Jonah Hill on Bad Raps, Crying Over Cyrus, and Having Your Impostors Killed

Since you bring up the internet, I was following that story about your Twitter impostor pretty closely.

Yeah.

I remember watching you talk about it on Letterman, and then I was later led to this confessional posted by the guy. He actually thought you'd find it funny, and was hoping there might be a chance that you'd want to work with him after you discovered it.

It's like King of Comedy. Rupert Pupkin.

Did you feel violated by that whole incident?

I did. I think that website is so silly and so stupid.

Twitter?

Yeah! I would be so arrogant and egotistical to assume that anyone would care if I was sitting in traffic and how annoyed it made me. You read those, and it's like some celebrity who thinks that where they are is important enough to tell people, so that other people pass along the message that, "Oh my god, so n' so stubbed their toe today. That sucks." But yeah, it felt like, if someone went to the bank and impersonated me, they would be arrested. People thought this person was me. I thought that was really harsh.

He even roped Doug Benson into it.

Was Doug angry with me?

The guy found a photo online of the two of you at South by Southwest, and had used that encounter to prove to him that it was really you.

It's so rude man. He did something really gross and disgusting. I have never gotten into an argument with anybody. I would just not be mean to someone. But someone told me that they read that Marlee Matlin wrote to my [fake] Twitter, "I love Superbad." And then my character wrote back, "How would you know? You can't hear it." And I thought that was just disgusting, rude and offensive, and not something I would do.

Once again, people take that character from Superbad and think that's what I am: just this loud, offensive, don't-give-a-shit kind of person. And that's so disturbing to me, man. If I met Marlee Matlin, I'd shake her hand and get to know her, and especially would not make fun of her handicap. It's just disgusting and rude, and it made me sick that people believed that.

It really fascinated me as this cautionary tale about the flip-side of celebrity in a social media culture. But I also just sort of felt for you.

I kind of told it as a funny story on Letterman. Like with most things, you try to see the humor in them. But it really is disheartening that that can happen, and that people came up to me and believed things that this person was saying were coming from me. Honestly, it bums me out super hard. It just sucks.

Well at least it's over.

I've had him killed.

And that's one of the perks of celebrity! But going back to Cyrus for a second, were you concerned that there might be a danger of making him too unlikeable?

I had no fear of that. I don't care! I go by the filmmakers. I love Mark and Jay, and I believe in what they did. I saw they had a voice in a short film of theirs I saw seven years ago -- Intervention. I had no fear, and that was the main thing we all agreed upon before we did it: the character has to be heartbreaking, twisted, manipulative, sweet, sad, fucked up, dark. And if any action or word is ever breaking that, then we can't do it.

I always think, I'm a nice person, so some of that niceness or genuineness will shine through. But other that that, let's make him totally unlikeable. Let's make him disturbed. But if you're playing someone who's fucked up, there's always a reason they're fucked up. It's because someone was horrible to them, or in Cyrus's case, he just cares so much about his mom -- she's probably the only person he even knows! All of it comes from the fear of that being taken away from him. If you know that, then all the fucked-up things he does don't seem quite as hateful.

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