Acting Up: Nick Jonas Effortlessly Switches Between Drama and Comedy in ‘The Good Half’

The Snapshot

In The Good Half, Nick Jonas plays a struggling screenwriter who returns to his native Cleveland after his mother dies. Once there, he tries to heal difficult relationships with his family while starting something new with a young woman he meets on the trip. 

The Good Half hits theaters on August 16.

Nick Jonas’ Performance in The Good Half

When we meet Renn Wheeland, he’s just received a message about a potential promotion he doesn’t want in a job he doesn’t enjoy, while he’s boarding a plane to fly halfway across the country to bury his mother. It’s not the most auspicious introduction to a character, but it sets the tone for this tragicomic tale of grief and family, and how sometimes we have to laugh so that we can cry. Renn is a screenwriter who never made it, but he doesn’t want that to define him, even as he tries to come to terms with the complicated relationship he had with his late mom, who just died of cancer.

There’s a lot in there for an actor, but there’s also the danger of playing it a bit too fast and loose. Erring too much on the side of melodrama, rather than allowing for the funny to come through. Or, conversely, embracing the comedy too much so that the drama suffers. It’s the kind of role that someone like Adam Driver has played a lot in recent years, to mostly great success.

Nick Jonas is still primarily known to most people as a musician, but he’s been doing solid acting work for years now, with some of his strongest work in a little-known television series that premiered a decade ago (and see more about that below).

He might not be the first person you think of for a role like this, but his natural charm — honed to a diamond sharpness over the years as he continues to perform on stage and screen — makes him easy to root for. That’s half the battle in this kind of film, wherein the audience is asked to bounce back and forth between tragedy and laughter, sometimes both at once, and needs a solid anchor to carry them through.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Jonas does well as that anchor and that it’s easy for us to empathize with Renn from the start. When he meets the fetching Zoey (Alexandra Shipp) on the plane ride home, he doesn’t reveal why he’s heading to his native Cleveland, because once he starts acknowledging that his mother is gone, it will become real. That comes out later, as the two of them meet up on a series of dates as he tries to escape his oppressive family situation, and she runs from something else.

Renn is uneasy around his father — Matt Walsh in a rare dramatic turn — and doesn’t know how to talk to his sister — Brittany Snow — whose relationship with their mother is very different from his. There’s also her mom’s second husband, Rick — David Arquette in a strong supporting performance — who Renn can’t stand, which only complicates matters further. On top of that, we get to see Renn’s relationship with his mom — Elisabeth Shue — in flashback, which tells us a different story than the one Renn is telling himself. 

The movie itself is sort of a Garden State light, but the way Jonas plays Renn’s constant sense of conflict, including a terrific scene between him and Arquette at the funeral in which the two publicly accuse each other of not grieving properly, is worth the effort to see it. It’s his first time carrying a movie, and he pulls it off with great aplomb. Jonas’ ability to switch back and forth so effortlessly from drama to comedy and back again, without ever leading the audience astray, shows how much promise he has as an actor.

The Career of Nick Jonas

Nick Jonas has grown up in front of us, first appearing on Broadway as a seven-year-old, then as a teenager, performing in a band with his brothers, Joe and Kevin. The Jonas Brothers became staples on the Disney Channel, and when the band disbanded in 2013, when he was 21, he began a solo career, which continues to thrive, more than a decade later.

He also branched out as an actor. His first major role was as young, closeted gay cage fighter Nate Kulina in the under-seen but thrilling drama series Kingdom, which premiered in 2014 and also starred Frank Grillo, Matt Lauria and Jonathan Tucker.

Jonas’ work in the show is subtle and nuanced, which is set off by Grillo and Tucker — playing his father and brother, respectively — both of whom tend to play their roles much bigger. It was a real risk for Jonas to choose this role as his first one as an adult, but watching the show, it’s clear how high his confidence level is to take on such a complex character.

In the years since, he has done a little bit more TV work, primarily a five-episode arc in 2015’s Scream Queens, and has shown up in supporting roles in films like the two Jumanji movies, Roland Emmerich’s World War II epic Midway and Doug Liman’s dystopian sci-fi action thriller Chaos Walking, starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley. He also has a glorified cameo in the 2023 romantic drama Love Again, but there’s an asterisk next to that since it stars his wife, Priyanka Chopra Jonas.

If you’re looking for the best thing Jonas has done before The Good Half, something that best showcases the potential that we’re now starting to see come to fruition in this new film, go check out Kingdom. It’s streaming on Peacock and Freevee, and well worth your time. Between that and The Good Half, it will be very interesting to see what he does next.

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