John Hoogenakker on Working With Paul Thomas Anderson and the Star-Studded Cast of One Battle After Another
Photo Credit: Warner Bros
2025 was a big year for John Hoogenakker. He starred in multiple projects, including The Morning Show, The Twisted Tale Of Amanda Knox, G20, and One Battle After Another. One Battle After Another, which is directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (he also wrote the screenplay), is one of the most acclaimed films of 2025 and is likely to receive many nominations at the 98th Academy Awards.
One Battle After Another follows Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ex-revolutionary, who spends most of his days getting stoned. 16 years prior, Bob was known as Pat Calhoun, and along with his partner, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), was part of the revolutionary group called the French 75. Now he is trying to put his past behind him and lives off the grid with his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). Their life gets upended when Bob’s enemy from the past, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), resurfaces as he is on the hunt for Willa. Once Willa goes missing, Bob is forced to return to his former lifestyle to try to save his daughter.
Hoogenakker plays Tim Smith, a hitman and member of the Christmas Adventurers Club (a secret society of wealthy and powerful white supremacists). Recently, REVERIE chatted with Hoogenakker about his role in One Battle After Another.
Casting director Cassandra Kulukundis reached out to Hoogenakker to discuss the film, and they read some of the Christmas Adventures Club scenes together. Since Anderson is one of Hoogenakker’s favourite directors, it was a wonderful experience for him to act in One Battle After Another. “I hold Paul and his work in such high regard that when [Cassandra] rang, I couldn’t wait for the opportunity to just talk to her about it and read the script,” he smiles. “It’s not always that you are working with somebody whose work you’ve absolutely loved since the 90s… Paul has such a casual presence when you’re working with him, and a lot of the people that make up the crew have been collaborating with him for years, are such profoundly talented artisans, so you feel very comfortable right off the bat. You feel like you are in a space that you can play, and while he’s provided you with a script which is alternately funny and ghastly, there is a lot of still room to make the words your own.”
Hoogenakker shares that seeing the dailies greatly informed how the actors and actresses performed what was in the script. “What Paul had done very early on, which is extremely cool, was that he invited me to come and see the dailies that had been filmed that day,” Hoogenakker says. “The first thing that I got to see was the scene that Sean and Teyana had filmed, which was when she is basically strapped to the gurney, and he’s sitting next to her, and he is offering her a way out of her situation… At the time, I had only read the script, and I was kind of mostly aware of the absurdity and the comedy of it ahead of anything else, so when I sat down and watched that scene, I was absolutely blown away by every aspect of it. That was incredibly formative, and in addition to building community, it served the purpose of keeping people on the same page artistically… A lot of the art in the relationship between Cassandra and Paul is that by the time that they get the people in the room to play the scene in a beautiful way its already kind of dialed in because there have been a lot of conversations between everybody to figure out what the tone is going to be.”
Being attached to a project with such a stacked cast, which includes Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, and Chase Infiniti, among many others, also excited Hoogenakker. “The people who gravitate towards [Paul] are some of the most wonderful and imaginative people in the industry, and he does such a fine job of creating a space and providing a canvas for their work,” he comments. “It is just the absolute cherry on top for me as an actor to get to work with people like that. I feel like I get to hop into the ring, play with them, and see how they approach these moments.”
Hoogenakker played Tim Smith as if he were just a normal guy (and not a hired assassin/hitman), rather than emphasizing the character's evilness. “Paul and Cassandra didn’t want me to put a lot of mustard on it,” Hoogenakker states. “They were like ‘This is not a guy anybody would suspect of being a hired assassin if they walked past them in the mall.’ That gave me a lot of space to just be very casual with him. To me, as an audience member, a casual nature around people who do horrible things is very engaging – the duality of those two things living at once in the same person. The idea of this is not a person who sort of twirls the mustache and leans into the villainy. In a way, it sort of allows you to see the villainy more clearly and perhaps makes it more disturbing is the idea that this is just another day for him.”
Most of Tim’s scenes are between him and the other Christmas Adventurers Club members, where they discuss evidence of Lockjaw’s past interracial relationship with Perfidia. Lockjaw is trying to join the Club and kept his relationship with Perfidia a secret. The other members send Tim to kill Lockjaw and Willa. “The house that we filmed in was actually the house that Nancy and Ronald Reagan lived in when he was the Governor of California,” says Hoogenakker. “What we were kind of doing in that scene was high comedy, but nobody was laughing at all. There was no giggling between takes. It was all very dry. I mean, we were all certainly very happy to be working together and happy to be there in the room, but we were taking the circumstances quite seriously.”
Throughout One Battle After Another, there are multiple instances of the dry comedy Hoogenakker discusses. Usually, it is mixed with moments that are often quite disturbing or intense. “[Paul] can have moments of comedy [in his films] and then the second you laugh, something horrible happens, or you are reminded of the given circumstances of the scene and are like, ‘Should I be laughing at that?’” Hoogenakker states. “That’s the thing I love about it. It is so true to life. Like you find yourself laughing at a funeral when there is nothing funny going on and you just need that release in the midst of such tension.”
The other scene Tim is in is the car chase sequences, where Tim elentlessly tracks down Lockjaw and eventually pursues Willa as well. In these scenes, it was a mixture of Hoogenakker driving and stunt drivers. “There were many instances when they were getting Chase’s coverage over my shoulder of Chase where it was just me driving,” he says. “We had a walkie talkie inside the car, and they would be like alright, ‘Go get her,’ and we could go as fast as we wanted to because we had the highway locked down.”
Other times, a stunt driver was used. “When I’m firing the gun out the window, obviously, at that point the car is sitting on a rig that is actually very low to the ground, and it’s configurable in the fact that you have a stunt driver who is put in a pod at any point in that rig and is able to drive it,” Hoogenakker says. “It’s actually a high-performance vehicle, so that they can place the camera anywhere they want and completely miss the stunt driver… The bit where I’m driving alongside Sean’s [Lockjaw] car, and Sean flies off the cliff, was an incredible bit of stagecraft. What we were doing there was that the car that goes off the cliff is driven by remote control by some guys on a bluff half a mile away. The guy actually driving my car was a legendary stunt driver named Mickey Giacomazzi. He was actually driving in the backseat on the passenger side.
Hoogenakker shares that the most challenging part of the experience was the first time they ran Lockjaw’s car off the road. At first this stunt was a little anxiety-inducing for him. “I think we actually got up to like 80 miles an hour on the first one because we were trying to keep up with the other car,” he states. “It ended up feeling a little crazy to me, just not having control of the car. I really wanted to be able to drive the car. Driving that fast, holding a steering wheel, and not having any control over the situation was a little unnerving.”
However, this stunt also showcased one of Hoogenakker’s most enjoyable aspects of acting in the One Battle After Another. “The experience of driving along with a sawed-off shotgun and pointing it at Sean Penn and pulling the trigger and seeing Sean Penn act like he's getting shot, it felt like we were both 14 years old and playing in the woods,” he shares. “It is just one of the coolest aspects of what we get to do, and when you’re in those moments, it is just the absolute best thing in the world. Those moments when you are completely invested in your character and the story that you’re telling, it’s a major rush.”
Overall, Hoogenakker loved the experience of acting in One Battle After Another and collaborating with such an amazingly talented cast and crew. “It’s a beautiful thing that such wonderfully creative people who are walking around on this earth at the same time have found a way to collaborate with one another,” he smiles.