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It’s over. With the release of his new movie, “Away We Go,” John Krasinski can now be named the all-time champion: He is Perfect Relationship Guy.
As Jim Halpert, the funny, devoted beau of Pam on “The Office,” Krasinski had already made himself the reigning titleholder.
But with Burt Farlander, the actor has topped even himself. As the scruffy, futures-trading father-to-be in “Away We Go,” which opened Friday, Krasinski hits relationship guy apex: a charmingly clumsy man who proposes to his girlfriend every other day and will stop at nothing to make her laugh.
Again, Krasinski owns the heart of the girl onscreen and her sighing sisters in the audience.
“It’s just going to ruin my personal life forever,” he sighs.
It is an awful lot to live up to, but Krasinski, 29, doesn’t distance himself from the archetype.
“I’m a pretty sentimental guy. And I think that for me, romance is this thing that I take very seriously,” Krasinski says.
After reading the screenplay for “Away We Go,” written by Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida, Krasinski remembers telling his agent that it was one of the most resonant scripts he’d ever encountered – especially in its depiction of the relationship between Burt and his longtime girlfriend, Verona (Maya Rudolph), who journey across North America to decide where to make a life for themselves.
“This is the first romance that was written on the page that was so incredibly well done that it was a couple that you believed in,” the actor says. “To me, it’s one of the more romantic couples because it’s not about the flowers and the diamonds. It’s about the secret languages and the looks to one another where everything is said without any words. … It’s not only a relationship you admire from a fictional standpoint, but you desperately want to be in that relationship.”
Eggers has said he had Krasinski in mind for Burt even as he and Vida were writing the film.
“That’s what they say,” Krasinski says. “I want to make sure Dave knows I’m not Ryan Gosling.”
Krasinski says he’d been a fan of Eggers for years, so when director Sam Mendes called to offer him the part, well, “I passed out and had a nosebleed, but then I woke up and figured, ‘This is an amazing opportunity.’ ”
Krasinski says the relationship Eggers and Vida crafted was an ideal that exists in a universe that felt both real and familiar.
Although, in truth, the world Krasinski lives in is charmed. He finished his 100th episode of “The Office” and made his directing debut at the Sundance Film Festival with a feature-length adaptation of the book “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.”
It might surprise some that the project Krasinski picked for his first time behind the camera chronicles some of the worst-ever relationship guys, men dreamed up by novelist David Foster Wallace.
“I’m definitely attracted a lot to the darker side of things – not horribly dark, but a more realistic sense,” Krasinski says. “That book was such an obsession of mine, truly, ever since college. And the fact that no one else would do it just left me to think, ‘Well, maybe I should do it.’ ”
Krasinski says that’s it for writing and directing.
“I’d never say never ... but I think I’m still working on being a single threat before a triple threat.”
That means lapping up every minute of Jim Halpert screen time.
“Everybody always says, ‘When are you going to break out of “The Office” and go into movies?’ It’s like, ‘No, no no. “The Office” isn’t something you break out of. It’s something you cling to desperately every year.’ ”
