Since graduating, Harner has earned an Obie award for his performance in Hedda Gabler at the New York Theatre Workshop tackled the role of Ivan Turgenev in 2007’s epic Tom Stoppard trilogy The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center and played opposite such stars as Annette Bening and Alfred Molina. An apprenticeship at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, in Kentucky, followed, and then a move to New York, where he supported his stage habit by working as a Spirit Cruises phone operator, a Spanish translator and a front-desk clerk at a Hilton before enrolling at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate acting program. Things changed when he enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University’s theater program. “I didn’t have the self-esteem to act,” he recalls. He was president of his high school drama club but spent his time building the boards rather than treading them. “If there is a carpentry gene, I have that,” he jokes, gesturing to the benches he crafted inside this very shop. Performing was not something that Harner, who’s descended from a line of plumbers and carpenters, aspired to while growing up in Alexandria, Virginia. “He was able to project a slight craziness without doing Charles Manson.” “It was a part a lot of well-known guys wanted, but I think Clint saw more depth and variety in Jason,” explains casting director Ellen Chenoweth. The actor, who spent the past decade making his name on the East Coast theater circuit alongside friends like Martha Plimpton and Josh Hamilton, landed the plum role after a single taped audition. Jolie plays the mother of a missing boy, and Harner appears as his possible murderer, the pedophile and serial killer Gordon Northcott. The two face off in Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a true story that rocked Los Angeles in the Twenties. Such is life when one’s costar is Angelina Jolie. “People were running up to me and taking my picture,” he says, looking out bashfully from under a lock of brown hair. Last fall, though, paparazzi were training telephoto lenses on him, and helicopters perpetually circled overhead. On a sunny afternoon, as the boyish 38-year-old digs into a bowl of peanut butter and chocolate chip ice cream at Blue Marble, a Brooklyn ice cream parlor owned by an actress friend, not a single person approaches aside from an errant toddler. For the time being, actor Jason Butler Harner can walk the streets of New York unmolested.
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