Jake Picking's Rock-Solid Hollywood Performance Blends Fact And Fiction

By Crystal Bell


Jake Picking's acting career began in a unusual place: goofing off in a high school math class. "My teacher notified me, 'I don't know if anyone can tell if you're being serious or not, and also you've got to try acting,'" the 29-year-old actor tells MTV News over the phone from his dad's residence in Thousand Oaks, California. Like several others, he abandoned his apartment in Los Angeles a number of weeks prior to shelter in place with his family member amid the coronavirus pandemic; right now, he's taking this time to reconnect with his two little brothers and decompress. He's decided to stay present, to breathe. Right considering that, this is the calm before the storm.


On Friday (May 1), Ryan Murphy's Hollywood, an eye catching reimagining of Tinseltown's post-World War II Golden Age, hits Netflix. Once the masses get a hold of Picking's chiseled jawline and scene-stealing presence as screen legend Rock Hudson, then it's only a matter of time before the world wide web crowns him a heartthrob — not unlike Hudson's own coronation 70 years prior (sans social media thirst traps). However that transition from secondary studio player to strapping, leading man isn't something you could prepare for. It's not like the Boston-born performer ever saw this coming.


Growing up, Picking never fantasized about seeing his name immortalized on the big screen. He idolized Kid Cudi, not Marlon Brando. He didn't even know acting was a possibility for him up until high school, and despite encouragement from Matt Damon's and Ben Affleck's former acting coach Carolyn Pickman, he enrolled at New York University to study company and play hockey. Nevertheless being surrounded by creatives and free spirits made him aspire finally get really interested in his craft. He began skipping class to join student productions, however any time once a transfer to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts threatened to break the bank, he did what any young person chasing a dream would do: He dropped out, packed his bags, and moved to L.A. Nevertheless, it wasn't the simplistic transition.


"I didn't really know anyone, so it was lonely," Picking says. "You think of Hollywood and you also think of the glitz and glam, and, like, the stars. It wasn't that at all."


However the loneliness that permeated his new reality helped him realize a couple of things. One, L.A. Was sort of like Saturn — cute to look at, void of seasons, and also hostile to support life; two, he was prepared to do almost anything to succeed ("sleep on the beach, couch surf, eat out of tuna cans, whichever it took"); and three, he really did love movies. Case in point, film became his "healthy escape" as soon as the solitude got also loud in the early days of his Hollywood residency.


He'd spend his afternoons searching via racks of records and movies at Amoeba Records on Sunset Boulevard and pick up take-out in bulk on the way back residence. ("It's sort of embarrassing, honestly," he says right now, thinking back on what he describes as his "Kid Cudi loner phase.") Then, he'd stay up all night diving into the classics. "That's what did As soon as I felt depressed," he adds. He'd coordinate the neon LED lights strung up around his tiny studio apartment to change colors based on his mood. Eventually, the work of Paul Newman, Brando, and Hudson flooded his imagination and his walls — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his preference film, was a contemplative purple. (By comparison, Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City was a blazing red.) "Those are the guys I look up to a lot," he says.


Years later, as soon as powerhouse producer Murphy turned to him while in a meeting and mentioned, "Tell me everything you know about Rock Hudson," he was able to call upon those sleepless nights watching Pillow Talk, All That Heaven Allows, and Magnificent Obsession alone in the safe neon glow of his apartment. "I felt like it was my duty to capture the essence of who Rock Hudson was and pay homage to his legacy," he says.


Hollywood's revisionist take on Hudson and the town he made his house is a potent mix of fact and fiction, or what Murphy calls "faction." The seven-episode drama, which was also written, produced, and directed by Pose's Janet Mock, imagines a version of 1940s Hollywood in which ladies, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks were celebrated as a substitute opposed to marginalized, their stories and ideas taken just as seriously as their straight white, male peers. Their struggles to claim a seat at the table, and the gross abuse of power they must often face, still feel painfully familiar, even decades later. Nevertheless in Murphy and Mock's Hollywood, Rock Hudson's story gets a hopeful rewrite. The closeted heartthrob, who died of complications from AIDS in 1985, is finally free to be unabashedly himself; in one poignant scene, he walks arm-in-arm with his boyfriend Archie — a Black, gay screenwriter — on the Oscars red carpet.


"I wish he was alive today to be able to see how far we've come," Picking says, while acknowledging that there's still a long way to go. "I think that's the tragedy in his life, although I do believe he was a hero, because he progressed through that. He's just resilient, you know?"


Hollywood paints this picture of resilience with broad strokes (nuance has never been Murphy's fashion, a parable for the generations of young people like Hudson who hid a segment of themselves to create it in an industry as ruthless as show firm. For Picking, there were so several things about the real-life legend that he regarding, like how Hudson moved to Hollywood at 21 to pursue a career on screen because he fancied going to the movies; how people judged him for his looks; nevertheless, mainly, how lonely he must have felt, also. "I read somewhere a secret isn't really real unless it's painful to hold onto," Picking recalls cautiously. "And I feel like that's what Rock was doing."


For an actor, living in someone else's pain, real or fictional, is piece of the job. It's what Picking finds most favorable about the heightened experience. "My preference films make me laugh and cry," he says. "It's inspiring. It makes me feel like a weight has been lifted."


And once things begin to get heavy, Picking has new ways to deal with it. "At first, my support system was the people on the screen or the artists that I was listening to," he says. Right now, he's been on enough sets to create a network of companions, like his Hollywood castmates and the companions he made while filming Top Gun: Maverick. "It's unique to get that support from not only your family members or your companions, although also the people that you work with." Still, he admits that Kid Cudi's "Leader of the Delinquents" has been keeping him present while in quarantine. He's been penning rap verses in his free time, adding to the 50 or so tracks he's already composed in GarageBand.


"Art, through film and writing music, is my emotional outlet. I admire the guys like Cudi and Childish Gambino, how they're so multivarious," he says. "They can do it all, and I think that's so cool. And I've routinely struggled with not feeling rather good enough however, like I don't feel like my connection is there musically. It's still growing. Maybe I need to find a way to put out my music under some sort of adjust ego and just drop it."


Is he being serious? With Picking, it's still sort of hard to tell.