Jack Quaid Was ‘Desperate’ to Star in ‘Companion’

Jack Quaid bounds up the stairs of Manhattan’s Midtown Comics like a Golden Retriever on a long-promised walk, his plaid winter jacket fluttering behind him in the January chill. Sandwiched between a 99-cent pizza joint and a smoke shop, the Times Square institution is one of the largest stores of its kind in the world — which makes it all the more surprising that the 32-year-old self-professed comic-book geek has never paid a visit before. “Every time I’m on location somewhere, I always Google the nearest comic book store,” Quaid says, paused in the store’s narrow entrance, bright blue eyes leaping among the racks of colorful volumes. “It kind of grounds me.” 

Quaid is in New York City for a few days to promote his new horror-comedy Companion (in theaters now), and he’s hoping to snag some reading material — namely, the latest issues of James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera’s horror comic Something Is Killing the Children and Saga, a space opera by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples — before he jets off to Toronto for his next project. An MCU diehard, Quaid nevertheless gravitates toward horror and fantasy these days; after all, he’s been living in superhero world for nearly six years now as one of the stars of the Prime series The Boys, a satirical romp where the majority of the caped heroes are actually villains and the eponymous, superpower-free Boys are the vigilantes on their tails. 

The show is based on Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic books of the same name, but Midtown’s employees haven’t yet noticed that the TV Boys’ real-life Hughie Campbell Jr. is currently fawning over an anthology of Creepshow comics, marveling at the various artist changes. “When I was a kid, I had my own comic series called Ghost Man, where this kid had ghost powers,” Quaid recalls, taking in the decaying ghoul on the Creepshow cover. “I’d get them printed out and copied at Kinko’s. They literally laminated them and had them in the library so kids could check them out.” He breaks into a self-conscious smile. “I don’t think anyone ever read them.” 

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Quaid’s aw-shucks affability belies his constantly turning brain and his ambition to stretch beyond the bounds of what he’s done before. Case in point: While he’s largely played good guys in the past, Companion sees Quaid (spoilers ahead) stepping into the villain role — something that required him to take several steps outside his comfort zone of the floppy-haired, noodle-limbed charmer. 

Quaid plays Josh, an average Joe on a weekend trip with his girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and a cadre of pals (Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend). What starts as a romp in the woods, though, soon turns into a horror show when Josh’s friend Sergey (Friend) tries to force himself on Iris, who stabs him to death. The story doesn’t end there, though. Iris is actually a sentient companion robot who believes herself to be human — something apparently anyone can buy pretty easily in this movie’s universe. Later, we find out that Josh had hacked Iris’ software to amp up her aggression levels and left her alone with his lecherous pal knowing she would attack, making Iris the lynchpin in an elaborate plan to kill Sergey and steal his vast wealth.

Quaid was drawn to the idea that Josh starts out seeming so charming “but he turns out to be such an asshole,” he says. A “lesser movie” would have made him the sad sack menaced by a killer robot, “but I love that they flipped that,” he says. Quaid’s theory is that Josh is someone “who hasn’t heard ‘I love you’ a lot in life — which made me empathize with him a little bit.” But, he adds, “now that I’m not playing him anymore… screw him! I don’t like him and I won’t invite him over to my house.”

Thatcher attests to how at-odds Quaid, who spent his free time between takes quietly playing guitar in his hotel room, is with the character of Josh. “He’s very nice — and he’s incredibly self-aware and socially aware,” she says, adding that she and Quaid bonded over their shared over of Weezer and creating character playlists (Quaid is a big fan of the Eighties). “Within the first two weeks, it was just a lot of apologizing and feeling bad because it sometimes scared him how good he was at the role.” 

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Quaid has played a villain once before: He was one of the Ghost Face killers in 2022’s Scream. It’s just not in his nature to go that dark — a point that was driven home one long-ago Halloween when he was a kid. “I remember trick-or-treating after Scream came out and all these kids had Ghost Face masks,” he says. “This one kid had a translucent mask and it had blood that you could pump so it ran down his face. I’ve never been more scared of a human being in my life.” 

Quaid’s own ability to both charm and menace was the key to Josh. “We needed someone charismatic,” writer-director Drew Hancock says. “You wanted this man-child that’s saying these awful things, but they’re not coming from a place of maliciousness. They’re coming from a place of someone who just doesn’t know any better.” Both Hancock and Quaid recall their first meeting about the script — especially how nervous the actor was. “I was just really, probably… the word is desperate,” Quaid says. “I probably was shaking — that’s my barometer for whether or not I want to be involved in something.”

“Jack had gotten a copy of the script slipped to him by his agents,” Hancock says. “And as soon as we met at this coffee shop, he shows up, and he’s so nervous, oh my gosh. First of all, like, ‘Why are you nervous? I should be nervous. You’re Jack Quaid.’ He wants to please and you’re like, ‘My gosh, I love this guy. I want to put him in my pocket and he’s, like, seven feet tall.’”

Given Quaid’s upbringing, it’s all the more refreshing that he’s so, well, nice. The son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, he’s basically Hollywood royalty — but his own journey to the screen was a bit more gradual. As a kid, Quaid was obsessed with Toy Story and sci-fi (“I dressed up as Buzz Lightyear every day for months. I don’t think they could get the costume off of me to wash. I was just a disgusting Buzz Lightyear”), but he didn’t get the acting bug until middle school. “I had a crush on this girl and she asked me what I did for fun on the weekends,” he says. “And I said, ‘Oh, I watch TV and I play video games.’ And then I remember, as soon she left, thinking, ‘I’m so uninteresting.’” The girl was into acting, so Quaid auditioned for the school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and scored the role of loveable clown Bottom. Performing was love at first bray — and his fellow cast members from that fateful production even attended the Companion premiere.

From there, Quaid started getting into sketch comedy with his pals, throwing an online festival in high school called Epic Fest, where opposing teams would upload skits to Facebook for voting. (A standout sketch? “An infomercial about a recently discovered series of Barry White albums that he wrote before he had sex for the first time.”) Jim Carrey was a “huge” inspiration. “He’s able to be so big and cartoon, rubbery and weird, but he’s also like Jimmy Stewart,” Quaid says. “I did [all the impressions]. I talked out of my ass. Jim Carrey corrupted me the best way.” 

While attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Quaid got even more into sketch comedy, performing with the likes of classmate Bowen Yang. “As I’ve grown, I’ve noticed that I have a somewhat rubbery body,” he says. “I did a sketch in NYU called ‘Funky Waiter,’ where I basically just used my body for comedy for, like, five minutes.”

After college, Quaid snagged a series of small movie roles — beginning with the conniving Marvel in 2012’s The Hunger Games — but it wasn’t until he was cast in The Boys in 2019 that his career really took flight. “I’m such a stupid nerd, and I love being a nerd. I remember thinking in the earlier days of the MCU, ‘Maybe one day I could be in the Marvel movie or be a superhero,’” he says now, while examining a Godzilla figurine that his partner, Boys co-star Claudia Doumit, would not want sullying their apartment décor. (“It’s desert, sort of cowboyish, but also, like, maybe it’s Cuba, maybe there’s pom poms,” he says of the aesthetic. “We’re still working it out.” ) “I lucked out. I got on the ground floor of a superhero property that’s now spinning off into a million franchises, and I’m so proud of what we’ve done.”

When Quaid gets in line to pay for his Creepshow anthology and Midtown Comics ballcap, the store owner emerges from the back room, and it becomes clear that Quaid’s cover has been blown. Employees pepper him with questions about The Boys and Companion, but Quaid doesn’t mind. He grins wide for selfies and chats up his next movie, Novocaine, a thriller-comedy about an unlikely hero who can’t feel pain. Someone asks if there’ll ever be a comic version of it in the future. Quaid hoists his tote bag of books. “That’s my dream,” he says. “That they make a comic book of Novocaine.” He laughs. “Thank you for unlocking a new goal.”