Josh Radnor: Heart versus head - 'its a big theme of my life'

Despite the setting — Radnor chose to shoot at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he himself studied, though the film is not directly autobiographical. But, as with his previous feature, Happythankyoumoreplease, there were “themes which I was wrestling with in my life when I was writing it,” he says. “I had a sense the movie would be about time, about ageing, about change, about nostalgia, about books.”

The subject of change comes up a lot in our conversation. And also, Radnor has realised, in his work. “I think I write about change so much because I know it’s the secret to life. But I also know it’s something I panic about and try to stop because of that grief with letting something go…”

When he says goodbye to How I Met Your Mother, with it will go the structure the show has given his life for almost a decade. He likes structure, and when he finally left academia at the age of 25, after completing a Masters in acting, “it was a shock, the icy cold water of adulthood,” he says. “That was a big transition.”

During his formative years, Judaism was part of the daily framework. His parents weren’t particularly religious, “more culturally American conservative”. They were “very active in the synagogue”, though, and sent him to an Orthodox Hebrew day school for nine years. Connecting the dots of his life, Radnor quotes playwright Tony Kushner’s theory that the reason why so many Jews are attracted to the theatre, is because there is a similarity between reading the Talmud and reading a play.

“What you’re really trying to do when you study the Talmud is get underneath the words. There’s a digging process that goes on. And that’s what you do in a play,” he says. “You’re looking for the subtext. For what’s motivating what’s on top. So I think there is a kind of overlap between my upbringing and what I do.”
Suggesting to him that Jesse’s analytical mind-set in the film feels Jewish, he says that one of the things he has grappled with in Judaism, and in his life generally, is that “there is such an emphasis on the intellectual and on the analytical and on the cerebral, that you’re leaving out the emotional. When I started working as an actor, that’s when I got to strike more of a balance. Liberal Arts is about that kind of treacherous journey from your head to your heart. And I think that’s been a big theme in my life.”

He still has moments when he retreats into his head, for example when he is “fearful or uncomfortable with something… and it’s not a safe neighbourhood, sometimes. You can get all sorts of wacky notions and you end up trying to protect yourself or protect others.”

Something that has helped him open up more is the aforementioned ayhuasca, which he first took six years ago when he was 32. He was going to publish a book based on his experiences taking the brew, which is said to cure everything from depression to cancer, but changed his mind. “I didn’t feel there was a way to put this book out without it being really mishandled in the press,” he explains. Instead, he is pouring what he learned into his work. Thus, in Liberal Arts, it informs a scene where music mellows Jesse’s perception of New York, and his reaction to the slacker wisdom dispensed by Zac Efron’s character, Nat.

Radnor, who does not talk about the subject on record much, says that taking ayhuasca “places you in your heart in a way that is so profound that you realise how deeply locked we are into our heads, and how our minds are our place of judgements, suspicions, defence — where we categorise, we label, and we keep things away from us.

“The experience of working with that medicine is a very unifying one… and very humbling.”