John C. Reilly and I have rubbed noses, but only I know that for sure. On a breezy March evening, the actor’s new alter ego, a smiley spirit named Mister Romantic, plucked me from the middle of the Largo theater in Los Angeles during his helpless quest to find a soulmate. He admired my height after I stood up, giddily fantasized about us spending our lives together, and asked my consent for one small thing: to touch noses. Mister Romantic’s face, centimeters from mine, maintained a warmly unbothered grin as he awaited my reply. I said sure. We leaned in. He gave me a card revealing the contents of his heart, instructed me to read it, and, essentially, proposed to me. I politely declined, returned the card, and sat back down. The show went on.

When I meet Reilly inside a busy Century City coffee shop the next afternoon, he doesn’t realize I’m the same David —a surprise, given our intense, prolonged eye (and nose) contact. My hair is a little flatter today, I guess, but I assure him it’s me. His bright blue eyes light up with recognition. “I did not do that on purpose!” he says, his tone somewhere between mortified and delighted. “I was moving down the row and suddenly you were there and you were smiling. I thought you seemed nice.” He preempts one of my lingering questions. “If I said, ‘Want to rub noses with me?’ and you said, ‘No, I really don’t want to do that,’ that’d be okay,” Reilly assures. “I would take that information, and see where that led.”

That’s the most thrilling quality of Mister Romantic: There is no telling where this thing will lead. Reilly has been mounting his vaudeville-tinged show, which intermixes loose comic routines with a musical set list inspired by the Great American Songbook, about once a month for a year now without promotion. “It’s this secret in town,” he says. (Consider us breaking that code by telling you that the next show takes place May 18, again at the Largo. Tickets are on sale now.) That will soon change as he prepares to take Mister Romantic around the country. He also had seven cameras and a crew hidden around a recent Valentine’s Day performance in Pasadena, and tells me a movie version will be released in some capacity.

The premise is deceptively simple. At the top of each show, a band—Reilly’s longtime collaborators David Garza, Sebastian Steinberg, Charles De Castro, and Gabe Witcher—quietly walks onto the stage. Reilly’s genderless and (I think?) pansexual Mister Romantic, hair crazed and voice kind, then pops out of a literal box from another dimension. He tells the audience he’s doomed to go back into the box if someone doesn’t fall in love with him that very night. He sings and serenades and thinks out loud to pass the time. Inevitably, he’s locking himself back up by evening’s end.

Seats have sold out fast thanks to glowing word of mouth. For the show I attended, the only empty seat was the one Reilly eventually stood on right in front of me (pre-nose-rubbing), and the crowd was in stitches throughout. Mister Romantic evolves over its 80-minute run time into a special piece of theater: fiercely funny, deeply weird, comforting if a little sad. Reilly at last feels ready to go public with it. “It’s really the only thing I’ve been doing for the past year,” he says in his first extended interview about Mister Romantic. “I kind of wanted to see, Are people even interested in this kind of music? Are they even interested in this type of performance?”

Depending on how you want to look at it, Reilly has been working on Mister Romantic since the pandemic, the mid-2000s, or the age of eight. Growing up in Chicago, he regularly starred in musicals as a kid. “That’s all I did,” he says, “just one after the other.” After high school, he was accepted into the acting program at DePaul University and shifted gears: “I just decided, like, Oh, that’s not what serious actors do.”

In his 20s and early 30s, Reilly established himself as an everyman with gravitas, with key roles in hit indies like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Boogie Nights. Then he was cast in Chicago to play Amos, a.k.a. Mister Cellophane. His soulful performance earned him an Oscar nomination.

“I realized, Wow, I can already do this—I grew up doing this—and not only is it worthwhile and a valid thing to do, but you have to be pretty fucking talented to do this,” Reilly says. “It’s not something that every dramatic Method actor can do. It gave me this deeper appreciation for it.” When filming finished, Reilly felt incomplete. He couldn’t just jump from movie-musical to movie-musical—they don’t make enough of those, though he’s long dreamed of playing Sweeney Todd—and he had a thriving film career. He’d awakened this quiet side of himself, and had nowhere to put it.

Even as he became John C. Reilly, screen star—taking on Adam McKay’s studio comedies Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, leading a parody classic in Walk Hard, letting his freak flag fly in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! as the unhinged newscaster Dr. Steve Brule—he started focusing on music. He formed a few bands, and at one point, sang Irving Berlin’s 1923 heartbreaker “What’ll I Do” at the Largo. He was moved by the experience of performing a song about eternal love, the same way he felt doing “Mr. Cellophane” in Chicago. So he collected songs like it, one by one, and built a set list. Two, actually.

Reilly had to wait, though, to finish the biggest acting commitment of his career. For two seasons on HBO’s Winning Time, he played the lead role of Lakers owner Jerry Buss, a process that took longer than he expected due to COVID delays. He filmed the second season finale (which turned out to be the series finale) on a Friday early last year, and performed his first show of Mister Romantic that Monday. “It’s the longest I’d ever been employed by anyone, and I was really itching to just be free again and express myself,” he says. “And also, I just felt like the world had gotten so hard to deal with. I felt like there was this real crisis of empathy, or lack of empathy.”

Reilly carries an earnestness that’s exceedingly unusual in Hollywood. “All I’ve ever known how to do is be sincere with my acting, and it’s never let me down,” he says. “You might not like what it is, but you can’t say it’s not real. You can’t say it's not true.” This goes even for his silliest characters, like Walk Hard’s Dewey Cox or Tim and Eric’s Steve Brule. It’s a way of getting out of his own way. “I’ve always been someone who doesn’t really like myself, my own personality, my own thoughts. I’m always more comfortable hiding behind a character.”

As we’re deep into discussing matters of characterization and motivation, the café’s young barista approaches. He tells Reilly that his family recreates images from their favorite movies for their annual Christmas cards, and shows the actor one featuring him and his brother standing in for Reilly’s and Will Ferrell’s Step Brothers man-children. Reilly compliments the artwork before assuring me of the fan encounter, “That wasn’t a plant.” He then connects that film’s endurance to Mister Romantic.

“So much of my own childhood is in that movie. You might not necessarily recognize that at first, but if you know me, and where I grew up, and how my brother was about his drums, it’s all there,” Reilly says. “Obviously, a lot of those stories were from me when I was a kid, but I’m playing a 45-year-old guy, and they’re ridiculous when you’re an older person. But my proudest moments are always when you really do put your own identity, your own experience, and your own feelings into something.”

Mister Romantic “came from a place of real despair and joy in equal measure,” Reilly says. His character arrives on the scene from oblivion, operating somewhere on the spectrum from angel to demon. After belting out swoony American classics as well as the occasional “La vie en rose”—Reilly, it must be noted, is a hell of a singer—he wanders through the theater, getting to know audience members and asking for their love. He fosters a strangely intimate and convivial atmosphere.

Recently, Reilly’s old buddy Will Ferrell came to see the show and approached him in awe afterward. “Johnny—no net!” he raved. “No net!” Ferrell was referring to the show’s delicate, improvised dance of taking everyone on the same surreal ride. “If you say to the audience, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen next,’ it puts us all together,” Reilly says.

Despite his success and longevity, Reilly has consistently expressed anxiety about running out of work, or falling out of favor in the industry. He’s finding himself, at last, relaxing into a new mode. “It’s very empowering, just getting someone to agree to let you come and bring your band—you don’t need a producer, you don’t need an agent, you don’t need a costume designer,” he says. “It’s kind of thrilling to just be like, No, it’s me and these four guys I know.” This marks a sharp contrast from the typecasting he’s faced as a screen actor: “The business always wants to pull you back, like, ‘Well, can you do this again?’ I’m just trying to push it forward.” The tradition of vaudeville, that system of charging a ticket and performing a show and going from town to town, oddly felt like the freshest pivot, a claim for agency “in this age of diminishing returns for musicians and actors.”

But Reilly thinks about that “no net” compliment from Ferrell from time to time—the reality that it’s all on him, every show. “It really takes a special effort to keep the self-doubt at bay,” Reilly says. “There have been times over the past year where I thought, Oh, I wish a big movie would swoop in and send me off to somewhere else in the world to make a bajillion dollars.” After all, he’s not doing Mister Romantic for the cash. “I don’t really make any money doing this thing,” he says. “I don’t need to be any more famous. That’s a part of my life that I actually don’t really get much out of.”

I suggest to Reilly that Mister Romantic feels like a culmination of his work on screen and stage, a seamless and singular meld of his approaches to comedy, drama, music, and fame. “In some ways, I think that’s just panic,” he replies with a laugh. “You’re just trying to deliver for people. Some part of you has to be really like, Oh, fuck it, I’m going to throw it out there. What’s the worst that could happen?” Every night that he takes the stage, Mister Romantic learns that the worst outcome, for him, is unrequited love. The irony is that as Reilly locks himself back into that mystery box and the band leaves the stage, the room is filled with love—just what he was looking for.