By Vanessa GrigoriadisWhat shall Justin Timberlake do today, on this overcast Los Angeles afternoon in the middle of spring? He’s been going to sleep early, around 10 P.M., so when he wakes up in his Spanish-style house in the Hollywood Hills, he feels well rested. He crawls out of bed all alone to brush his teeth, take a pee with his two boxer dogs, and make himself a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich with eggs and sausage. He answers a few e-mails, noodles around on his guitar while absentmindedly watching television, then drives down from the hills to a private gym, where his trainer puts him through a set of plyometrics, a form of leg strengthening that involves moving from squatting to jumping in rapid succession. Timberlake, who is over six feet tall, with luminous blue eyes and a completely unlined face, is devoted to keeping his body in a state of perfection. “I did, like, 10,000 of those jumps today,” he deadpans, though I have a feeling he probably did about a tenth of those—still more than most humans could handle.
What next? On that, Timberlake had been undecided until yesterday, when the idea came to mind to visit a museum. He puts on a big nubby wool cap from American Apparel, which makes him look vaguely like a snake charmer from a cold climate, and begins piloting his gleaming Audi R8—a car possessed of so many blingy accoutrements that it feels like riding in a spaceship designed by Gucci—around town. “Right now, I’m not in the mood to work,” he says. “I want to not have a schedule. I want to go to the Dodgers game if I feel like it. ‘Hey, do you guys want to play basketball today? Cool, let’s do that.’ I’ve never really given myself the opportunity to be spontaneous.”
In fact, Timberlake says that since his 30th birthday, at the end of January, for the first time in his life he’s done “nothing,” spending most of his time either simply “sitting still,” “enjoying the breeze on the top of Mulholland,” or, on the other hand, enjoying the Zen state that comes with helicoptering into backcountry snowboarding areas near Yellowstone National Park, where he spent more than a month this winter. “I figure I can go on like this until the end of the year,” he says, both hands on the steering wheel, driving slowly and peacefully, like a dowager in a Cadillac. “I don’t have anything I have to do. The only job I have to do is promote the films that are coming out, and I’m really looking forward to that.”
You’re looking forward to your junkets?
“Oh yeah,” he says, grinning widely. “It will be fun. I’ll get to go to a bunch of countries, hang out.” He makes a tight left turn, following traffic. “You know, where I’m at in my life, I’m alone and being in it, in each moment: good, bad, ugly, pretty—all of it, take it as it comes.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s a big deal. The fact is, I look back, and I made a lot of choices because I felt I needed to be validated. And I just don’t feel that way anymore.”
Timberlake’s current state of non-doing, as the Buddhists might call it, is surprising, because at his age there are few people who have followed as many different, and successful, career paths. By 16 he was the kiddie star of ’NSync, the best-selling boy band, which still holds the world record for the most albums sold in the space of a week. By 21 he had escaped this pubescent prison to become a solo R&B artist, playing an updated type of free-flowing 70s funk that turned him into an international sex symbol. And then, at 25, by singing about putting his dick in a box on Saturday Night Live, he began what’s been a seamless transition from rock star to actor, a path which is widening this month as he appears in his first leading role, in the comedy Friends with Benefits. He also has a supporting part in the Cameron Diaz comedy Bad Teacher, and is finishing postproduction on Now, a futuristic drama with Amanda Seyfried and Olivia Wilde. He has his own tequila, distilled on the agave farms outside of Guadalajara, he hosts a PGA Tour tournament that has raised millions for Shriners Hospitals for Children, and he owns one of the country’s few eco-friendly golf courses, Mirimichi (translated as “Place of Happy Retreat”), in his hometown of Millington, Tennessee. “What can I say?” says Timberlake, shrugging his shoulders. “I’ve made a long career out of low expectations.”
This need to succeed, to become his generation’s multi-talented Sammy Davis Jr., is part of what makes him appealing to filmmakers. “I needed someone who could be a Frank Sinatra figure, someone who could walk into the room and command all the attention,” says David Fincher, of casting Timberlake as Sean Parker, the Facebook investor and rogue, in The Social Network. “I didn’t want someone who would just say, ‘I know how to play groovy.’ You can’t fake that stuff. That’s the problem with making movies about a rock star—actors have spent their lives auditioning and getting rejected, and rock stars haven’t.” Timberlake takes acting seriously, though. “There’s a lot of downtime on a movie set, and there’s nothing to do except talk, read, or check your phone, but Justin didn’t have a phone on set,” says Gene Stupnitsky, co-writer of Bad Teacher. “He didn’t bring it because he didn’t want to have any distractions.”
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