Original-Cin Q&A: Actor Patrick J. Adams on Secrets and Lies in The Swearing Jar

By Bonnie Laufer

The Swearing Jar is a romantic musical drama directed by Lindsay MacKay.

Adapted from Kate Hewlett's musical play of the same name, the film stars Adelaide Clemens as Carey, a music teacher who stages a concert about her relationship with her husband Simon (Patrick J. Adams) as a birthday present for him, only to be drawn into a dilemma when she also begins to fall in love with Owen (Douglas Smith), the guitarist she hired perform the concert.

Our Bonnie Laufer spoke with Adams about his passion for the script and his thoughts on keeping big secrets.

ORIGINAL-CIN: I really enjoyed The Swearing Jar. Was it on your radar before you got the script and if not, what connected you to your character Simon?

PATRICK J ADAMS: I didn't know about the play. It had been several years since I'd seen the script for the first time, it had been floating around for a while. I think they'd been trying to make the movie for quite a while and there have been a few iterations of it before it reached me. So, I had read the script, fallen in love with the script and I just wanted to be involved.

When it came time to actually make it, the script came back and I read it and I was so excited. Is it happening for real? Then I got to talk to Kate and to Lindsay and the producers and it was very real.

The thing for me that clinched it was the music. I've been in this business long enough to know if the music isn't good or compelling it takes you. If I'm watching a film and the music needs to move you it needs to and especially with this film where it's so integral to the movement of the story. Once I heard the music I was locked in and ready to go.

O-C: Your wife is played by Adelaide Clemens who is wonderful and has such a great voice. How did you enjoy working with her and was that chemistry instant?

PJA: She's great. It's a lot to be the number one on the call sheet and she brought her A-game every single day. She is insanely talented and was so easy to work with. You have to have a really particular disposition and you have to be there day in and day out intertwined with the whole production and that takes a very particular kind of person. Her performance was beautiful, and her insight into her character was dead on. The things that she brought to it, a lot of it that was on the page but a lot of it that wasn't was just breathtaking and she was such a collaborative artist.

I love working with people like that because you can immediately push each other. We didn't know each other that well but you sort of get over that hump of having that comfort level and it becomes how can you help me how can I help you? What do you need from me? I felt like we could create that relationship right away. So you just don't have a lot of time on these productions to create intimacy or chemistry. It's either there or it's not but it's usually there in my experience when you're dealing with someone who really takes the craft seriously and loves what they do and does their homework and Adelaide does all those things.

O-C: You're playing a guy who has a major secret. She's going through her thing, too: they're expecting a child and they're both conflicted. Being a new dad, that had to have hit home.

PJA: Whenever I work on anything I'd like to try and figure out what the secret of a character is. That's part of my process because I think every character has some secret but with Simon it is the crux of the whole thing and it is a secret so massive and that was a big part of the work too. Some days I was like, ‘How dare this guy keep something like that so private?’ I had a lot of judgment about it and I had to find my way figuring out how to make him relatable and to understand why. Who keeps secrets to this degree, and why and really how it had to be. Not just out of fear, but out of love, wanting to take care of this woman who he loves and make sure that this family happens and it's hard because he's making a lot of decisions for her by keeping that secret and we talked a lot about that.

Again, that goes to the credit of the kind of actor that Adelaide is and our incredible director, Lindsay. We really pondered over, ‘Who are these people? Why are they doing what they are doing? How does their behavior come up in the scene and how much do we let the audience decide as to how they feel about it?’ There's a lot of very subtle nuances that are hard to convey or flesh out especially when you don't have a lot of time and money on a set. You have to be with really great people who are all on the same page and you just sometimes get lucky and I think in this case we got really lucky.

O-C: Another key element in the film is the swear jar. This couple wants to be respectful, wanting to bring up this child without hearing any swear words. So, spill the beans, do you swear?

PJA: No, I'm not really a swearing guy. I completely relate to the challenge of keeping it clean around kids or being a good parent especially with our first daughter with Aurora. I was like, we're not ready to be parents. I can hardly take care of myself. I can't take the garbage out once a week, you expect me to raise a kid. I think there was certainly a lot I related to on that level of just who are we as parents? Are we ready to do this? How dare we think we know what it is to raise a child but it’s also the gift of that and I think the film captures that so beautifully.

OC: Your mom in the film is played by Kathleen Turner. How fantastic was that?

PJA: She was a hoot. We had such a great time with Kathleen. So open and giving and I loved that there was that tension between mother and son. She really was a joy to work with.

O-C: You are in in the recent stage revival of the play, Take Me Out in New York. You had so much time to sit with it because of it being delayed due to COVID but I have to know, does it ever get easy to be naked on stage?

PJA: (laughs) No! There are some people that I think kind of get a kick out of it, maybe have a little bit of an exhibitionist streak. For the record, I do not. I loved doing that show, mainly because it was such a great script. You can do anything when you're a part of something that you really believe in and if the nudity in that play had ever felt like it didn't have a purpose, if it was just there to be titillating then I don't think I ever would have done it. It's such an integral part of what that play is about and it's in that scene specifically that we're referencing, which is a shower scene with six guys from this baseball team.

But the whole point of it is that it's unsexy, it is just nudity. It is not guys looking at each other. It was so expertly crafted by the writer Richard Greenberg that the nudity becomes sort of inconsequential to it.

I won't lie, it is sort of a nightmare to be naked in front of 600 strangers each night. You just get out of your brain for the seven minutes that it happens. Certain nights it's weird, some nights it would hit you hard, like ‘Oh my god, I can't believe I'm about to do this.’ Strangely, it was when you know people in the audience, like when friends and family are there. If it's strangers, it's fine.

The Swearing Jar is now available on demand.