John C. Reilly Convinced Jack White to Make This Music Video
John C. Reilly was recently driving around Los Angeles on a rainy day when he had a revelation. “I was like, This fucking song is amazing,” he tells me. “I just kept listening to it.” The song in question was “Archbishop Harold Holmes,” a seethingly raw single from Jack White’s 2024 album No Name. Reilly and White have been friends for decades, after the duo met backstage at a White Stripes gig — Reilly caught wind that the band was covering “Mister Cellophane,” the actor’s showstopper from Chicago, as an encore, and he wanted to witness the cover for himself. “We met and discovered we had all this stuff in common,” he says now. “We’re both from the Midwest. We’re both from big, Irish Catholic families. We’ve stayed friends after all these years. Whenever he comes to town, I go see him, and we’re thick as thieves.” Humor was a shared value; White would go on to cameo as a bizarre Elvis Presley in one of Reilly’s most enduring movies.
White had told Reilly — a musician himself who just released his debut album under the alter ego Mister Romantic — about the inspiration behind “Archbishop Harold Holmes,” which was spurred by finding a religious chain letter on the wall of someone’s house. “He discovered it and basically used the words of that letter to turn them into the lyrics of the song,” Reilly explains. “I thought that was such a cool origin story.” It was such a cool story, in fact, that Reilly badgered White to film a music video for it. “I kept saying, ‘Jack, we should do a video. You should direct it.’ Jack had been interested in directing in the past. So I said, ‘I’ll be the preacher, or you be the preacher and I’ll direct it.’ We kept passing the idea around,” he says. “And Jack told me, ‘When I’m on tour, it takes up all my time. Then when I’m off tour, it’s a big drain to have to micromanage a video shoot.’ He was feeling demoralized that not many people are into making videos anymore.”
Despite Reilly’s promise that he would make the video “fast, sexy, and fun,” White still needed to be convinced. The final push arrived last month, when “Archbishop Harold Holmes” unexpectedly began to chart high on alternative radio. Reilly went to see his pal perform at the Hollywood Palladium and plead his case one last time. “I was like, ‘Jack, I have to say, this radio thing is very satisfying to me,’” Reilly says. “Because at this point I’ve been talking to him for months about the song and trying to encourage him to make a video of it. I said, ‘Look, whatever you want to do, I’m available and it would be a pleasure for me.’” With director Gilbert Trejo — who was mentored by frequent White Stripes video director Autumn de Wilde — also interested in collaborating, White finally approved the project.
He said, ‘This is the first video I haven’t had notes on since Michel Gondry did some of our White Stripes videos.’
Reilly was given carte blanche to pursue whatever idea he best saw fit. Since “Archbishop Harold Holmes” concerns a religious organization using written tactics to recruit new members — “Dear friend, if you want to feel better / Don’t let the devil make you toss this letter,” it begins — the actor always envisioned himself as a preacher who was channeling White from the pulpit. “Jack has such a specific aesthetic with his colors and with the stuff he’s interested in. It was almost like doing a Prince video for Prince,” he jokes. “I thought it should be a direct appeal to people from this preacher. I knew Jack was really into electricity and Nikola Tesla. He does a lot of electric design for amplifiers and guitars, and it’s a passion of his.” Once Reilly started thinking more about electricity, he found his hook for the video. “I was like, What if this person’s not a very reliable narrator? That’s why we came up with the concept of he’s a total lunatic in an asylum, and all these electrical things he’s been imagining are all related to his experiences with his treatments in the hospital,” he explains. “It’s almost like a perfect fan fantasy. When you’re listening to a song and you’re imagining, Oh, if I did a video, it’d be like this and it’d be like that. I got to do just that.”
Reilly and Trejo shot the video over the course of one May day at a church in Los Angeles. The extras served as both the congregation members and mental-hospital patients. “Jack’s label did give us some money to make the video,” Reilly says, “but it was way cheaper than they ever thought it would be.” The actor equated learning the “Archbishop Harold Holmes” lyrics not unlike memorizing a long monologue from his filmography. “It’s written kind of like a hip-hop song,” he notes. “It has all this rhyming and verse. I almost had it in my memory already, but I went gangbusters once we got into it.” Despite the confidence in their execution, though, Reilly and Trejo were “biting our nails” waiting for White’s feedback. They didn’t have to wait long — White was effusive in his praise. “Jack just flipped for it,” Reilly recalls. “He said, ‘This is the first video I haven’t had notes on since Michel Gondry did some of our White Stripes videos.’ We were psyched. I still can’t believe it came together the way it did.”
Reilly is aware he would’ve been more intimidated to work with White if they weren’t already close friends. Still, he had to go through a few moments of self-doubt while on the set. “It’s like, Who the hell do I think I am trying to encapsulate this guy’s vision of his song?” he explained. “But because I know Jack so well and for so long, I felt confident that we could get something that would be at least in the ballpark of what he was into.” And if the success of this music video parlays Reilly to induct the White Stripes into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this year, it’s a role he would be happy to accept. “I would do anything for Jack,” he adds. “I really believe in the quality that he represents in music and how much care and thought is put into every part of his enterprise. And, of course, he kicks major ass.”
Related