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It was August 2007 when a chubby, curly-haired unknown named Jonah Hill broke out onto the Hollywood scene with the charmingly vulgar teen comedy Superbad. Unlike his other teenage co-stars, Hill followed up the hit with a string of successes (four which cracked over $100 million at the box office) in A-list laughers. So how come almost four years later it seems like Jonah Hill is crashing the Tinseltown circuit once again?

Showcasing a shockingly slender figure and a dramatic performance in the new movie Moneyball, Jonah Hill is once again trying to win over audiences.

“I never imagined that I’d get to do dramas as well as comedies,” said Hill in a roundtable interview at the Four Seasons in Boston, comparing his experiences on the set of Moneyball to a surreal dream. Directed by Bennett Miller (Capote) and scripted by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, American Gangster), Moneyball, based on the Michael Lewis book, tells the true story of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) rebuilding the team to success via numerical calculations. Hill plays Beane’s data whiz kid who applies the Moneyball technique (technically called sabermetrics) to the baseball draft.

Holding his own against Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Wright, Jonah Hill shouldn’t worry about being accepted by audiences once again, for they should readily welcome his less raucous, more real performance that (don’t worry) still provides some comic relief.

In this interview, Hill talks about re-breaking into Hollywood, the iconic screen duo he and Brad Pitt developed their character relationship on, Wham!, and Pitt’s “prank elves.”

Your character in Moneyball uses a formula to combat the “face for baseball” popularity contest the sport was becoming. Do you think Hollywood has the same problem, where people only see the surface value?

Jonah Hill: I don’t want to name people that aren’t as good looking as other people, but at the end of the day, unfortunately, it is all based on ticket sales. The studios base their decisions on who can get people to come – and that’s it. Amy Pascal, who runs Sony, and the people at Sony are really special in that way. They really, really care about their movies, making films like The Social Network and Moneyball and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which aren’t getting made at other places. They are making cool adult tentpole dramas, if you will, and it is very fking unique and cool. … They make Spider-Man, which will make a ton of money, so they have that luxury, but they care. At the end of the day, any studio head will tell you that they look at a receipt to see how much money you are worth.

So did you see Moneyball to be a comparison to Hollywood as well?

JH: Of course there is a massive comparison with Hollywood and Moneyball. That’s how I saw it. I familiarized myself with the inner workings of baseball and really studied, but the way I saw the character was that this is how my friends and I talk about other actors, directors, and writers. We sit and we analyze them and break them down – here are their weaknesses, here are their strengths. And that’s what [they do in baseball]. But unfortunately, it is just a number.

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