That couldn’t have been less of a problem. I was nervous about interviewing five young guys at once, thinking I’d get them mixed up. If they tell me I have to do it a specific way, I don’t want to do it.” He very badly wants to get outside and skate, he tells me he’s had little time do that lately-all thanks to Hill’s pesky film. “They can’t media train me ,” Na-Kel says when I ask how much they were prepped for press. He lands like a cat, limbs taut and controlled, sometimes with a somersault. When he falls, he does so offensively-leaping off the board long before it hits the ground, graceful as a paper airplane. He tries the same trick over and over until he lands it. He slides down handrails and across flights of stairs, flips over fire hydrants, and narrowly avoids traffic. Smith is a vastly talented skater, something you can see a bit in Hill’s film, and even more directly in homemade videos uploaded to YouTube. At one point he surveys me from upside-down, head hanging over the chair’s edge later, he falls out of it completely. Na-Kel Smith, the oldest and most experienced skater of the bunch (he’s twenty-four), tips back in his chair for the better part of our hour together, slowly scraping paint off the fancy hotel wall behind him. I like listening to the kids talk over each other, taking the piss out of my questions and blatantly staring at their phones-though his compassion for the journalistic process is appreciated. All the boys are Los Angeles natives except Sunny, who moved here from Atlanta five years ago. Rather than teach actors how to skate, Hill found skaters who could act.

The rest joined the project after coproducer Mikey Alfred, owner of the skateboard brand Illegal Civilization, suggested them to Jonah, who was casting for a movie about young skateboarders in LA.

Of the five, only one had substantial professional acting experience prior to starring in Jonah Hill’s mid90s -the youngest, Sunny Suljic, who also starred in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer -which means they are not quite media trained. “The kids,” as their publicist calls them, have been sitting cooped up in a room doing press for so long they’ve all gone a bit crazy. “Yo, let’s get to the questions because, like, she has a limited amount of time. “I’m so sorry,” Olan Prenatt says midway through our interview, before turning to his four restless costars.

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