9 minute read
Justin Baldoni: Man Enough for Ojai
— the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse by charlie mackesy
Story by KAREN LINDELL
Photos by KURT ISWARIENKO
The “boys’ club” — whether a real place like a locker room, or the more metaphorical space where guys supposedly learn how to be masculine — can be messed up, even dangerous. so actor and director Justin Baldoni is suggesting a new twist on club admission: you’re already in.
Because you’re man enough. And human enough. “The ‘boys’ club’ is really just the mental landscape of places where we men gather, where the cultural messages of what it means to be a boy and a man in this world are embedded, enacted, enforced, and then passed on,” Baldoni writes in his book ‘Man Enough: My Masculinity’, which follows his enormously popular TED Talk in 2017, “Why I’m Done Trying to Be Man Enough.”
In his TED Talk, the book, and a podcast also called ‘Man Enough’, Baldoni, who plays Rafael on Jane the Virgin, explores his own struggles with growing up male and the societal norms he’s absorbed — but is trying to change — about being brave, fi t, smart, sexy, confident, and successful. He includes racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights as part of the conversation, and is working on a version of the book for boys 9 to 13. “Healthy masculinity is masculinity that’s talked about and dissected, discovered and unlearned, because there are so many things that have been taught to us over the course of our lives that are just fl at out wrong,” he said in an interview from his home in Ojai, where he moved with his family in January 2021.
He’s embraced feminine qualities men are taught to avoid, in particular vulnerability. “I’ve been pretending to be a man that I’m not my entire life,” he said in his TED Talk. “I’ve been pretending to be strong when I felt weak, confident when I felt insecure, and tough when really I was hurting.”
Baldoni is still exploring who he is and who he wants to be, and says the move to Ojai with his family — wife Emily, daughter Maiya (CQ), and son Maxwell — has made room for that ongoing journey. “One of the things I love about Ojai, it’s so spiritually open,” Baldoni said. “I don’t feel a lot of judgment. I feel like there’s space to be yourself, and that’s one of the big things with my work in masculinity. It’s this lifelong journey to enough-ness, to recognize that we are enough as we are. But over the course of our lives we put ourselves in boxes, and compare ourselves, and end up imprisoning ourselves.”
In Ojai, he said, “there’s an element of freedom. It’s almost like a consciousness liberation.”
He’s come a long way.
As a 13-year-old, he jumped from a bridge into a freezing river even though he was afraid of heights so his friends wouldn’t call him the dreaded “P” word (a five-letter synonym for a cat). In middle school, he loved acting, but gave up the stage in high school for sports because athletes got girls and theater kids got picked on.
At age 21, after receiving his first substantial acting paycheck (for a recurring role on Everwood), he bought a ’76 Ford Bronco because it was “the sexiest truck” he could think of.
What changed? Well, underneath he’d always been sensitive and emotional, raised by loving, caring parents. But he buried that part of himself because he was afraid he wouldn’t fi t in.
Baldoni describes Man Enough not as a “memoir,” but rather a “personal exploration” of what it means to be a man. He digs into life experiences that most of us (not just cisgender males) would probably rather keep hidden: hormone spurts, bullying and being bullied, bumbling in and out of relationships, obsessions with chiseled chests and abs, confusion about intimacy, and fears about sharing feelings.
Throughout his life, Baldoni said in his TED Talk, “I’ve just been kind of putting on a show, but I’m tired of performing.”
That’s a bold statement coming from an accomplished actor and filmmaker.
Baldoni is probably best known for playing Rafael Solano on Jane the Virgin. He’s also had roles in The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, Charmed, CSI, and Madam Secretary, and has served as a guest host on CBS’ The Talk.
Talented behind a camera as well, he directed the 2020 Disney+ biographical drama Clouds (about Zach Sobiech, a real-life musician who had cancer) and the 2019 drama Five Feet Apart (starring Cole Sprouse and Haley Lu Richardson as teens with cystic fibrosis).
Or you might know him from a 27-minute charmingly elaborate video of his marriage proposal to Emily that went viral; it has more than 13 million YouTube views.
Before showbiz and grand social media gestures, Baldoni grew up in Santa Monica, then moved to Medford, a small town in Oregon, when he was 10. Baldoni’s dad, a Hollywood entrepreneur, and mom, an artist and designer, were sensitive, kind and spiritual, raising him in the Bahá’í Faith. Baldoni, however, wanted his dad to be more … rugged. “I wanted a dad who was like all the other dads in that small town,” he said. One who hunted and fi shed, chopped down trees, drank beer on the weekends, worked with his hands, and could teach him how to fight.
Instead, Baldoni learned about masculinity on the playground, including the unspoken “don’ts”: Don’t be friends with girls, don’t act like a girl, don’t act gay, don’t show any emotion, don’t talk about your feelings, and don’t EVER cry. These schoolboy “lessons” followed him into adolescence and young adulthood, with troubling results. He excelled at athletics, but at times acted like a bully or was bullied. He lacked self-confidence, felt shame, and made immature choices. He had trouble with porn and intimacy, and obsessed about body image. But after marrying Emily in 2013, and when his daughter Maiya was born in 2015, the sensitive stuff inside — all the questions and concerns he’d been carrying around about masculinity but rarely shared — sent him on a private and public journey to learn more about himself. He started therapy, then took
Photos by KURT ISWARIENKO
the conversation to the outside world.
On social media, where he has a large following, he began talking openly about relationships, fatherhood, love, and intimacy. People took notice, and he was asked to do the TED Talk about masculinity at a TEDWomen conference.
The response was immediate and arming — but mostly from women, who gushed over his words and shared the video of his speech with the men in their lives. Men, in public responses on social media, were either silent, or trolled him with rude comments.
In private, however, men sent him direct messages and emails saying how much they identified with him and felt “seen,” and shared their own fears, feelings, and vulnerabilities.
Baldoni then wrote his book and started the podcast. He co-hosts the Man Enough podcast with Liz Plank, journalist and author of For The Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity, and his friend and musician-producer Jamey Heath. Guests have included Glennon Doyle, author of the bestselling book Untamed; actor Matthew McConaughey; singer Shawn Mendes, Queer Eye’s Karamo Brown; and in a particularly poignant episode, Justin’s father, Sam Baldoni.
Baldoni said his book and the podcast are “absolutely NOT an attack on men or on masculinity,” and he doesn’t like the term “toxic masculinity,” because he enjoys being a man and believes men are inherently good. “People have maybe projected I’m starting or part of a movement,” he said. “I think in some ways my work could be a sibling to feminism and the equality movement. I believe men are the problem in the sense that we are the oppressors in the relationship and why women don’t have full equality. That also means we are the solution. And that’s the thing that’s left out. I believe that feminism needs men, that men need men, just like men need women. We’ve been conditioned in so many ways as men to act in a way that is oftentimes counter completely to how we feel inside.”
Our problematic notion of masculinity, Baldoni believes, fuels more than personal strife. “There’s conflict everywhere,” he said. “Would war exist if there wasn’t an issue with masculinity? Would there be mass shootings … mass genocides? Would these things exist, if boys at an early age were taught to use their hearts, taught empathy and compassion and love and sensitivity, and not taught to compete for power?” Baldoni’s principles spill over into Wayfarer Studios, the production company he co-founded that aims to create “purpose-driven” shows and films “that elevate and speak to the human spirit,” like Clouds. The mission of Wayfarer Studios, he said, “is to create content that makes us want to be better, not content that makes us feel better about being worse. We’re a cause- driven studio.”
Baldoni said that along with his family and friends, Ojai keeps him grounded and doesn’t let him get “lost or sucked into” the tropes of Hollywood vanity or shallowness.
“Part of that is living in a place like this — just the reminder how unimportant all of that is,” he said. “Sometimes people need to live in a place where Mother Nature is apparent, where you can actually feel her, where you can walk out on grass and not cement, where you can just see mountains.” Baldoni and his family officially moved to Ojai in January 2021, but bought their home in May 2020. His parents and sister have moved up to Ojai, too. Emily grew up in a mountain town in Sweden, he said, so “she had been drawn to Ojai.” Emily also runs a business with Ojai resident and hat maker Satya Twena called AmmaMMA that sells products for mothers. As the women established the company, the Baldonis, then living in Los Angeles, came up to Ojai.
“I remember feeling like I was in a totally different world, but I didn’t pay any attention to [Ojai as] a place I would ever live, because honestly I was shooting a show at the time in L.A.,” Baldoni said.
The stay-at-home pandemic order, he said, made him realize he could have the life he and his family wanted, and build his career and business at the same time.
“We found what we feel is our forever home, our dream home,” he said. “We can have the kids in a small school, and be in nature, and have this kind of small-town lifestyle while also building careers. And we want to be clear: This is our home. This is not a summer house. We’re in.”
Baldoni is nowhere near done delving into masculinity, he said: “I want my children to see I’m working on myself, that their daddy’s not perfect, that I’m willing to ask the hard questions of myself, and be corrected, and learn and grow and sit in the discomfort.”
And he wants other men to ask these questions as well, “so they can show up in the world not just as big, strong, powerful men, but as good, kind, loving, and powerful human beings”.
Story written by Karen Lindell
