Jonah Hauer-King on His ‘Frightening’ Role in ‘A House of Dynamite’ and Sharing Scenes With Idris Elba: ‘Two Arsenal Fans Making Monumental Decisions About the U.S. Military’

Jonah Hauer-King has a line in “A House of Dynamite” so disturbing that friends are now texting it to him as soon as they see the film. “Some don’t write anything other than that line,” he says.

Charting the chaos within America’s halls of power as an atomic bomb hurtles toward the U.S., Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller — landing on Netflix Friday — sees the busy actor play a clean-cut military aide tasked with shadowing the president (Idris Elba) while carrying the famed satchel of nuclear strike options and launch codes. In one late scene, with retaliation apparently the only choice and the satchel well and truly opened, he compares three scenarios of expanding apocalyptic proportions with the chilling calm as if he was reading out choices on a lunch menu.

“We actually call them rare, medium and well done,” he tells the considerably more distressed POTUS. ‘Well done,’ presumably, would be near total planetary destruction.

The line — now regularly pinging onto Hauer-King’s phone — is made even more alarming through the fact it wasn’t a piece of fiction put in by “A House of Dynamite” writer Noah Oppenheim.

“It’s so brutal, but it’s also true,” says Hauer-King, speaking from his home in North London. “We checked — it was an anecdotal thing. That wasn’t just made up. That’s not to say it’s the military as a whole, but at least one individual referred to it like that, and that’s, yeah, really frightening!”

Hauer-King’s lieutenant commander is one of the smaller characters in “House of Dynamite.” Alongside Idris as the president, the lead ensemble cast of increasingly frantic White House officials, security advisors and senior military figures includes the likes of Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke and Tracy Letts. But while it’s a relatively brief appearance (he doesn’t show up until the film’s final third), his straight-faced, emotionless and clinical demeanor — not to mention his dazzlingly pristine white army uniform — as he carries the keys to the end of the world makes him the movie’s most terrifying element.

He is, effectively, presented as the handsome, clean-shaven and slick-haired face of nuclear annihilation.

“The character I play has such a strange job,” says the 30-year-old. “They’re relatively young in their military career, and they’re given this big weight of responsibility and are trained within an inch of their life. They have to always be alert and calm. And they’re just there, lurking in the background, following the president and waiting for worst possible thing to happen — but obviously the hope is that they’re never actually called into action.”

Bigelow described the character to her actor as someone who “takes their job with the utmost seriousness and who feels quite honored to do that job,” he says. “My understanding is that this is someone on the rise and it would be considered a badge of honor.”

But it’s a mindset that’s extremely hard to get into, Hauer-King admits, with the “well done” anecdote pointing to mental strategy that’s required to deal with it all.

“Some people say that it’s almost necessary working in those jobs that you have a level of disconnect… but for us it’s so shocking,” he says.

Bigelow’s films — and especially the likes of “A House of Dynamite,” “Zero Dark Thirty” or “The Hurt Locker” that take a deep dive into military protocol — “live and die on their authenticity,” says Hauer-King, who claims there were more historical and military advisers on set than any other department. Such rich level of research proved to be especially useful to him, as he could only dig so far into his role. “I couldn’t exactly talk to a person who had done that job — I think would be far too classified!” he says.

When Hauer-King first auditioned for “A House of Dynamite” his agent said a “potential stumbling block” was that he was not American, so they’d been touting his dual-citizenship (his mother is the California-born therapist and theater producer Debra Hauer, while his father is British restauranteur Jeremy King, who helped revive The Ivy). They needn’t have bothered. As the actor notes — and as he discovered the first day on set — most of the cast wasn’t American.

It didn’t go unnoticed between himself and Elba — who effectively have a decisive hand over America’s nuclear arsenal and the fate of humankind — that they’re both Londoners.

“We did have a laugh about two Arsenal fans driving around in the presidential beast and making these monumental choices about the U.S. military,” he recalls.

“A House of Dynamite” marks the third in a trio of recent releases starring Hauer-King, who has been steadily shifting the gears upwards over the last couple of years.

Having broken out on the big screen with the instant actor box-ticking role of a Disney prince, capturing Halle Bailey’s heart in “The Little Mermaid,” he entered darker waters as the lead in 2024’s devastating Holocaust TV drama “The Tattooist of Auschwitz.” But 2025 has firmly accelerated his move from rising talent to in-demand star with three films and three wildly different performances.

Earlier this summer, he was among the main cast of — mostly — bloody victims in Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s silly and decidedly self-aware slasher reboot-sequel hybrid “I Know What You Did Last Summer” for Columbia Pictures (a role he says he landed after a recommendation from “close friend” Maya Hawke). Then came Chad Hartigan’s rom-com “The Threesome,” playing a man for whom a one-time ménage à trois (with Zoey Deutch and Ruby Cruz) results in a somewhat complicated double set of pregnancies (and some comically awkward hospital scenes). And now he’s about to help blow the world to pieces for Bigelow.

Coincidentally, the three films have one connecting factor — Hauer-King plays an American in each one. “It just happened like that,” he insists. “It wasn’t a choice.” But he worked hard to perfect three different accents (for “The Threesome,” he says he styled his on a then little-known singer called Benson Boone).

Next up, he’s playing another American — this time the real-life Mark Vonnegut, son of Kurt — in “The Eden Express,” based on his 1975 memoir about fleeing Nixon’s America to set up a commune in British Columbia. Hauer-King notes that they shot in Powell River, “where the story is actually set.” Then there’s “The Face of Horror,” the next feature from Anna Biller, best known for 2016’s cult and kooky retro horror film “The Love Witch.” “At its core it’s a horror — it’s gory and it’s a ghost story,” he says. “But it definitely has that same style where it can be funny, and also an homage aesthetically to the Technicolor films of the ’40s and ’50s.”

“The Face of Horror” also offers a Hauer-King a rare break from the American twang. “I’m playing a medieval knight, so it’s a kind of heightened RP [received pronunciation] — it’s all very proper and over top.”

With a growing resume and swift climb up the call sheet as his in-demand status continues to rise, it could be easy for things to go Hauer-King’s head. But the actor says he recently received a very welcome lesson in humility and from the “A House of Dynamite” POTUS himself as they drove around in the presidential limousine.

“It was a challenging scene. There’s a lot going on, especially for Idris, because he’s talking to me, he’s dealing with a telephone call, which had been pre-recorded, but involved a lot of lines. And we’re also on this random highway,” he recalls. “And after the first take, he looked at me and just said: ‘That was really hard.’ It was a really nice reminder that even someone like him can find this difficult. And not everyone reacts like that.”