Nick Jonas Talks Yankees, Skattebo & More with Bobby Bones

Nick Jonas is home in Los Angeles for a minute, which he says almost never happens, and he is leaving again in a few days.

The destination is Melbourne, where the Jonas Brothers play the halftime show at the 49ers-Rams game, the first regular season NFL game in Australia, streaming on Netflix.

He would not say how long the performance runs, on the grounds that it would spoil the surprise. What he would say is that relative to the travel, it evaporates.

"When it takes however long it takes to get to Australia, naturally the sprint of that performance, it feels like an instant."

The Yankees hat he wore into the interview is not a prop. Jonas grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, during what he called one of the many golden eras, watching Derek Jeter and the early 2000s teams with Alex Rodriguez, Jorge Posada, Mike Mussina and Hideki Matsui.

Then Joe Torre went to Los Angeles at roughly the same time his family did, which is how he ended up with real affection for the Dodgers too, and how he came to know Dave Roberts.

He met Jeter once, at dinner, through a mutual friend, and he was starstruck.

"How could you not be?"

Asked whether that surprised him about himself, Jonas said it is the oldest exchange in entertainment. Actors and musicians want to be athletes, and athletes want the reverse.

The story he told to explain the fandom is the better one. On tour in Europe in 2009, during that fall run, the only way to watch was to stay up until three or four in the morning. So he and a few other Yankees fans on the tour did exactly that, then slept until showtime at seven or eight the next night.

"No way to live life on the road, but we were committed."

He is on the show for DraftKings and the Take Your Game Anywhere campaign, built around the app going nationwide, which reunited him with Kevin Hart. The two have now done three movies together, with the third Jumanji installment arriving Christmas Day.

Chris used his question on the Christmas movie, and specifically on whether a sequel is coming.

Jonas was noncommittal but warm about it. The idea traces back to their first years working with Disney, got resurrected in a 2019 meeting, and became the thing he now describes through the lens of fatherhood. All of them are dads. Making something families can share, that does not take itself too seriously, is the entire point of a holiday film.

They have also since produced and cameoed in Camp Rock 3, which came out about a week and a half ago.

The parenting conversation went somewhere better than expected, because Bones has a five-month-old and Jonas has a four-and-a-half-year-old.

Asked what he has learned about himself, Jonas started with how fast adults calcify.

"You really realize how quickly we fall into certain patterns and start to see the world certain ways," he said. "And when you have to explain why glass is clear, it kind of opens your mind up."

Beyond the improvisation, he said, you are shaping a worldview, deciding what matters to someone and how they treat people, and those small moments count more than anyone warns you. The compensation is seeing things again with the same wonder.

On Broadway, which he keeps returning to, his comparison was athletic and unqualified.

"It's the closest thing to being an athlete," he said. Eight shows a week, six days a week, for a year or more. He called it the most physically taxing version of performing there is, reserved for the strong of heart and mind, and said he looks forward to going back.

His NFL team is the Giants, and he is genuinely optimistic, name-checking John Harbaugh, Jackson Dart and Cam Skattebo. Skattebo came to a show and they met. Skattebo and Dart were also at Game 4 of the Knicks' finals run with his oldest brother Kevin, which Jonas described as New York and New Jersey royalty in one box watching that team walk toward destiny.

Asked who has shown up at a Jonas Brothers concert and genuinely stunned them, he named two musicians and one quarterback.

Barry Gibb came with his family and spent real time with the band. Paul Simon did the same.

And Eli Manning came to a New Jersey show with his family, then announced from the stage that the Jonas Brothers were being inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

"No bigger icon in our minds than the two-time Super Bowl MVP."

Bones, who spends most of his life in music, asked which artist could be born today, make the identical music, and still land. His own answers were Biggie and Led Zeppelin.

Jonas went to Tupac immediately, then Janis Joplin, and framed it as a loss rather than a hypothetical. There are so many people gone who he believes would still be closing out Coachella.

TJ took the last question, and took it somewhere specific. The Rich Eisen Show got its start on DirecTV's Audience Network, which also produced Kingdom, where Jonas played MMA fighter Nate Kulina.

Jonas loved doing it, and was clear-eyed about the timing. It arrived right before streaming took off. He described the show as a family of fighters undone by an inability to say they cared about each other.

The origin story is the part worth keeping.

When Jonas asked to read for the role, his agents were told the producers did not want to see a Jonas Brother.

"That just made me all the more determined to kind of push that wall down and just get in the room and fight for it."

He got it. He is now close with creator Byron Balasco, has a film in development with him, and calls the whole experience formative as an actor and a person.

He would like Kingdom to find its way back onto a streaming service someday.