Jonah Hill Opens Up About Losing His Brother And Struggling With Body Image in Netflix’s ‘Stutz’

On the day that Jonah Hill’s brother, Jordan Feldstein, died suddenly, the actor went to his therapist’s office.
“I spend a lot of my life avoiding thinking about that day,” Hill tells his therapist, Phil Stutz, in his new documentary. “I went into your office. It was definitely the most intense day in my life.”
Hill’s new documentary, Stutz—which is now streaming on Netflix—is an experiment that feels like it shouldn’t work, and yet it does. The 38-year-old A-list actor, known for his roles in films like Superbad, 21 Jump Street, and The Wolf of Wall Street decided to direct a movie in which he interviewed his therapist, the renowned psychiatrist Phil Stutz. At first, Hill insists the movie is not about him—it’s about Stutz and the cognitive-behavioral tools that Hill says helped him through the lowest point in his life. But eventually, Hill acknowledges that the movie is, at least partly, about him. He pushes himself to open up about his late brother, who died of a heart attack in 2017, at the age of 40. (Through the course of making the movie, Hill learned that Stutz, too, lost a brother, when the therapist was just 9 years old and his brother was only 3.)
In Stutz, Hill recalls that on the day he found his brother died, he went in for a session with Stutz. While there, Stutz asked Hill for his phone to take a picture of the actor. “I wondered why you did that,” Hill tells Stutz.
“It is very rare in life you get a chance to record something at the climactic, most important moment,” Stutz replies. “And then you come back to it a week, a year later. In that time gap, you experience the forces of healing, of recovery.”

Hill nods in understanding and then tells Stutz that he hadn’t looked at the photo in four years. But now, after going through the journey of processing his grief, in part by making this movie with Stutz, he feels ready to face it. He holds a printed version of the photo, and he and Stutz look at it together. “I look stripped of everything fake,” Hill says. “There’s an oddly serene look on my face, which is like so bizarre. But maybe because it demolished everything that didn’t matter.”
Stutz offers his own analysis: “That’s the picture of somebody who’s gone through hell, come out the other side, and is really OK.” Hill seems moved by Stutz’s words, then holds up the picture to the camera for the audience to see.

Hill goes on to describe how Stutz’s “loss processing” tools have helped him with his grief but clarifies that it wasn’t a magical fix. “I still feel that pain every day,” he says. “I still miss my brother.”
Earlier in the movie, Hill also opened up about his struggle with growing up overweight, and the years he spent struggling with his body image. “It’s something that sounds like not a big deal, or ‘poor you,’ or whatever, but for me personally, it intensely fucked me up,” he says. That struggle was one of the reasons Hill first started seeing Stutz when he was 33 years old. But as with his brother, Hill wants to face this demon head-on—literally. He pulls out a cardboard cut-out of himself at 14 years old and looks at it.

“I had an incredible amount of success [at 33], was in really great shape physically. All things that should have rendered this version of myself non-existent,” Hill recalls, gesturing to the cardboard cut-out. “I thought that if I got successful, they wouldn’t see that. And then I did, and all people did was just say more of that. And it hurt.” Hill explains he’s worked hard to not only accept who he was 14 but love him, too. But he admits that it’s hard, especially in the face of mockery and cheap shots from the media. Not only that but his successful career���which included an Oscar nomination for The Wolf of Wall Street—didn’t work as the salve he had hoped for.
“When [success] didn’t cure any of that stuff, it made me beyond depressed,” Hill says. “At the same time, the media kept being really brutal about my weight. It was free game for anyone to hit my sore spot. It made me so defensive.”

Hill goes on to say that it wasn’t until he met Stutz that he was able to successfully start blocking out the negative and form his own opinion about himself.
As part of his steps toward self-care, Hill opted not to go on a promotional tour for Stutz, and even deleted his social media accounts. In a statement reported by Deadline in August, Hill said, “You won’t see me out there promoting this film, or any of my upcoming films, while I take this important step to protect myself. If I made myself sicker by going out there and promoting it, I wouldn’t be acting true to myself or to the film.” He added, “I hope the work will speak for itself.”