Bobby Cannavale's Personality Crisis

How the ‘Vinyl’ star charmed Mick Jagger and got to play the coolest, craziest music exec that never was.

- Alex Morris

A couple of years back, Bobby Cannavale went to see Mick Jagger about a job. The Emmy-winning actor had been tapped by Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter to play the lead in a show that was being kicked around at HBO, but the project was really Jagger’s idea – conceived two decades ago as a film that pulled the curtain back on the music industry of the 1970s – so Jagger was the man to please. And thus far, he hadn’t been. “I remember being really freaked out about what the lighting should look like in my living room,” Cannavale says now of a Skype call gone wrong. “I was like, ‘I want him to think I’m cool.’ So I wore black, you know? Black’s rock & roll.” The feedback Cannavale got afterward was that maybe he’d come off as too intense, too much like his (pathologically violent) bootlegger character on Boardwalk Empire, and not enough like the complex, drug-fueled but ultimately redeemable music exec Jagger envisioned.

Which was how Cannavale found himself driving to Washington, D.C., with girlfriend Rose Byrne in tow, to see the Stones play and meet Jagger in the flesh. They went to Jagger’s room at the Four Seasons (“I didn’t even know a hotel room that big existed. Like, I couldn’t find a bathroom”), they talked music (“I just tried not to say much”), and eventually Cannavale mentioned a YouTube video of a James Brown concert where both Michael Jackson and Prince came onstage: “Michael does the moonwalk and people go crazy, and then Prince is carried through the crowd on the back of his bodyguard. I showed it to Jagger, and he died. We must have watched it 10 times. I felt like, ‘Oh, we’re good now.’ ”