Joe Jonas has opened up about what he describes as one of his most humbling Hollywood moments, a disastrous audition for The Morning Show that he says he crashed and burned so badly he wasn’t even sure what role he was going for.
The 36-year-old singer shared the story on Wednesday’s episode of Hey Jonas!, the new podcast he hosts with brothers Nick and Kevin, revealing he had tried out for the part of a young news anchor intended to be a love interest for Jennifer Aniston’s character.
The experience, by his own account, did not go well.
“Long story short, I show up early [and] they’re like, ‘Oh,'” he told his brothers. Rather than joining the general waiting area, he was quietly ushered elsewhere.
“They did this thing, which was very kind… they were like, ‘Oh, we have a private room for you.'”
The private room, it turned out, was anything but a perk.
“The saddest room you can imagine,” he said, where he could hear other actors auditioning “clear as day”, and they were, in his words, “crushing it.”
Then came his own turn. “I go in and I just, like, crash and burn. It was literally, like, I don’t even know what I’m auditioning for.”
The confession prompted Nick, 33, to start guessing which role Joe was talking about, throwing out Spider-Man and Wicked as possibilities.
Joe’s response drew laughs: “We don’t need to name all the things I didn’t get.” Kevin helpfully confirmed: “Those are two of them.”
Joe later admitted that the Wicked audition was its own particular experience, given the level of theatre vocalists he could hear performing around him.
Fans responding to a clip from the episode on Instagram were characteristically entertained, with many demanding a full list of Joe’s failed auditions and at least one suggesting the universe had made a terrible mistake by not casting him in Wicked.
The Morning Show audition aside, Joe’s screen career has had its moments, most notably the Camp Rock films with his brothers, the 2025 Jonas Christmas movie and a memorable cameo in Zoolander 2.
The Morning Show, it seems, was just not meant to be.
