Jay Duplass, the director who became an actor by accident, is directing again

Jay Duplass

Photo: Colleen Sturtevant / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 7, 1973 New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Occupation	Filmmaker and actor
Known for	Paper Towns, Pain Hustlers, Prospect
Awards	Emmy (shared) · SXSW Film Festival Audience (shared)

Jay Duplass spent the first half of his career making films with his brother Mark and had no plan to appear in them. Then, at a dinner party, a showrunner who had heard him suggest actor after actor for a role nobody could fill told him to play it himself. The man most viewers now recognise is a performer: the restless son in Transparent, the hapless professor in The Chair, the husband Michelle Williams walks away from in Dying for Sex. This week he is in cinemas as the father in Other Mommy, a haunted-house film opposite Jessica Chastain, and next month he plays John G. Avildsen, the director of Rocky, in Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky.

The casting is apt, because the question hanging over Duplass is a director’s question. After more than a decade in which his directing name went quiet, he has gone back behind the camera, and for the first time without his brother’s name next to his on the credit.

The elder of the two Duplass brothers, he was born in New Orleans on March 7, 1973, to Cynthia and Lawrence Duplass, and raised in a Catholic household. He attended Jesuit High School, and by the brothers’ own account the two of them spent their childhood behind a home video camera. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and began its graduate film programme, then withdrew within months to make independent work. He credits the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona with setting the standard: it was, he told the author Robert K. Elder, “the root of everything that Mark and I always hold ourselves to in making movies.”

The brothers’ feature debut, The Puffy Chair, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2005 and won the Audience Award at South by Southwest two months later. Made on a budget reported at around $15,000, it was grouped with a handful of low-budget, dialogue-driven American films under the label mumblecore, a name the filmmakers did not choose. Jay later said the hardest part was “not having stars”, which meant buyers “didn’t know how to market it”. Baghead, a comic horror film about four actors at a cabin, followed at Sundance in 2008 and set off a bidding war.

Bigger budgets came next. Cyrus, in 2010, put John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill inside the brothers’ loose, improvised method, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home did the same with Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Susan Sarandon and Judy Greer. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, a small film about two competitive brothers, closed that run in 2012. Television followed: the brothers signed an overall deal with HBO and, with Steve Zissis, created Togetherness, a comedy about a married couple, her sister and his best friend under one Los Angeles roof. HBO cancelled it after two seasons in 2016; its premiere had drawn 427,000 viewers on the night. The anthology Room 104 ran on the same channel from 2017 to 2020. Through Duplass Brothers Productions they executive-produced Wild Wild Country, the Netflix documentary series about the Rajneeshpuram commune in Oregon, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series in 2018.

The acting career began in the middle of all this. Joey Soloway, then casting Transparent for Amazon, asked him to play Josh Pfefferman, the record-producer son of a family whose parent comes out as a trans woman. Duplass had never carried a featured role. The part grew in the second season and earned him a Critics’ Choice Television Award nomination. “It’s very common for actors to switch over to directing in midlife,” he told Entertainment Tonight in 2016. “It’s very unusual to have a successful writer-director switch over to being an actor.” More roles followed: Beatriz at Dinner, Landline, Outside In, which he co-wrote with its director, Lynn Shelton, the HBO banking drama Industry, the Netflix campus comedy The Chair opposite Sandra Oh, and a turn as Hades in Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

The neat version of this story, two brothers who made a cheap style respectable and then built a production company on it, leaves out what it cost. Duplass Brothers Productions has put its name on dozens of films and series as executive producer, and for more than a decade after The Do-Deca-Pentathlon Jay did not direct another feature. The Baltimorons, his first without Mark, premiered at South by Southwest in 2025 and opened in September through IFC. Co-written with its star, Michael Strassner, it follows a newly sober improv comedian who cracks a tooth on Christmas Eve and ends up in the chair of an older dentist played by Liz Larsen. Critics found it warm and funny, and several found it thin. See You When I See You, adapted by Adam Cayton-Holland from his own memoir Tragedy Plus Time, split them further at Sundance in January 2026. TheWrap compared it to Ordinary People; The Film Stage wrote that it kept his themes and lost much of his charm, hitting familiar notes but playing off key. The open question is whether the director has kept pace with the actor.

The acting has not slowed. In Dying for Sex, the FX series released in April 2025, he played Steve, the well-meaning, overbearing husband Michelle Williams’s character leaves after a terminal cancer diagnosis. See You When I See You, with Cooper Raiff and Kaitlyn Dever, went on to South by Southwest in March 2026. In August, Prime Video released Sterling Point, Megan Park‘s island-set coming-of-age series, in which he plays Steven, the adoptive father of twins played by Ella Rubin and Keen Ruffalo. Other Mommy, directed by Rob Savage from Josh Malerman’s book Incidents Around the House for Blumhouse, opens in American theaters on October 9, 2026.

The brothers wrote about their partnership, and their rivalry, in Like Brothers, a joint memoir in essays published by Ballantine in 2018 with a foreword by Mindy Kaling. Mark had acted in their films from the start; Jay’s acting career arrived later, and by accident.

I Play Rocky, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September with Anthony Ippolito as the young Sylvester Stallone, reaches theaters in November through Amazon MGM Studios. In it Duplass plays Avildsen, who won the Academy Award for directing Rocky. A director who became an actor by chance will spend that film standing behind a camera that is only a prop, while the films he directs himself wait for their audience.