Inside the Yaamava’ Theater, a casino-adjacent venue in Highland, Calif., a crowd of mostly women in their 20s and 30s assembled on a late April evening, cocktails in hand.
“Do you know how euphoric I am?” one woman squealed to her friend.
The Jonas Brothers were about to perform.
Most of the fans had grown up with the group. They were there when the brothers became mid-2000s teen heartthrobs who sold more than 17 million albums; there when the band broke up in 2013 to pursue solo projects; and there when they reunited in 2019 and had their first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Sucker.”
Nick, 33, is used to the fanfare that has followed him and his older siblings — Joe, 36, and Kevin, 38 — for the past 21 years. But backstage before the Highland concert, Nick was soft-spoken as he sipped a can of grapefruit La Croix and thoughtfully discussed his life. His vibe was more introspective businessman than cocksure rock star.
“There’s a certain indescribable thing that happens when the three of us make music together,” he said. “Our fan base has really stood by us, and our connection with them is so much deeper than just a successful song or a moment.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Nick is intent on defying the traditional boy-band-to-solo-star path. He’s currently attempting something Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake and Harry Styles didn’t: permanently return to the group that made him famous while also pursuing significant solo endeavors.
On breaks during this Jonas Brothers tour, Nick shot the holiday horror film “White Elephant” and reprised his role as Jefferson McDonough for the third time in “Jumanji: Open World” (out Dec. 25). He also released his fifth solo album, “Sunday Best,” in January and embarked on a mini solo tour.
Now, he stars with Paul Rudd in “Power Ballad” (in theaters), a music-filled dramedy from John Carney, of “Once” and “Sing Street” acclaim.
When Carney began casting “Power Ballad,” he knew he wanted an actual musician in the role of Danny Wilson, a former boy bander who is desperate to escape his past. But when Carney floated Nick’s name for the role, he was met with pushback.
“A few other people were like, wasn’t he a teen star? Will it Disney-fy the movie?” Carney recalled in a video interview from Ireland. Instead, the director said, Nick “really humanized it. He darkened it. He made the character mercurial and mysterious and enigmatic.”
In the film, Danny crosses paths with Rick (Rudd), a wedding singer who never hit it big, and the two spend a tipsy evening jamming together. When Danny records a version of a song Rick played for him and it becomes a hit, a fight for credit ensues.
It helped that Nick had partially lived Danny’s experience of longing for industry respect (minus the plagiarism). After Nick initiated the Jonas Brothers’s breakup in 2013, he shaved his head, gained 20 pounds of muscle, released the sexually charged, multiplatinum solo tracks “Jealous” and “Chains,” and played a closeted M.M.A. fighter in the drama series “Kingdom.” He even considered dropping his last name and creating an alter ego to truly break free.
“My whole life,” Nick said, “was leading up to me actually being able to do this with the context needed to do it.”
GROWING UP IN WYCKOFF, N.J., where his father was a Pentecostal pastor, Nick was the first Jonas brother to show a desire for the spotlight. He often roped his siblings into performing self-produced plays or required the entire family to attend his one-man shows in the basement.
Soon, a prepubescent Nick landed parts on Broadway in “A Christmas Carol,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Les Misérables.” And he inspired his brothers to follow suit.
“I brought a girl that I had a crush on to see Nick onstage, and she was like, ‘That was amazing,’” Joe said backstage in Highland. “That day, I was like, ‘I want to be a singer.’”
At 12 years old, Nick released a solo Christian album with Columbia Records. Soon after, in 2005, Nick, Joe and Kevin were signed as a secular group to Columbia and later to Disney’s Hollywood Records, where they put out three studio albums, heavy with teenage pining. Disney also recruited the brothers to appear in the “Camp Rock” TV films and their own comedy series on Disney Channel.
Early on, Nick was positioned as the group’s leader, despite being the youngest of the three. (There is also a fourth Jonas brother: Franklin, 25.)
“I was like, great, someone else, please. I don’t need to lead. I just want to have fun,” Kevin said backstage. “He was young, but his focus was being the best at what we were doing. And he still is that same way.”
The Disney machine helped push their fame to new heights. Nick dated Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, and their fledgling relationships became teen tabloid gossip. And then there were the brothers’ purity rings, which they wore for a time in a pledge of abstinence, that made them fodder for “South Park” and media pundits. The pressures of fame were intense.
“I think I handled it OK to the degree that the armor never really cracked, but there were days that were really difficult, and I didn’t have the tools then — the tools being therapy,” Nick said. “I just kind of went into my hard shell and waited till I was an adult to unpack it.”
Before the Highland concert, I sat in the empty theater and watched the Jonas Brothers do a sound check with their band. The siblings were all consummate professionals, but only Nick chimed in with a series of performance tweaks: “Try going from the F sharp to the E”; “Invert the end of the riff”; “Before we go into the outro just hit the ‘hey, hey, heys.’”
The brothers have always played their own instruments and written or co-written their own music. But their audience was, initially, teenage girls — an oft-dismissed demographic presumed to lack critical taste — and Nick put pressure on himself to “get better” and prove his worth.
“With whatever level of admiration and success that we had, there was also equally, if not louder at times, or it’s just what you’re choosing to hear, criticism,” he said in a follow-up video interview from a tour stop in Buenos Aires. “It wasn’t hard to stay humble because I felt like I was always hearing more of that than praise.”
Even now, his first days on a new project are anxiety-ridden. “The first call is never, ‘Oh, I feel great about how it went today,’” he said. “It’s always, ‘I think no one thinks I’m good.’”
But on the “Power Ballad” set, Nick delivered an understated performance that left his co-star, Rudd, impressed. One scene in particular, Rudd said in a phone interview, “broke my heart.”
“It’s the look in his eyes. He does it so subtly, and it’s like, wow, that guy — not that guy, that actor — that actor knows what he’s doing right there,” Rudd said. “It was very apparent that there’s real depth to him.”
THERE SEEMS TO BE TENSION between the ambitious solo career that Nick is once again seeking and the nostalgic comforts of the Jonas Brothers, which have included them playing heightened versions of themselves in a campy 2025 Disney holiday film, “A Very Jonas Christmas,” and reprising their “Camp Rock” roles for appearances in “Camp Rock 3” this August.
But Nick doesn’t see it that way.
He now views the Brothers as a “home base” and said he has been inspired by “the K-pop model,” watching how groups like BTS and Blackpink stay together as a unit, while also allowing their members to find individual success. Nick doesn’t foresee them disbanding again.
“We’re focused on legacy at this point as a family,” he said. The trio started a podcast, and Nick serves as a producer on many of his upcoming film projects through their production company, Powered by Jonas.
Nick, who is based in Los Angeles, also has a family of his own with the actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas and their daughter, Malti Marie, 4.
In a phone interview, Chopra Jonas said she was initially attracted to Nick’s sincerity and kindness, and they have connected over a love of creative pursuits.
“On our honeymoon, we wrote two TV shows,” Chopra Jonas said. “We were just sitting there by the beach and came up with characters and built a world, and then abandoned it along the way, of course. But the thing we do for fun is create.”
Last year, Nick returned to Broadway to star in “The Last Five Years.” And recently, he’s been quietly developing an original stage musical about Hans and Margret Rey, the married couple who created Curious George.
“About eight years ago, I was at home, and I just had this sudden urge to figure out Curious George’s origin story and who the creators were,” Nick said. “So, I went down an infinite rabbit hole.”
The show is still a work in progress, but Nick has already written four or five original songs and said he is collaborating with the Reys’ estate, along with the playwright Peter Duchan (“Dogfight”) and the producer Aaron Glick (“Purpose”). Separately, Nick hopes to develop a jukebox musical that uses the Jonas Brothers’s catalog to tell an original story.
His long-term plan involves performing, writing and producing film, TV and music projects. (Despite having expressed an interest in politics and a presidential run in the past, Nick said that’s “absolutely not” a desire anymore.)
“That’s the big picture vision,” he said. “And then when something comes in and is great, I scrap it all and go, I want to do this.”
