Photo by Caleb Adams
Blink and you’ll miss Jordan Raf in The Drama. The New York City-based actor and musician plays the chef catering the starring couple's wedding who is also present for the fateful pre-dinner where the bride, played by Zendaya, reveals a relationship-changing secret. “My big line is ‘We’re not a bar,’" Raf says over a recent video call. He filmed two more scenes for the film, but they were unfortunately cut.
Raf is taking it in stride, though. After all, Raf can boast about something no one else can: that he’s been in (almost) every single one of The Drama’s director, Kristoffer Borgli’s, movies. In Borgli’s 2022 film Sick of Myself, Raf has a “funny little” cameo. And in 2023’s Dream Scenario, he plays a “dream travel guru.”
Raf, who writes music, has also had his songs featured in the films. For The Drama, Raf wrote “Sky Turns Red” which plays in a scene where the central couple discuss their vows in a bookstore. It’s a timeless, Goo Goo Dolls-type crooner that goes quite hard, centered around Raf’s aching voice that’s harping on the apocalyptic feeling of deflated love.
Raf says he first met Borgoli at a gauche Hollywood Hills party in the late 2010s. “Immediately, we were drawn to each other,” he recalls of their first encounter. “At our cores, we’re both absurdists.” The two worked on Raf’s music video for “Scales of St. Michael,” an absurdist trip co-starring bodybuilder Frank Yang.
Ahead, we spoke with Raf about his longstanding creative collaboration with Borgli, coming up in late 2010s Hollywood together, and a scrapped finale piece of music in The Drama.
The FADER: How did you meet Kristoffer Borgli and start collaborating?
It’s an Entourage-adjacent story. We were at a party in the hills with all these creative director guys and model girls. I was 23, and Kris was probably 31 or 32. I had a record come out on a major label in 2016 that was alternative/R&B bedroom pop. Kris was starting to do commercials and made a short called WHATEVEREST in Norway and had just moved to Los Angeles a few years before. Neither of us really deserved to be [at this Hollywood afterparty] yet. We were just desperate to make stuff.
He [goes up to me like], "Oh, you're Jordan Raf." I made a music video called "What You Want" in 2016 on a sand key in the Bahamas where I’m fake-catching a giant fish with my hands. It was bizarre. Kris saw that and said he liked my music. I was at a point where I just really wanted to be famous, but coming out of my early 20s, I wanted to meet artists who had more mature taste. Kris was one of the first people I met who was older and more sophisticated.
We made a music video in my hometown of San Diego for Scales of St. Michael." To this day, it's my favorite thing I've ever made. We had this Taiwanese bodybuilder Frank Yang in my childhood home, which was very weird, but awesome. Then we went to Sundance in 2019 for his short film Cult Member.
As a teenager, I wanted to be an actor as much as a musician. Kris picked up that I had an acting sensibility. One of the first real steps into becoming an actor again was when Kris asked me to be in Cult Member. That set a whole new trajectory for us. We were random L.A. people who didn’t belong to any tribe. I never felt much kinship with other musicians or directors in L.A. Meeting him has been one of the most consequential moments of my life.
You have small roles in all his films, right?
I had two or three diegetic songs in Sick of Myself. I had a YouTuber cameo in Dream Scenario, and my song "Uncanny Valley" was in there. I’m usually one of the first people to read his features when he’s done with scripts.
Can you describe what working with Kris is like, or who he is as an artist?
He’s just a character. He’s so European in some ways, but then also loves classic old Hollywood stuff, like getting suits tailored and driving a convertible BMW. He contains multitudes. He really does love art and cinema. He has bad taste in restaurants and likes really silly stuff, but he has encyclopedic knowledge of art in all forms.
Your song, “Sky Turns Red,” is used in The Drama. How did you make the song and what themes were you thinking about?
The theme of the movie is a broken relationship and getting to know someone better and the difficulties you can face with that. The song is about this British girl I was dating who I thought was cool and eloquent. But it turns out she was really shallow and mean. In the film, Zendaya did what she did, but at the end of the day she was a good person. But in my real life relationship with this girl, she just kind of sucked.
Filtered photo of Jordan and Kristoffer Borgli.
Photo courtesy of Jordan Raf
What guidance did Kris give you on the song?
The first thing that he wanted to do was …. There's a dance number in the movie, the credit sequence. There's this amazing song that they had in the film, Shira Small’s "I Want to Lay With You." Kris wanted to end the movie on a cover version in the style of Grouper, sad and folky. That was going to hit when the credits rolled. I made a bunch of different versions of that, but every time he tested it, it was too sad and almost like a little bit too cliché.
The following has a spoiler to the plot of The Drama
Last question—you said you feel like the main character of the film is a good person in the end. Do you have more reflections on the central conflict?
To me, it’s an allegory for America and this weird moral absolutism we have right now. The hypocrisy of Alana Haim's character was really interesting to me. I think it’s a great allegory on hypocrisy and how we judge people in this cultural landscape. School shootings are one of the hardest things to grapple with as an American. The fact that we’re so numb to them is horrible. Kris and I are absurdist artists, and that's one of the most absurd things we deal with today. The fact that there isn't more legislation and we just do "thoughts and prayers" is just horrible.
