On a watery Monday in Stoke, Jonathan Gullis is having his photograph taken beside a canal. The photographer, flown in from Brooklyn at ruinous expense, keeps asking him to “lean into the melancholy of post-industrial decline.” Gullis, who thinks leaning is woke, grudgingly obliges by staring at a discarded Greggs wrapper as though it is the last letter from a dying empire. The resulting image runs on the cover of this magazine under the caption “The Seagull’s Lament.”
I search his vexed face for clues, but at thirty-five, Gullis wears the perpetual expression of a man who has just been cut up by a Honda Accord. He never smiles. He reminds me of the depression-era hobo clown Weary Willie. He gurns, he grimaces, he looks permanently defeated. Emmett Kelly performed the character for decades, but offstage he struggled with alcoholism and the collapse of his marriages. You get the sense that offstage, Jonathan Gullis struggles with being Jonathan Gullis.
