John Logan writes for actors in big rooms: monsters, emperors, spies, all given long speeches and clear motives. The clarity is his gift and his habit; he rarely trusts a scene to make its point without a line saying so.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in most John Logan scripts there is a room lit by one candle and a character explaining what the story means. In Penny Dreadful (2014) the candle is literal: his Victorian monsters talk to each other for whole scenes, and some of the speeches are fine and some are filling. In Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) the doubling of Picard and his young enemy is rhymed with Data and a simpler android, and the dialogue points it out in case we missed it. In Hugo (2011) the film keeps checking that we have understood why old films matter, after the pictures have already told us. He began as a playwright, and he still writes like one.
He wrote for the Chicago stage first, Never the Sinner (1985) among the plays, and turned to screenplays in the late 1990s with Any Given Sunday (1999). Gladiator (2000) made his name and it holds up, stirring and bloody, with someone worth caring about under the armour, though its political exchanges have an obvious good side and bad side. After that the big directors kept asking. The Aviator (2004) and Hugo for Martin Scorsese, Sweeney Todd (2007) for Tim Burton, Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015) for Sam Mendes. In 2014 he created Penny Dreadful, followed it with City of Angels (2020), and directed a film of his own, They/Them (2022).
What he does well is give actors something to play. Daniel Craig and Judi Dench in Skyfall have a relationship with proper weight, and the film is absorbing because of it. Eva Green's Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful is written seriously enough that the pulp around her stops feeling like pulp, and Russell Crowe's Maximus carries a grief the film keeps returning to. Logan is drawn to dark, heightened people in heightened worlds. He has called himself "a total monster geek", and Penny Dreadful is that enthusiasm done with care.
What he does less well is stop. Skyfall explains Bond's past when Craig and Dench have already done it with a look. Rango (2011) winks at Chinatown and High Noon until winking is the main activity, and we were bored, then annoyed at being bored in a film that handsome. Spectre, with four credited writers, spends two hours putting old parts back together. Then comes Michael (2026), where for once Logan says too little. The script is a straightforward rise that stops before the difficult years, and along the way there are scenes of Michael Jackson being kind to children, offered as evidence of a good heart. We watched those with a knot in our stomach. The man who wrote The Aviator, and let Howard Hughes fall apart in the same scene that admired him, wrote this without one line admitting a difficulty.
He has said he insists on doing new things. The new thing we would like is a pause. Craig and Dench have already shown him it works.
Biography
John Logan is an American playwright, screenwriter and producer. Born on 24 September 1961 in San Diego, California, he is credited as writer on the 2026 film Michael and as co-writer of the screenplay for Skyfall (2012).
His other film writing credits include Gladiator (2000), The Last Samurai (2003), The Aviator (2004), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Hugo (2011), Spectre (2015) and Alien: Covenant (2017). He created the television series Penny Dreadful (2014).
Logan has received three Academy Award nominations for screenwriting. He has also won a Tony Award and a Golden Globe Award.
