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"FacebookPinterest\n\nSo I find it ironic that I'm doing an interview with you about Man of the Year when I feel\u2014literally\u2014like a bunch of people just took a shit on my face.\n\nJustin Timberlake has had better Mondays. We're sitting in the FedEorum in Memphis, his hometown, five rows back from where his NBA team, the Memphis Grizzlies (he's a minority owner), plays ball. There are 18,119 seats in this arena, and 18,117 of them are empty. Today, this is how he wants it. After sailing through the first nine months of the year like some kind of celebrity superhero\u2014a one-man juggernaut of singing and dancing and hosting and viral-video-ing\u2014Timberlake has taken some punches in the past few days.\n\nDouble whammy, he says, referring to critics' excoriation of both Runner Runner, a thriller he made with Ben Affleck that has just had a disastrous opening weekend ($8 million, and that's rounding up), and The 20/20 Experience: 2 of 2, his second number one album of the year. Specifically, Variety has just run an op-ed titled Why Justin Timberlake Should Stop Acting. (Oof.) And Billboard has, in Timberlake's words, said, Tell him to leave his second half at home. Where did all this vitriol come from? It's mean. And I'm not cut out for it.\n\nSlouched down in jeans and a T-shirt, the guy sitting next to me looks nothing like the suave showman from the Suit Tie video. He's fidgety. He keeps tugging at the stubble on his chin.\n\nDON'T MISS THIS\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nThis face, he says, circling it with one finger. This recognizable face that you work so hard to get\u2014not because you want the recognition but because you know you're made to do it. This face, he's saying, comes at a cost. The movie didn't do well at the box office, so I should quit? Hold on a second. If I was somebody else, you wouldn't have said that. I have the number one album this week, and I shouldn't have released it? Come on, man. You sound like a dickhead.... It just shocked me because, like, you're trade magazines. None of your opinions count. And by the way, none of you can do it.\n\nWhen we first sat down, Timberlake seemed vulnerable. Confused, even. Now he's just pissed. He starts talking about Memphis, the place that he says defines him: It's a struggling city with a defeatist attitude. I'm from this town, and I grew up with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, so sometimes I find it funny that I've been able to acquire the patience it takes to be kind to people in our business. Because sometimes I just want to fucking kill everybody.\n\nBut just as the 32-year-old Justin Timberlake seems bent on morphing into the 1999 version of Marshall Mathers, he takes a deep breath, and I swear it's like the stale air around us just got a few degrees cooler. His anger was a splinter under the skin. Now that it's out, he already feels better.\n\nI don't see myself as someone who's ever going to be defined by one moment, he says. It's on to the next. He's sitting up taller, and his blue eyes have a glint that wasn't there before. Timberlake's skills on the golf course and basketball court are well-known, and now he seems to be summoning the elite athlete's ability to shake off a run of bad play as if it never happened.\n\nWhich is right around the time that all the spotlights in the arena click on and start to swirl, moving in curlicues as if searching for their starting point guard. Is this normal? Timberlake calls out to a couple of workmen nearby. Naw, one of them calls back. They just know you're here.\n\n\n\nHere is just a partial list of highlights from Timberlake's big 2013:\n\n Played a comeback concert on the eve of the Super Bowl with Jay Z.\n Staged Timberweek with Jimmy Fallon\u2014a five-night run of appearances on Late Night, most of them hilarious, some flat-out brilliant.\n Released his first album in seven years and toured the world to support it.\n Performed at the White House, coaxing the president and first lady into joining him on vocals for a few lines of Otis Redding's (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay.\n Hosted Saturday Night Live for the fifth time\u2014and got an Emmy nomination for it. (I'm sore, he tells me, arching his back and grinning. Really sore. You have to be really flexible to get it done five times.)\n Reunited with the other members of 'N Sync at the Video Music Awards.\n Released that second album.\n Starred in Runner Runner (a decision, by the way, that he doesn't regret).\n\nAnd while the drubbing of those last two is what caused his freak-out, he can take comfort in the fact that his next film is unlikely to make anyone take a shit on anyone else's face: He's in the new Coen brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, out this month. That and all of the above on top of a career that, don't forget, has been going for more than two decades. I've been doing this professionally since I was 10, he says. If entertainment years were dog years, man, I'd be like Gandhi. I'd be like 250 years old.\n\nHis role in Inside Llewyn Davis\u2014a kind of cartoonish folksinger\u2014is small but quirkily funny. Ethan and Joel Coen told me they cast Timberlake because they admired his previous performances\u2014his turn as Napster co-founder Sean Parker in The Social Network is startlingly good\u2014as well as his sketch work. We really liked Dick in a Box, basically, is what it was, Ethan half joked.\n\nYou do a Coens movie, Timberlake says, and secretly you're like, All I want to do is make people laugh in this movie. If I can make people laugh in this movie, then I don't care. Whatever else happens, happens. At the Cannes Film Festival, he says, people were laughing out loud, and it was like that first drink of warm tea\u2014or that first cold drink of beer, or that first hit off a joint. You're just like, Yeah, everything's going to be all right.\n\nMusicality may still account for the bulk of Timberlake Inc., but it's the making people laugh part of his career that has endeared him to so many who fall outside his natural fan base. And a huge part of that is his friendship with Jimmy Fallon.\n\nFallon and Timberlake met back in 2003, the first time the latter appeared on Saturday Night Live. Since then, they've become a sort of YouTube Abbott Costello, coming together regularly to make skits that comment on everything from hip-hop to self-indulgent Twitter culture. (Go watch #hashtag, in which neither man can deliver a full sentence without adding a #coda, and you'll feel a wave of #shame.) But the satire has a sweetness mid in. This year, in a bit that aired during Timberweek, they both dressed up as Michael McDonald and sang Row, Row, Row Your Boat as a round\u2014with Michael McDonald himself.\n\nMichael McDonald is one of the greatest singers of all time, Timberlake says, describing how for years he'd wanted to honor him in a skit called Michael McDonald's McDonald's, about a singer who at the end of his career figured, Why can't people have good food for an affordable price? and came up with a chain of restaurants where they could: McDonald's. But the skit never quite worked. Instead, this past March, Fallon, Timberlake, and McDonald\u2014all with flowing white hair and beards\u2014sang the children's classic together. Timberlake looks wistful at the memory. Those are the moments you hold on to, he says.\n\nI've turned in my seat to look at him, and I can tell he's reflecting on the thirty-minute tirade that began our conversation. First he apologizes. I'm sorry, he says, that we got off on a whole tangent. But that's not enough. He also wants to explain the genesis of his rant. Listen, I'm not cool, he says. Now it's my turn to look confused. Being cool, he says, is about keeping your blood pressure steady. So no. Don't be cool. Be passionate. Be dedicated. Be tenacious. Be uncompromising. Be pissed. Be happy. Be sad. He pauses. It's important to take risks, he says. To do sketch comedy when you're supposed to be staying in your lane as a singer. To do movies when all people want is your next album. I've made a career out of doing things that I should not be doing. I wasn't cool about it, he says. Because being cool would have meant I passed up on those opportunities. If you do that, it's because you're afraid. And what are you afraid of? You know?\n\nYou've got to give it to the guy: Fear, if he ever feels it, doesn't seem to sway him. Maybe that's one of the payoffs of surviving child stardom. Before 'N Sync, before even The Mickey Mouse Club, he was beating back the jitters by simply working harder. It began, or was at least fostered, on the basketball court. I grew up an athlete, he says. I believe in routine. (Ben Affleck told me that on the set of Runner Runner, we were shooting this scene where I was supposed to be playing basketball, and Justin came down wearing a suit, and between takes, I look over and this guy's knocking down shots from half-court! Just, like, wearing his dress shoes and raining fucking threes!)\n\nDiscipline is the key ingredient. The night before a performance, Timberlake gets lots of sleep. (It's a huge part of whether I can hit my range.) The day of, he tries to keep talking to a minimum. Then, two hours before the show, the real work begins. There is stretching involved. And meditation. He spends some time on an inversion table and, in the final minutes before showtime, begins to move, dancing to get his heart rate up. I want my circulatory system on every level to be firing, right when I walk on that stage, he tells me. I want to feel the blood all the way to my fingertips. I want to feel hot.\n\nBut there's one pre-game ritual that sets him apart from the Memphis Grizzlies players he has been known to shoot around with: Seconds before he steps onstage, he takes a shot of tequila. He loves it when I ask what brand. I know he loves it, because his eyebrows jump up, like I've just thrown him the softest of softballs and he can't wait to crush it.\n\nThat seems funny, he says, smiling big, all that anger a far-off memory. Which is about the time that I remember that Justin Timberlake has his own brand of tequila. He directed a TV ad for it this year, which ends with a voice-over he did himself: Uncommonly smooth.\n\nWell, most of the time.\n\nAMY WALLACE (@msamywallace) is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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