Don Johnson thinks of himself as a bag. Not an old bag, even at 74, but a bag nonetheless. He’s explaining his approach to acting, in which he empties himself out of the container that is his body and stuffs the character in. There’s separation but always at least some overlap.
Perhaps that’s why, in the late 1980s, it was hard to distinguish Johnson from his Miami Vice alter ego, Sonny Crockett, a gruff, perennially stubbled police detective who lived on a sailboat with a pet alligator, wore Italian suits over pastel T-shirts, drove a Ferrari and chased bad guys around the Gulf Stream in a Kevlar-reinforced 38-foot Wellcraft Scarab.
Johnson shared the character’s flowing locks, his sockless, casual-cool vibes and his adventurous lifestyle, racing powerboats offshore, counting sunsets with Jimmy Buffet and falling in and out of love with a string of models and actresses.
They were men’s men in a time when that implied a swaggering, take-life-by-the-throat bravado that few were questioning. Except maybe Johnson. “I saw Sonny Crockett as the undoing of the American male,” he says on a video call from his home office, dressed in a white “LA” ball cap and a grey hoodie. “The law-and-order part of Sonny’s job was overwhelming, impossible to keep up with, and it’s kind of debilitating when you can’t make a difference. By the end of the fifth year, the character was so dark, and it was affecting my soul.”
This is relevant because in a life and career defined by water and boats, Johnson is back at the helm, playing the role of Robert Massey, the captain of a luxury cruise ship on Doctor Odyssey. The show features a string of guest stars who come aboard for episodic tales. That may sound familiar, but it’s definitely not The Love Boat. “It’s more like The White Lotus on a ship,” Johnson says. “It’s about what happens when people lose control. [Writer/producer] Ryan Murphy is a genius at figuring out what people want to see.”
Johnson’s career journey from the avatar of iconoclastic ’80s cool to an avuncular authority figure in a privileged world—from a speed boat to luxury liner—could serve as a metaphor for the evolution of a certain segment of American culture over the last 40 years. “That tracks,” Johnson says with a laugh, then zeroes in on the possibility of a modern-day Sonny Crockett.
“I think the interesting question in all that is, would there be there a place for that guy in this world?”
That’s a question he might never have asked himself if he hadn’t become an actor and ’80s sex symbol, albeit through an unlikely route.
On the third day of his senior year in high school, Johnson arrived at business class vowing to keep his eyes open. He’d dozed off the first two days, and his teacher—“she had a voice like Thorazine”—threatened ejection.
Johnson needed the class to graduate, but “my butt barely hit the seat, and I was sawing logs,” he says, his familiar smile wrapped by a whitening goatee. He got tossed, and the only other class available was a speech and drama section. “And I couldn’t just sign up,” he says. “I had to audition.”
That didn’t sit quite right. Johnson had grown up bouncing between Kansas and Missouri, which resulted in a “thick hillbilly accent,” a devotion to sports, and time in the outdoors “with my dad and my uncles and my grandfather hunting and fishing,” he says.
Acting didn’t resonate among those social circles. But lacking options, he showed up at the audition, and the teacher, Dr. Sharon Pyle, not only admitted him to the class, she immediately cast him as Tony in “West Side Story.” Suddenly, he was not just acting, but singing and dancing, too.
“She saw something in me I didn’t even see in myself,” he says. “She started throwing all this wild stuff at me—Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Sartre, Tennessee Williams, and others. Not the rest of the class, just me and this one girl.” She also gave him daily diction worksheets that unbent his accent.
Johnson began reimagining his future. He found his way into the Summer Reparatory program at the University of Kansas, which led to a scholarship to attend the school’s drama program. Two years later, he set out for California.
What followed was a decade-and-a-half of small theater productions and bit parts in movies and TV shows, until, in 1984, he landed Miami Vice. The show grew so big so fast that Johnson soon needed round-the-clock security. “When we were on location, it was not uncommon for us to walk out of our trailers and find police tape holding back a crowd of 10,000 people,” he says. “I couldn’t really go out or do anything.”
He escaped by water.
“I did all the boat work on the show, right from the start,” he says. “I even did the stunts, but not the crashes, because only the bad guys crashed.” He smiles. “I just had a feel for it. Any time I get on a boat on the water, it’s like, Oh, I got this.”
The show maintained several versions of its signature Scarab and “the producers made the horrible mistake of giving me one of those boats to use on my own,” he says. “I spent a lot of my time offscreen doing that.”
The craft’s 330 horsepower MerCruiser sterndrives pushed it to 70 mph, a taste of speed that left Johnson searching for more. In 1986, he drove a brand-new 43-foot Scarab in an 1,100-mile race up the Mississippi river that he won. He later worked with Wellcraft to design a “Don Johnson signature edition” of that boat.
By 1988, he turned his attention to offshore racing, taking the wheel on a 46-foot Scarab with three turbocharged engines and surface-piercing drives. After an up-and-down season, Johnson’s boat finished strong to take the APBA World Championship in the superboat category and he was named Top Driver.
Johnson’s presence brought previously unknown attention to the sport, bolstered by other celebrity racers Chuck Norris, Kurt Russell, Walter Payton, Stefano Casiraghi (deceased husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco), with an array of TV cameras following.
At the end of the season, he teamed with Revenge boats and designed and oversaw the production of a 50-foot catamaran called Team USA. “It had four big-block Chevy truck engines bored and stroked into race engines that produced 1,100 foot-pounds of torque each, which is insane.”
The boat had four eight-inch exhausts above the waterline and was so loud that, he says, “the first time I turned it over, it broke every window in the shops along the water in Key West.” Its first speed test flirted with 150 mph. “We hit 149-point something on the open ocean,” he says. “At that point it’s basically an aircraft. You’re just touching down from time to time and holding on for dear life.”
With Johnson flying back and forth between shooting locations and race sites, Team USA performed well but Johnson failed to repeat as champ, even as he burnished his rep as fearless and aggressive. “I was fearless because I was good,” Johnson says. “Boat racing required serendipity and amnesia, because you had to block everything out and focus on the task at hand and hope nothing went wrong.”
Nothing did, but as the ’80s ended, so did the world in which Sonny Crockett and, to some extent, Don Johnson held a central role. Miami Vice was cancelled in 1991. Johnson stopped racing that year, too.
Johnson’s relationship with the water survived though. “I became good friends with Jimmy Buffett,” he says. “And one of the reasons was that I liked the water and Jimmy liked the water. We loved to be on it fishing, loved to be on it floating, even loved to be on it just sitting.”
By the late 1990s, Nash Bridges, another hit show, came along as did his fifth marriage, which is 25 years strong. In all, he has five kids, three sons and two daughters, ranging in age from college freshman to early 40s.
He brings up his boys while returning to the question of a latter-day Crockett. “There’s a place for that guy—but modified,” he says. “My sons hunt and fish and ride motorcycles, they have the adventure bug, but they’re not wild and crazy like I was. They do it in disciplined ways and they have fun. The big difference is the opportunity for growth and maturity we’ve been offered to accept from women. I have an abiding respect for women. They’ve taught me to be less toxic and more mindful.”
After telling the story of Key West’s broken windows, Johnson leaned toward the screen. “Of course, these things tend to get embellished over time,” he said. “I’m guessing just one window cracked.” He laughs a laugh that suggests it very well could have been none. The anecdote contains the echoes of a very different time and place, but it’s better this way—it’s entertaining but more honest, more real. Modified.
“Doctor Odyssey” debuts Sept. 26 at 9 p.m. on ABC and streams on Hulu.
