What The 22 Jump Street Cast Is Up To Today

Movie reboots of old TV shows typically stink, and sequels to surprise box office hits usually produce diminshing returns. Thanks to the combined skills of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — and their screenwriters Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman — their 2014 comedy “22 Jump Street” managed to defy any and all expectations. Not only is it a sequel, it’s a sequel to “21 Jump Street,” which was released in 2012 and based on the popular 1980s sitcom (which introduced the world to a young Johnny Depp, who shows up in that movie in a weird little cameo). Despite all of the factors working against it, “22 Jump Street” is genuinely incredible and might even be funnier than its predecessor — so who’s in it, and what have they been up to since?

With “21 Jump Street” stars Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill — as well as supporting players Nick Offerman and Ice Cube — returning for the sequel, “22 Jump Street” sets the narrative in college (instead of high school like the first time) and brings some new characters into the mix. Here’s who played who in “22 Jump Street” and what they’ve been doing since it released.

In “21 Jump Street,” Channing Tatum’s cop Jenko experiences a total role reversal when he ends up fitting in with the “nerds” instead of the “cool kids” as he and his best friend, fellow officer Schmidt (Jonah Hill) go undercover as high school students — and in the sequel, the equilibrium is restored when Jenko joins the football team as an undercover freshman at the very fictional MC State University. He befriends fellow player Zook (Wyatt Russell) and basically abandons his best friend Schmidt, but when he uncovers something vital about their assigned mission — which is to find the supplier of a drug called “WHY-PHY” (which stands for “Work Hard? Yes, Play Hard? Yes” and is pronounced like “WiFi”), he teams up with Schmidt again to take down the whole operation.

Tatum was already a big deal in 2014 — his semi-autobiographical hit “Magic Mike,” which paired him with director Steven Soderbergh, came out two years prior — and he rose to Hollywood’s A-list with projects like another sequel, “Magic Mike XXL,” the searing drama “Foxcatcher,” and the Coen Brothers comedy “Hail, Caesar!” These days, Tatum often produces his films — including “Dog” and his 2024 release “Spaceman” — and also recently starred in “Blink Twice,” directed by his real-life girlfriend Zoë Kravitz, as well as the sequel “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” (which brought Soderbergh back to the franchise). Plus, let’s never forget that, thanks to the success of “22 Jump Street,” we all learned that Tatum is just as delightful as he seems, according to an email discovered in the 2014 Sony leak.

As the “nerd” to Jenko’s “jock,” Jonah Hill’s Schmidt also experiences a giant role reversal in “22 Jump Street” after being pretty cool as a high schooler (hell, he even managed to romance a young Brie Larson, inappropriate as that whole situation is if you think about it). When Jenko and Schmidt split up to try and find the “WHY-PHY” supplier and Jenko earns a spot on the football team, Schmidt falls in with an artsier crowd after a disastrous turn at a slam-poetry night and meets Maya (Amber Stevens West), a gorgeous art student. They sleep together but Maya is adamant that they’re not in a relationship, hurting Schmidt just as he and Jenko experience a huge rift in their friendship. (Obviously, the movie finds the funniest possible angle on this: Schmidt on a “walk of shame” alongside a bunch of other girls on campus, telling them that all he wants to do is get back into bed and watch “Friends.”) As Schmidt and Jenko both realize later, though, the supplier has been right under Schmidt’s nose the whole time.

Hill, who earned his first Oscar nomination in 2011 for “Moneyball” and his second for 2013’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” ultimately reunited with Tatum in “Hail, Caesar!” as well as “The Lego Movie” and “The Lego Batman Movie” and also appeared in prestige projects like “Richard Jewell” and “Don’t Look Up.” In 2018, Hill also made his directorial debut with the film “Mid90s” and also directed the 2022 documentary “Stutz,” so it’s safe to say he’s stayed plenty busy since playing Schmidt.

Ice Cube does the exact same thing in both “Jump Street” movies, and that’s fine, because he’s very funny. As Jenko and Schmidt’s superior Captain Dickson, Ice Cube is perpetually perturbed and enraged by the two, but in “22 Jump Street,” he at least gets to make a lot of jokes about how they’re doing the same thing they did last time (meaning in “21 Jump Street”) but that everything is bigger and more expensive this time. (Dickson’s office gets conspicuously cooler looking in the sequel, for one thing.) This sequel does throw in a fun twist, though: that girl Maya that Schmidt started sleeping with happens to be Dickson’s daughter, which sends Dickson into a blind rage — leading to an especially funny sequence during the college’s parents weekend (that also brings Queen Latifah into the mix as Mrs. Dickson).

Most people know that Ice Cube first rose to promience as a rapper with the group N.W.A. — there’s a joke in the movie about how Mrs. Dickson is “straight outta Compton” in case you forgot — but ever since he started acting in 1991 thanks to John Singleton’s “Boyz n the Hood,” he’s also been a big-screen staple. After “22 Jump Street,” Ice Cube produced the N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton,” appeared in the sequel to “Ride Along” (the first film came out in 2014 alongside “22 Jump Street”),  and even lent his voice to the animated hit “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.” Watching him verbally abuse Jonah Hill, though, is a pretty singular pleasure.

Nick Offerman is, truthfully, barely in the “Jump Street” movies, but he’s a welcome presence every time he shows up. In both films, he appears as Deputy Chief Hardy, who clearly thinks both Schmidt and Jenko are irredeemable morons and gives them their basic mission before they report to Ice Cube’s Captain Dickson. In “22 Jump Street,” a seemingly exhausted Hardy tells the two lovable bozos that all they need to do is the exact same thing they did last time: go undercover and find the supplier.

Offerman was still a series regular on “Parks and Recreation” during his appearance in both of the “Jump Street” movies; the series ended in 2015, giving his irascible yet big-hearted character Ron Swanson the perfect ending (as a caretaker of a beautiful, peaceful National Park). In the years since playing Ron Swanson, Offerman has been working more or less constantly. On the big screen, you can see him in movies like “The Little Hours,” “Bad Times at the El Royale,” and “Dumb Money,” and he’s continued working extensively on television on shows like “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” as himself on “The Good Place,” and in the second season of Noah Hawley’s anthology series “Fargo.” In 2023, Offerman finally won his first Emmy for outstanding guest actor in a drama series for his stunning, heartbreaking, single-episode turn on “The Last of Us” in the standout episode “Long, Long Time.”

Jenko and Schmidt spend the bulk of “22 Jump Street” hunting the mysterious drug dealer known only as “The Ghost,” but Peter Stormare’s character doesn’t actually show up until the movie is well underway (because, naturally, he has an accomplice working at MC State University). There’s not a whole lot to say about The Ghost, to be honest. He’s a snarling caricature of a villain, and Stormare doesn’t need to do a whole lot, but he’s clearly having a ton of fun being in such a ridiculous movie. That said, Stormare is a legendary Hollywood character actor, and you’ve definitely seen him in other projects.

Stormare, who was born in Sweden, started acting in the 1970s in his home country before making the leap to American movies with 1996’s Oscar-winning classic “Fargo” and the 1998 cult comedy “The Big Lebowski.” In 2017, Stormare appeared as the villainous Abram Tarasov, and he’s also shown up in TV shows like the “Yellowstone” spin-off “1923,” the procedural series “Tracker,” and the recent adaptation of “American Gods.”

Wyatt Russell is what some people might refer to as a “nepo baby” — his dad is Kurt Russell, his mom is Goldie Hawn, and his step-siblings are Kate and Oliver Hudson — but it’s a bit shortsighted to reduce him to his family when you consider that he’s very funny. Russell is perfectly cast as the affable, dim-witted football star Zook Haythe, who immediately bonds with Jenko (and is sort of confused by Schmidt’s whole deal, which is, admittedly, weird and off-putting at times). When Jenko and Schmidt get information that the dealer has a conspicuous tattoo — and they spot it on Zook’s bicep — he’s briefly a suspect, but they later learn that he’s just buying WHY-PHY, not supplying it; ultimately, Zook’s biggest role in the movie is to drive a wedge between Jenko and Schmidt as he gets closer to the former (although Jenko learns, over time, that he’s a little bored hanging out with a guy who’s exactly like him).

Besides “22 Jump Street,” you’ve probably seen Russell show up in projects like a (particularly scary) Season 3 episode of “Black Mirror,” on the AMC+ original series “Lodge 49,” in the dark social media satire “Ingrid Goes West,” and alongside Glen Powell in Richard Linklater’s comedy “Everybody Wants Some!!!” Russell also pretty famously played John Walker, the “new” Captain America in the Marvel TV series “Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” and in 2022, he appeared with Andrew Garfield in the true crime miniseries “Under the Banner of Heaven.”

As delightful as Amber Stevens West’s character Maya Dickson is whenever she’s on-screen, it’s also fair to say that the character is little more than a plot device meant to occupy Schmidt. After watching him freestyle about her dead roommate at a slam poetry night — her roommate who died after overdosing on WHY-PHY — Maya inexplicably takes Schmidt back to her dorm, and the fact that she turns out to be Captain Dickson’s daughter just creates a giant rift between the captain and Schmidt (though it’s admittedly very funny). So what has West been doing since she appeared in “22 Jump Street?”

From 2014 to 2019, West played the recurring role of Joy Struthers on “Criminal Minds” — she showed up regularly in Season 10 and returned as a guest star in subsequent seasons — and after playing Maya, she also joined the main cast of short-lived shows like “The Carmichael Show,” “Ghosts,” and “Happy Together.” In 2023, she also appeared in a single episode of Paramount+’s “Frasier” reboot.

There are a lot of very funny people in “22 Jump Street,” which makes it all the more remarkable that Jillian Bell basically runs away with the movie. After Maya and Schmidt spend the night together, Schmidt is greeted with a jumpscare in the form of Bell’s character Mercedes, who makes sure to say that she was present for their entire encounter and immediately clocks the fact that Schmidt looks way too old to be a college freshman. (She fires off a ton of great zingers during this scene, but the standout might be when she looks directly at Schmidt and deadpans, “Tell me about the war. Any war.”) When it’s revealed that Mercedes is The Ghost’s daughter and is the one supplying the campus, Bell unlocks a more sinister side of the character, but she’s still unbelievably funny; a scene where she and Schmidt fistfight in a Mexican motel room while she keeps wondering if they’re going to “kiss” is another one of the movie’s best highlights.

Bell was probably best known for her supporting role on “Workaholics” when she played Mercedes, and she’s continued working steadily ever since “22 Jump Street.” On the small screen, Bell has popped up in everything from “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Eastbound & Down,” “Portlandia,” and “Bob’s Burgers,” and it’s safe to say “22 Jump Street” helped kickstart her movie career. After her turn as Mercedes, Bell appeared in “Office Christmas Party,” “Rough Night,” and long-awaited sequels like “Bill & Ted Face the Music” and “Good Burger 2” — and she led the unexpectedly big-hearted comedy “Brittany Runs a Marathon.”

The real-life Lucas twins — Kenny and Keith — only appear briefly in “22 Jump Street” as Jenko and Schmidt’s hallmates Keith and Kenny Yang, but they’re also the guys who feed the two cops baked goods infused with WHY-PHY without telling them. They also have a pretty great bit where they finish each other’s sentences and say the same thing at the same time (a test Jenko and Schmidt, undercover as brothers but not actually related, absolutely fail to pass).

The Lucas twins typically perform together, and aside from “22 Jump Street,” you can see them on shows like “Crashing” and movies like “Babes” — but their biggest recent accomplishment? They co-wrote and co-produced Shaka King’s extraordinary 2021 movie “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which earned the duo a screenwriting nod at the Oscars and won a trophy for star Daniel Kaluuya. (The film was also nominated for best picture but ultimately lost to “Nomadland.”) If nothing else, besides Jonah Hill, the Lucas twins are the only Oscar nominees on this list (though maybe Channing Tatum or Nick Offerman could hit that milestone at some point).