He has starred as Nick Miller in the Fox sitcom New Girl (2011–2018), for which he was nominated for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series in 2014.

Johnson has also starred in Let's Be Cops (2014), and appeared in Paper Heart (2009), Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), 21 Jump Street (2012), Jurassic World (2015), The Mummy (2017), and Tag (2018).

[2][3][4] He was named after his maternal uncle, Mark Johnson, who died at the age of 26 in a motorcycle accident in 1977, a year before Jake was born.

Raised in Wilmette, he graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka and started his post-secondary education at the University of Iowa.

While in Iowa City, he wrote a play, which wound up earning him admission to the Dramatic Writing Department at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, followed by the 2002 John Golden Playwriting Prize and the Sloan Fellowship for Screenwriting.

After moving to Los Angeles, Johnson supported himself as a waiter and a production assistant, also scoring a series of bit feature and guest TV roles.

In 2013, he appeared in the music video for "Rouse Yourself", a song by indie soul band JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound alongside his Safety Not Guaranteed co-star Aubrey Plaza.

[13] In the same year, it was announced that Johnson was cast in the lead role of Ben Hopkins in the Netflix adult animation series Hoops.