HOW DO YOU stay cool in Hollywood? Well, you could always drive your car off a cliff or organise a well-timed fatal overdose. If, however, you want to be around to enjoy your hip status then you should, perhaps, take a glance at Sam Rockwell's career path, writes
DONALD CLARKE
Now 42, with a high, hairy head and a charming beatnik drawl, the actor has chosen his roles cunningly. Modestly sized parts in studio pictures such as The Green Mileand Charlie's Angelshave been interspersed with larger roles in funkier films such as Chokeand Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.He was Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He was the cloned lunar lighthouse keeper in Moon. Slowly, stealthily – without quite becoming a star – Rockwell has matured into one of those actors who lend credibility to a project.
“That’s a nice thing for you to say,” he says, picking the shell from a boiled egg. “To some extent, as an actor, you are just a hired gun. But you are also planning to some degree. The only real power an actor has is to say yes or no. It’s like falling in love. You might fall in love with Roberta. Then somebody will say: ‘Have you met her sister, Doris? She is so pretty. No? Why don’t you like Doris?’ People often don’t understand it and take it very personally when you say no.”
Consider Conviction. Tony Goldwyn's gripping picture could, if staffed with different personnel, have turned into an industry-standard TV movie. Based on a true story, the picture tells how Betty Anne Waters, an ordinary single mom from Massachusetts, trained as a lawyer in order to free her brother, Kenneth Waters, after he was wrongly convicted of murder. Starring Hilary Swank as Betty Anne and Rockwell as Kenneth, Convictionprofits greatly from the integrity of its key performances. It feels like a proper film.
“I did study tapes of Kenneth,” Rockwell muses. (Poignantly, the real Kenneth died in an accident a few months after being released from prison.) “But you don’t want to do an impression when playing a real person. You just want to give the essence of them. Even if you are playing Elvis, you really just want to get an essence. Look at Brendan Gleeson playing Churchill. Wonderful. The idea is to marry that impression with your own performance. That’s where the emotion comes from.”
Speaking of emotion, the Convictionshoot must have been particularly traumatic for Ms Waters. It took nearly 20 years for this dedicated woman to secure her brother's freedom. Then the unfortunate fellow died after falling from a wall.
“Oh yeah. I think it was very, very emotional for her. But she called it therapeutic. It was cathartic. She’s one of those people you can underestimate. She’s very sweet, but she has this unshakeable determination. I worked with Brenda Blethyn once and she’s very like that. Yeah, yeah.”
Another egg is unrobed. Sam slumps and munches. Come to think of it, even if he had appeared in nothing but Alvin and the Chipmunks movies, Rockwell would still radiate Kerouac cool. Dishevelled in bohemian fashion, polite in a way that only Americans can manage, he belongs behind the wheel of a big shabby car on a long, unwavering highway. It comes as little surprise to learn that he grew up in the natural home of the hipster. The child of only modestly successful actors, who divorced when he was five, Rockwell lived his formative years among ageing hippies and budding activists in San Francisco.
“It was a little tough after my parents split,” he says. “But we travelled around a lot. It also was a luxury, because I was exposed to things that a lot of kids weren’t. It was a bohemian life. Somebody like Chris Walken – who was a child actor – had a similar sort of upbringing. It’s a whole different world.”
Many of us naively believe that San Francisco of the mid-1970s was a haven of radical indulgence. Just think of Gus Van Sant’s recent biopic of Harvey Milk. That looks like a fine life for an aspiring artist.
“Oh yeah, it was great. We lived above the Castro and I remember meeting Harvey Milk when I was a little kid. I remember 1976 vividly – an amazing time. San Francisco is not all cable cars and Rice-a-Roni. There are some scary ghettos. But it is a very beautiful place.”
Rockwell spent some time at the San Francisco School of the Arts, but dropped out before graduating. Already committed to the player’s life, he took a few roles in no-budget movies and then made the move to New York. There seem to have been more than a few slack periods, but his quirky good looks and intense charisma gradually began to impress themselves on casting agents.
“Look, I didn’t have any other skills,” he says. “I didn’t have a Plan B if things didn’t work out. I was working in restaurants. That side of it is a young man’s game. I couldn’t do it now at 42. I am too spoiled. If someone asked me to go work in a restaurant now, I’d say: ‘F**k off’. This is all I have. This is all I have to hold on to.”
He says that in a slightly desperate voice. Though no superstar, Rockwell has, surely, secured enough money to last him a lengthy lifetime. He recently turned up as an immoral businessman in Iron Man 2. Later this year, we will see him in the science fiction epic Cowboys & Aliens.Hollywood has decided that Rockwell is the sort of actor it can't do without. Yet one gets the sense that – like so many actors – he fears the edifice that is his career could, at any moment, come crashing about his blameless ears.
“Absolutely. Oh yeah. You never know. You just kind of work away. Occasionally you allow yourself a break, but you do feel the need to work whenever you can. It’s about versatility. Hey, that’s what’s going to carry me through when these good looks vanish. Ha ha ha!”
It's impossible to definitively identify the point at which Rockwell became an immovable part of the Hollywood furniture. He was very funny in 1999's admired science-fiction spoof Galaxy Quest. He secured the lead role in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney's adaptation of game-show host Chuck Barris's unreliable memoirs, but that film (to use a soft-soap euphemism) never quite secured an audience.
He has crept up on us. That could, of course, be a good thing. Those actors who arrive amid sudden jarring explosions of hype often vanish into the ether just as quickly. At any rate, by 2009, he was already sufficiently established for Duncan Jones, film-maker son of David Bowie, to write an entire script – almost a one-hander – with Rockwell in mind. Moon sounded like an unlikely project. Jones’s debut feature, in which the lone occupant of a lunar base appears to go barmy, was made for a tiny budget in Shepperton Studios.
As things worked out, the picture rapidly developed a dedicated following, but it could so easily have been a disaster. An inexperienced director shoots an effects-driven movie for a minute $5 million. What on earth persuaded Rockwell the film would work?
“Nothing I can think of,” he laughs. “It was always a gamble. There was something about Duncan that I trusted. I felt he was very smart. Something told me he could pull it off. Hey, even if he doesn’t then the worst that can happen is that nobody will see the movie. As it happened, a lot of people saw it. A lot of people in the industry saw it. So that worked out. You never know.”
Convictionis a very different class of film. Whereas the defiantly odd Moon played well to cultists, highbrows and high-concept addicts, the new picture wears its thumping-good-story credentials with deserved pride. Yet, in many ways, Rockwell's current role offers just as many challenges as did that performance in Moon. Spending most of his screen time in cells and behind grilles, the actor has, working with fairly scant dialogue, to convey the passing of two lonely decades.
“The make-up was very helpful. But the main trick was to make him buoyant and puckish in the beginning – he’s the life of the party at this point – and then gradually to give the impression that he’s more downtrodden. It’s a slow wearing down. It’s like being at a press junket for a movie. Ha ha ha!”
Oh, don’t complain. At least you get free eggs.
- Convictionis on general release from Friday
