Sam Rockwell

By: Interview by Gideon Yago | Photographed by Nino Munoz | December 09, 2009 |

You could be excused for thinking you were watching two different actors. The two men on screen look uncannily similar. They share the same sharp face, the same quick eyes, the same lick of brown hair. Walking down the street, they could pass for identical twins. But the difference in their character is off-putting. One seems cut from sheet metal: disciplined, heroic, a leading man. The other is the ghost of every dude you know who took it too far: hairy, covered in blood and puke, paranoid and possibly bonkers. You watch them circle each other in the bay of their space station, arguing about which one of them is really real, and you have to remind yourself, “Oh right, that guy playing those guys is actually the same guy.” The embodiment of opposite extremes is so pitch perfect that as sleight-of-hand acting goes, it’s disarming.

“The reason to do Moon was that I got to do all that stuff,” says Sam Rockwell on a gray November morning, explaining his leading roles in 2009’s most mind-bending sci-fi film, over a breakfast of coffee and eggs in New York’s East Village. “That to me is always the real opportunity with independent film. But it could have gone horribly wrong. I get a lot of independent films, and I’m happy and I’m lucky to get that but you just never know how it’s going to turn out.”

In downtown-guy camouflage of chunky black glasses and a flannel, Sam Rockwell, at 40, looks younger, healthier and significantly less beat up (sorry Sam) than he normally appears on screen. In part, this is because Rockwell has a reputation for playing, as The New York Times once wrote, “A one-man gallery of rogues, crooks and oddballs”. His film roles are usually brushed with a patina of crazy desperation. He was the twisted child-murderer Wild Bill Wharton in Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile, the possibly schizo Gong Show host Chuck Barris in George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the unnerving gun for hire Charley Ford in Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James and the emotionally exposed, hostile husband Glenn in David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels.

Despite big-budget franchise roles in Charlie’s Angels, and Iron Man 2, “The Bourne Identities aren’t getting thrown at my footstep,” says Rockwell with a smile. Roger Ebert wrote last year that Rockwell’s role as the sex addict Victor Mancini in Choke permanently cemented his status as “The latter-day version of Christopher Walken — not all the time, but when you need him, he’s your go-to guy for weirdness.”

But what The Right Stuff-inspired half of Rockwell’s performance in Moon counterpoints, even to fans of Rockwell’s misfits and miscreants, are his chops to play a conventional leading man. Just when you think you’ve got his number, Rockwell evolves into something else unexpectedly. Perhaps in an era of Twilights and Saws, Rockwell’s kind of leading man is a throwback to those of a bygone era.

“A lot of my references are movies from the ’70s, and I always use that as a base and a standard of what I think good filmmaking is,” says Rockwell. “Those guys: Nicholson, DeNiro, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight in Coming Home and The Champ. Just like how those guys have pieces of Brando or Cagney in their arms or the back of their neck, (Rockwell makes a Frankenstein impression over himself with his hands), I try to have piece of Bruce Dern here, DeNiro here.”

The danger comes in sharing screen time with your acting source code. This holiday season, Rockwell plays alongside Kate Beckinsale and Drew Barrymore as three of Robert DeNiro’s children in Kirk Jones’ Everything’s Fine. There were times when the temptation to mirror back to DeNiro was automatic.

“I was working with him, and I think for two seconds I was doing him,” says Rockwell. “I didn’t know I was doing it until after, and he definitely didn’t know. It wasn’t like an impression, but it was. There’s this moment in Mean Streets where Harvey Keitel is asking DeNiro’s character about money, and he doesn’t want to get embarrassed in front of two girls so all he says is, ‘What? What?’ In Everything’s Fine, there’s this scene where Bob’s asking me about my brother. And I just kept doing that ‘What? What?’ I didn’t realize until later that performance felt really familiar, and then I realized, oh yeah, that’s Mean Streets. I was just doing Mean Streets to Robert DeNiro.”

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