Sam Rockwell

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

Mean Streets was released the same year a 5-year-old Sam Rockwell was told that his parents would be getting a divorce. Rockwell stayed in California with his father, settling in San Francisco, while his mother lived in New York and pursued acting. The Rockwell family was in the drama business. Both parents acted. As a baby, Rockwell was brought to his parents’ performances at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. As a boy, he followed his father on a tour of The Great White Hope. One of Rockwell’s first experiences on stage was in the East Village, the same neighborhood he lives in now, where his mother brought him on stage at age 10 to play Humphrey Bogart in an improv sketch. From a young age, he was treated as part of the company.

“I was backstage in a very Bob Fosse way with naked women and East Village types, so I was exposed to all that stuff at a young age,” says Rockwell. “I learned a lot about acting and actors from my mom.”

Eventually, Rockwell enrolled in and dropped out of the San Francisco School of the Arts. He finished high school through an alternate program called Urban Pioneers and then moved to New York at 18, enrolling in the William Esper Studios and studying the Meisner Technique in earnest. Meisner stresses the need for realism and honesty of a performance down to the subtlest physical cues.

“I think it’s because I’m a city kid at heart,” says Rockwell. “I grew up in San Francisco, and if things get a little too safe or a little too Anglo, I start to get nervous. I need a little grit, a little funk.”

That funk led him through a career of theater roles and independent films through the 1990s that established him as the kind of chameleon character actor who was capable of delivering memorable performances in even the smallest roles. Within the acting community, he also established himself as a heavy, the kind of actor’s actor who drew people to projects. Clark Gregg, the actor and first-time director behind Choke told Back Stage East in 2008, “I don’t know if Anjelica (Houston, who plays Rockwell’s mother) would have taken the script seriously without Sam. A lot of actors are big Sam Rockwell fans, and she was one of them. I think she agreed to meet with me based on that, and we hit it off.”

“It’s the most incredible compliment an actor can get. It makes my heart soar like a hawk,” says Rockwell. “My etiquette is that I have to do the same thing off-camera that I do on camera because it effects the other actor’s performance. It’s all about doing the best work you can do, and that’s making everyone look good. I think a heavyweight actor knows that there are many colors they are painting on this canvas, and when you go back and forth like I do from leading roles to supporting roles, you develop a lot of compassion for the leading and the supporting actor because I’ve been both.”

In Moon Rockwell was almost the entire cast, sharing most of his screen time with a friendly robot named GERTY (ed. - unclear if the allusion to E.T. and Rockwell friend Drew Barrymore was intentional). It is one of the most impressive anchorings of a feature film since Daniel Day-Lewis whipped out the mustache wax and carried a riveted audience through two and a half hours of There Will Be Blood. But Moon is a much lonelier, less populated place. Most of the time, the audience is just watching Rockwell fend off space madness and the existential dread of waking up each morning to Chesney Hawke’s ’80s cheesy ballad “I Am The One and Only.” That is, when Rockwell isn’t on screen kicking his own ass all over a space station.

“The role was one of the most amazing gifts you can give an actor,” says Rockwell. “It’s also some form of weird narcissist experiment. There is literally a scene where the two clones are fighting and where we shot it for two days, and I just had to go back and forth. That’s what’s great in playing both parts because in a sense it’s almost a directorial approach because if (Moon writer-director) Duncan (Jones) was on board, I could play that thing out the way I wanted. I could punk the guy, and I could be the guy who is being punked.”

Rockwell says he was both pleased and happily surprised when he finally saw Moon on screen, since past experiences with some indies have left him wary. “It can be hard with a first-time director, a real crapshoot,” says Rockwell of Jones. “He was eager to know my vocabulary, and I was eager to know his. I’ve gravitated toward first-time writer-actors in my career, like Clark Gregg on Choke and George Clooney, which was a huge break for me. I liken it to how Freddy Roach is a better boxing trainer for Manny Pacquiao because he used to be a boxer. I think a trainer who is not a fighter knows less about what it is to be in the ring, and they don’t know what’s going on in your head. It’s just another vocabulary. With somebody who is not an actor, sometimes you have to teach them that vocabulary, and they’re not interested. But Duncan, I think he just really went for it.”

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