Sam Quest

Sam Rockwell is not a bad looking guy. Actually, he's something of a looker. But interviews with him inevitably yield a lament about our looks-fascinated culture.

Whether he's wishing that Pruitt Taylor Vince (Heavy) had been cast instead of Sly Stallone in Copland, or celebrating Pacino's "feminine" character choices in Serpico, Rockwell dissects the phenomenon of beauty as if he's a graduate student in feminist theory, rather than a hot young commodity of an actor.

Which isn't to say that he doesn't want to participate in our consumer culture where "money is power, and power gives you choice," as he said to Interview magazine earlier this year.

We caught up with Rockwell to talk about his current roles in The Green Mile and Galaxy Quest, liquid courage and mousacide.

RC: You've had a career where basically you've played offbeat, weird, but adorable and sort of normal characters, you know? And in this, your big, big studio breakthrough, you're the skuzzball of all time. Why were you willing to take it?

SR: Percy and Wild Bill are great parts because they're complicated men. Wild Bill is a very charismatic villain. I don't think he's really that unlikable. What he does is terrible, of course. He's atrocious. But that's not what it's about for me. You never see me do that on camera.

The qualities that I admire are the resilience of this man and the rebellious quality of breaking the rules. His bravado. His peacock quality. He's a braggart, somebody who's confident enough in himself. I'm not that way, really.

Sometimes I'm that way, if I've had a couple of margaritas or something, but I'm not really like an outwardly confident person. I'm more of a self-deprecating person. It's a great fantasy to play someone who is really, really confident, and someone who has a large ego. That's a fun fantasy for me. And he likes to break rules. I keep coming back to Muhammad Ali.

RC: We don't have him as a villain though?

SR: No, he's not. But I don't think of Bill as a villain either. Boxers and black men were supposed to be soft-spoken, not stir up anything. And Muhammed, Cassius Clay when he was younger, was considered an upstart.

He was cocky. He was illiterate, but he was a smart man. He broke rules. The draft. He dodged the draft. He kind of said "fuck you" to the civilized world. That's the thing that I found in Bill.

I also looked at standup comics. Sam Kineson's got a lot of rage, you know. Richard Pryor. Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice. He's a showman, but Wild Bill's a showman. That's why Cassius Clay is an influence. He's a showman and he's got a big ego.

RC: There are some really tough scenes. Did you get hurt on the set?

SR: Yeah, sure, sometimes. It was hard. I almost lost my voice at one time. I know about that from doing theater, that you can lose your voice and it's dangerous. It takes at least a day to recover. I had a big scene the next day so I was a little concerned about that.

During one take I said, "I'm not going to scream this time" when I was attacking David Morse. If I had done it any more I wouldn't have been able to shoot the next day. We looped it in later.

RC: You're giving away the magical secrets of production! OK, but while we're at it let's give away the secret of the Moonpie.

SR: Ah, Moonpie's pretty dry. You'd have to have a lot of saliva to get it to look like that. It would be maybe a little whiter. It was just very pasty. It was some kind of mishmash of Moonpie and some other stuff that the props guy came up with and squirted in David's face.

RC: We heard that it was strange to shoot this movie in sequence.

SR: No, it was fantastic. Such a luxury to do that. It was a lot like theater. Because you had all these theater actors on one set and it was really like doing a play, in a way.

RC: And you could really go full throttle? Everybody else had to really restrain themselves.

SR: It was great. It was very freeing. Frank (Darabont, the director) really let me go berserk.

RC: How long did you shoot your memorable entrance, when you came out of your trance?

SR: We shot that for three days. The actual attack, the transition where he goes ballistic. And then we had to go back and shoot some more. It's a long thing. It was exhausting. But it was exhilarating. It's refreshing when you have to do physical stuff in a movie. For me. Because you're just sitting around so much on a movie set. Getting the blood flowing is refreshing.

RC: What's next? More crazy guys, or back to nice?

SR: Galaxy Quest is coming out. I play a guy who's more like Percy, more of a coward. A pretty oddball character named Guy Fleegman. Another very strange guy. Not a good looking or appealing guy. But he's kind of funny.

RC: Then why are they putting you in GQ?

SR: Great publicist. Harrison Ford's on the cover.

RC: Barry Pepper (Rockwell's co-star in The Green Mile) is wearing ostrich leather and cowboy boots.

SR: Well, you know, Barry's a bad ass. I get a red suit and a pink shirt, some sunglasses and black shoes. I'm looking pretty devilish. We're not doing the Mack Daddy stuff. Mine's pretty conservative, in comparison to some of these other guys. I do have the Robert Evans sunglasses.

RC: What issue is this for?

SR: I don't know. January? February?

RC: The Oscar issue. By then you'll have changed completely.

SR: Yeah, I will.

RC: When do you start shooting Charlie's Angels?

SR: January. I'm playing Drew Barrymore's boyfriend.

RC: Do you just sit at home while she solves the crimes?

SR: I get in with the bad guys, and I get kidnapped. I get tied up and Lucy Liu saves me. I'm a computer guy. I'm the Hugh Grant of the movie.

RC: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

SR: That's a good thing for me. I just got done with false teeth and a mustache. I'm excited. Especially with chics. I like that -- yeah, baby. They haven't cast any other men yet.

RC: Guy can't be that offensive looking.

SR: Well, no. Guy looks like Burt Reynolds on a bad day. Burt Reynolds is a good looking guy. Actually, Guy is kind of attractive. But his personality is a little exhausting.

RC: In what way?

SR: He was on the TV show, but he was killed on the TV show. So he's afraid that when they really get kidnapped by aliens that he's going to die -- like he did in the TV show. He's the emcee of the convention as well. He has no career. He thinks he has a career and he thinks he's chum-chum with the cast members. And they don't even know who he is.

They've forgotten who he is. He's a very funny, funny character. I like to talk about Guy Fleegman. He's one of my favorite characters. He's an homage to all those guys. The typical guy in the science fiction movie who goes, "Hey, man, we're all going to die, man." Nobody's ever done it better than Bill Paxton in Aliens.

RC: Do you see yourself in a particular group of actors at this point?

SR: My taste in actors is very eclectic. I like strange actors too. I like people who have a lot of depth. Like Michael Jeter and Jeffrey DeMunn. Jeffrey DeMunn is an amazing actor. A lot of people don't know that. I like all these actors who end up doing very small parts or who are unsung heroes.

RC: So you really want to be a character actor in many ways.

SR: I want to be a character actor, but I also want to make some money.

RC: Odd dilemma. Like working like Alan Rickman.

SR: Yeah, sure. But character actors don't make a lot of change, you know? And they don't have a lot of power. I think it's hard. I think you can do both.

RC: Especially if you get a big TV series.

SR: But what I'm saying -- somebody like Jeff Bridges or John Voight in the '70s, for example. A leading man and a character actor. Dustin Hoffman. I don't know why that is not allowed as much now as it was then. Gene Hackman.

RC: Do you think that's because your generation is so concerned about with how people look?

SR: Yeah, it is. And it's sad. It's very sad.

RC: Because Dustin Hoffman as a leading man was not someone who had women falling at his feet.

SR: No, but they found him sexy. He's very sexy in Kramer vs. Kramer, or Marathon Man. He's extremely sexy. The Graduate. He's very sexy. Now it's different. It's almost like we've gone back to the 1950s or something. It's very strange.

To me, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Steve Zahn and Giovanni Ribisi are the leading men. It's more interesting when you see an actor like Jeffrey Wright, who's multi-faceted. Those kinds of actors are much more interesting to watch than these pretty boys.

RC: Are you starting to feel your fame?

SR: I get recognized by film students, people who are fans of independent movies. I live in the West Village.

RC: Pardon my ignorance, but who is your mother?

SR: My mother was never a huge star. But she was quite an accomplished actress. She did a lot of Shakespeare -- played all the ingénues. She went to San Francisco State and then she went to NYU. She studied at ACT. Penny Rockwell. Penny Hess is her maiden name.

My father was also an actor. My father toured The Great White Hope with James Earl Jones and Buck Peters. Actually, I toured with them when I was a young kid. They brought me to ACT as a baby.

My father's name is Pete Rockwell. And he was an actor for a while. My mother was in it longer. My mother did a lot of improvisational theater downtown, East Village kind of, you know, Charles Ludlam type of stuff.

When I was ten years old, I was in a play with her, called Joan Crawford's Children. It was kind of like a Saturday Night Live format with sketch comedy. And it was a parody on Mommie Dearest. It was during that whole thing. And it was actually pretty popular. A lot of people started showing up with Joan Crawford masks. It was very camp.

RC: This was in San Francisco?

SR: New York. I lived in San Francisco with my father but I would visit her every summer for a month. I mistakenly went to rehearsal with her. She used to sing telegrams for a living. I would go on the telegrams with her. You know, those telegrams where they come in a red suit and sing "Happy Birthday."

She sang telegrams for people like Jack Lemmon. And she had all kinds of crazy stories about going up to Harlem and going into this house where these people were poverty stricken. And they gave her this huge tip. You know, like more than Jack Lemmon would give her. And then we'd go to rehearsal for her show and....

RC: Did you get to dress up and sing "Happy Birthday?"

SR: No. They were doing a skit on Casablanca in the rehearsal and she was Ingrid Bergman. But they couldn't figure out a way to make it funny. John Giler, who was playing Sam, the piano player, said, "Why don't we make your son Humphrey Bogart. That would be pretty funny." I had a cigarette and a three-piece suit. And I was Rick.

RC: From indie theater to indie film. Do you think that this current indie revolution may be over?

SR: It's good that we have things like The Blair Witch Project that are getting successful. Whether you like that film or not. I personally haven't seen it. But it's good that a movie like that makes so much money. That's important.

There are good studio movies and there are bad studio movies. There are good independent movies and there are bad independent movies. I don't believe you should have this reverence for independent movies just because they're independent movies.

RC: How do you, as an actor, make your choices about where you want to expend your energy?

SR: Well, independent movies are more fun for me as an actor, but people aren't necessarily going to see those movies. You've got to do a little bit of both. You've got to get your work out there so that people see it. I want to buy some real estate someday. I'm not a kid anymore.

RC: How old are you?

SR: How old do I look?

RC: Twenty-five.

SR: You really think I'm twenty-five?

RC: Nineteen. Twenty. Did you do Galaxy Quest right after The Green Mile?

SR: No, I waited about four months. I actually had to drop out of an independent movie to do Galaxy Quest. That was a very tough decision to make.

RC: Three big studio movies in a row. Was it very different working on something like Galaxy Quest, which is a big Hollywood movie?

SR: Oh, it's very different. You're dealing with blue-screen. You have to use your imagination a little more, pretending to react to monsters and aliens. It's tough. It's tough doing a comedy too. You can't treat it like a comedy. You have to treat it like a drama. But everybody else is sort of lackadaisical. It's a lazier atmosphere. So you've got to treat it like it's Hamlet.

You really have to treat it respectfully or it's going to suck. Sigourney Weaver and Tim Allen are really serious actors. They're both stage-trained. They're not messing around, just because it's a comedy.

RC: One more question about The Green Mile: How could you step on poor Mr. Jingles? He was so cute.

SR: You've got the wrong character! I didn't step on him. But I would have liked to have stepped on him and then eaten him.

RC: So you were all for killing Mr. Jingles?

SR: Yeah.