Rockwell Makes The Cut: Bay Area actor breaks out in festival favorite "Lawn Dogs"
by Sue Adolphson

Sam Rockwell has been likened to Brad Pitt and described as a cross between Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. But he shrugs off those comparisons and offers one of his own. "Don Knotts?"

"I'm quirkier than Pitt," he says of the New York Times' analogy, admitting that he does kind of like Esquire's Cruise - Nicholson label. "Clean-cut and sleazy," he muses. "A versatile combination."

Offbeat and naked better describes Rockwell in his recent movies: Box of Moonlight, a hit at last year's Sundance Film Festival, and Lawn Dogs, which opens Friday at the Kabuki.

"That was a coincidence," he says of his back-to-back nude scenes. "If I did it any more it might become gratuitous." Then he grins scampishly and reconsiders: "But whatever. It's just Mother Nature."

Box of Moonlight, directed by Tom DiCillo and starring indie stalwart John Turturro, was supposed to be Rockwell's big break. His turn as a free spirit in a Davy Crockett suit, who lives in a beat-up trailer in the woods and has a penchant for skinny-dipping and stealing lawn gnomes, sparked industry attention, but the film was virtually ignored at the box office.

PASSED OVER FOR PITT

Coincidentally, DiCillo had considered Rockwell for the lead in an earlier film, Johnny Suede, but decided he was too young -- and cast Pitt instead.

"But I knew I was going to do something with Sam," DiCillo says. "He was such an imaginative actor. It's the kind of imagination that keeps feeding into the part, making the character richer and richer. Everyone who has seen Sam's work seems to really respond to it."

In Lawn Dogs, featured this year at Sundance with two other Rockwell films, Safe Men and Jerry and Tom, the actor is back in a trailer in the woods -- and swimming naked -- but this time his character, Trent, is a sullen fellow who dresses more conventionally and mows lawns for a living.

An outsider in the ritzy Camelot Gardens development where he works, Trent doesn't improve his lot when he befriends a kindred spirit in the neighborhood -- a 10-year-old girl with a heart problem.

"It's a compassionate story about two people who are kind of lost," Rockwell says at a Noe Valley cafe, where he has arrived with hair askew, in need of a shave and comfortably dressed in cords and plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows.

When Rockwell read for the role, which earned him the Independent Maverick Honor at the Dockers Khakis Classically Independent Film Festival last weekend at the Castro Theatre, director John Duigan hadn't seen any of his work but was pleasantly surprised.

"It was one of those casting days where you feel tremendously excited," Duigan says.

"Sam had an empathy with the role and he had a humor and a warmth which I found extremely attractive onscreen. He's a very committed actor, and I think what singles him out is he's a very accessible actor. He can take you into the emotions of his character in a very immediate way without ever being mawkish."

Perhaps Rockwell is so convincing in the role because he identifies with the character. "I've done my share of (menial) work," says Rockwell, 29, whose politeness and playful demeanor make him seem younger.

"I've delivered burritos, I was a busboy. I've been demeaned by people who think they're better. And the loneliness of the character attracted me. I have a lot of compassion for lonely people. I've felt (loneliness), more as a child."

ACTORS' SON

Rockwell was born in Daly City in 1968 to aspiring actors Pete and Penny Rockwell, who soon moved to New York to pursue their careers. An only child, Sam had to devise ways to entertain himself. "That's how I got into acting, re-creating the entire plot of movies with my little army men," he says.

After his parents divorced when he was 5, Rockwell moved to California with his father, now a newspaper printer in San Francisco. But he visited his mother, now a painter, every summer in New York.

"I'd go with her to sing telegrams and to rehearsals," he says. At one of those rehearsals, for "a kind of Saturday Night Live thing with improv skits," 10-year-old Sam was plucked from the wings to play Humphrey Bogart to his mother's Ingrid Bergman in a takeoff on Casablanca.

"I came in with a cigarette and said, 'I thought I told you never to play that song'," Rockwell says, explaining that the director thought a juvenile Bogie would make the sketch funnier. "The next year I got another play, and then it became an addiction."

Back home with his father, Rockwell soon enrolled at the San Francisco School for the Performing Arts, and at 18 landed his first movie role, in the horror film Clownhouse, filmed in Napa Valley.

Though the production was touched by scandal -- director Victor Salva was later convicted of molesting one of his young actors -- Rockwell was not involved in the trouble and remembers the film as a positive experience.

"I got to meet Francis Coppola (whose company produced the film)," Rockwell recalls. "He was great. I saw him years later for an audition for Godfather III and told him I was nervous. He said, 'Why be nervous? We're just two guys from the Bay Area.' " But Andy Garcia got the part.

BUSY IN NEW YORK

After Clownhouse, Rockwell moved to New York and made 20 more films, including Strictly Business, Jack and His Friends, In the Soup, Drunks, The Search for One-Eyed Jimmy and Glory Daze, in which he starred with a couple of other unknowns named Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey.

While his colleagues went on to fame soon after -- Affleck won a screenwriting Oscar this year for Good Will Hunting -- Rockwell says he doesn't envy them.

"Your first instinct is to be jealous, but no way. Outright fame is not what I want. I want opportunities and to have people recognize my work," he says. "That kind of fame is over the top. It whips your whole world upside down."

He'd rather just continue working in films and keep his hand in theater, about which he is passionate. "Theater humbles you," says Rockwell, who recently completed a 2 1/2-month run in Mike Leigh's Goose Pimples off-Broadway. "It's like a gymnasium to work out your acting muscles."

He wouldn't mind building up his love life as well, which he says has been "pretty obsolete" since he's been working so much. Though he's not sure about kids, he sees himself getting married someday, to someone who is "understanding and funny. And, you know," he adds, "kinda hot."

That's an adjective being liberally applied to his career lately, with upcoming parts in Woody Allen's Celebrity, A Midsummer Night's Dream with Kevin Kline and The Green Mile with Tom Hanks. Filmmaker magazine went so far as to proclaim him "poised to become a major star." But again, Rockwell laughs it off.

"Poised? What's that?" he says, sticking bent arms out and freezing like an Egyptian statue. "I'm not that kind of actor. I don't think I have that kind of appeal. I'm too weird."