Check it out!! A full story on the totally brilliant Mr. Sam Rockwell 🙂 (I hope Snow Angels picks up a distributor soon):

Scenery Chewer Plays It Straight, Methodically

THE long, steep stairs leading up to Sam Rockwell’s East Village apartment didn’t faze the delivery guy from the corner joint. He and the organic hot dogs arrived at the door less than 20 seconds after the downstairs buzzer sounded.

Mr. Rockwell was not surprised. “That’s his job,” he said. “He does that for a living. Your tip is dependent on how quickly you get up there.”

And Mr. Rockwell knows. He used to deliver burritos. These days he delivers performances, memorable ones that have had him foaming at the mouth (as a deranged inmate in “The Green Mile”), dancing madly atop a truck (as a working-class outcast in “Lawn Dogs”) and bouncing from game-show host to C.I.A. hit man (as Chuck Barris in “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”). His latest character, in the George Ratliff suspense movie “Joshua,” is even more unusual: He’s normal.

In a way normalcy is the subject of “Joshua,” which opens Friday. The title character is a 9-year-old prodigy — an exceptional student, a brilliant musician — whose more ordinary parents, played by Mr. Rockwell and Vera Farmiga, don’t know quite what to make of him. Trouble is, he knows exactly what to make of them. And when Joshua’s place in the family is threatened by a baby sister, his reaction is typical, but his behavior is a bit extreme.

Shuffling to the kitchen in his slippers — shoes aren’t allowed on the polished wood floor — Mr. Rockwell fetched plates and cutlery for the frankfurters and acknowledged that playing normal is, well, not exactly normal for him. “I do usually play the freaks,” he said.

Fortunately, he added, he had “just chewed up all the scenery in ‘Snow Angels.’ ” In that unreleased movie, which like “Joshua” was first seen at Sundance in January, he plays “a born-again Christian alcoholic who’s chasing after his ex-wife and kind of goes postal.”

So, he said, “I was fine being the straight guy in ‘Joshua.’ ” “Straight” performances don’t always get the kind of attention that the wacky ones get, but Mr. Rockwell, 38, said they require just as much skill. “Michael Douglas in ‘Fatal Attraction’ or John Cassavetes in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ Craig T. Nelson in ‘Poltergeist’ — those are really underrated performances. You don’t notice so much what Michael does in ‘Fatal Attraction,’ but it’s a really great piece of acting. I think there’s a lot of acting that gets missed.”

It’s no accident that Mr. Rockwell cited three particularly creepy films to make his point. “Joshua” is the latest in a long line of “bad seed” movies that portray children as avatars of evil. Mr. Ratliff knows that his movie can be construed as a nightmare view of parenthood. “I always blame David Gilbert, my co-writer,” he said in a telephone interview. “It was 100 percent his idea.”

That said, he added that as the father of two sons, with a third one on the way, he is aware of how little sway he has over who his children will become. And he finds that scary. “I’m not very interested in supernatural horror movies,” he said. “I think they’re stupid and a waste of time. I’m interested in movies that find the horror in the mundane.”

Mr. Ratliff, who came to prominence with his 2001 documentary “Hell House,” said that he knew he was taking a risk in casting Mr. Rockwell as the sane center of his family. “People would look at me really oddly,” he said, when he’d mention the idea. But Mr. Ratliff had pictured Mr. Rockwell in the role as he was writing, so it didn’t seem so far-fetched to him.

“One problem Sam has is that people tend to see him as one of these off-the-wall character roles,” he continued. “But he could be a leading man. He can do anything.”

Mr. Rockwell’s acting began getting attention in 1996, when he starred with John Turturro in Tom DiCillo’s whimsical fable “Box of Moon Light.” Playing the lovable dropout who latches on to Mr. Turturro’s uptight engineer, Mr. Rockwell laid down the basic outline for many of the characters he would later portray: offbeat, charming, canny and completely unpredictable. Whether he’s the smug villain of “Charlie’s Angels” or the worried sidekick in “Galaxy Quest” or the three-armed, two-headed fool of a president in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Mr. Rockwell is never just an oddball: His characters are peculiar in complex ways.

Partly it’s his Method training in drilling through layers of buried emotion to find the truth of a moment. But there’s also his unusual background. The only child of a painter and an actor who separated when he was 5, he had an unlikely, peripatetic childhood. He would spend the school year in San Francisco, moving often as his father changed jobs and girlfriends. In summer he would join his mother in New York, becoming part of her Bohemian circle of starving artists. He found his vocation when he accompanied her to a rehearsal of a skit satirizing “Casablanca,” and the director had an inspiration: Wouldn’t it be a laugh to cast a 10-year-old as Rick?

“I know what it’s like to be backstage with a bunch of adults and then go to a bar with your mom and these other actors,” Mr. Rockwell said. “She couldn’t pay a babysitter, so I’d go with her.” One of her day jobs was delivering singing telegrams — “She once sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Jack Lemmon,” he said — and he would tag along. “Then we’d go to a rehearsal. It was such a crazy day. So weird. It changes you in a way. You kind of get older quicker, but it’s deceiving, because you’re still a kid.”

He is, he said, still in thrall to his memories of those “magical” summers. In some ways his apartment in this raffish building in a still-scruffy neighborhood is an attempt at going back. It looks more like a grad student’s pad than the home of an established movie actor. And despite the stacks of jazz CDs and movie favorites, the plushly upholstered sofas from ABC Carpet & Home, and the walls decorated with his mother’s paintings and assorted posters and photographs, it seems somehow unfinished.

It’s certainly a far cry from the sleek, rambling Upper East Side apartment of the family in “Joshua.” The boy, played with eerie calm by Jacob Kogan, goes to an elite private school. Mr. Rockwell’s character is a hedge-fund manager who plays squash at a fancy club. At home Mr. Rockwell has no Central Park views, and he exercises at Crunch. His passion is boxing, not squash.

“I have a weird lifestyle,” he said. “But I think I like the lifestyle because I romanticized it as a kid,” he said. “I don’t want a normal life. It bores me.” He is, he said, fortunate to be dating someone “very understanding.”

But in the next breath he bemoaned the ways in which New York has changed since he was young. “People have no idea,” he said. “The whole Basquiat era — I miss it. Sometimes I do think I’d like to shack up with somebody and go to the country. Maybe go to Connecticut. Get away from all this craziness. It used to be exciting. Now it’s more like a pain. There are so many people. I get bugged out. I can’t handle it.”

It’s not that he’s being hassled on the street by fans. With his black-rimmed glasses, mussed hair and bristly mustache, he is hard to recognize. “I’m at the border of the comfort level,” he said. “I can walk down the street. I can take the subway. I go to regular places. Once in a while I get, ‘Hey!’ ” He knows it would be ungrateful to complain. “I’m fine,” he said. “It’s a good life. You get free clothes. You get free flights.” And it’s someone else running up the stairs with the food.

Tags: Travel

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