Adrian Turpin Profile: Sam Rockwell
To become a star every actor needs a quirk in his or her private life. A handy hook, preferably unconnected with work, something that allows people to say, “Yeah, that’s the guy who …” For Sam Rockwell, it’s what he does in bed. “My mother, let’s just say, was a little eccentric. She has certain insomniac problems, fears and phobias from childhood. Those sleep problems have carried over into my life.” He says this very slowly because he’s hardly slept for the past two nights. “You know, I should play a narcoleptic or something.”
Sleepy is not a word you’d associate with the on-screen Rockwell: goofy, kooky, manic, wild, wide-eyed and wide awake, but never dozy or slow.
The 29-year-old actor first showed his considerable talent playing opposite John Turturro in the whimsical comedy directed by TomDeCillo, Box of Moonlight. Turturro played an electrical engineer in midlife crisis, Rockwell a backwoodsman called The Kid, a human dynamo in a buckskin cape, who’s opted out of society to live in a half-built mobile home, and who introduces a little much-needed chaos into the engineer’s life.
In Lawn Dogs, he plays another trailer-dwelling outsider, white-trash gardener who makes friends with a 10- year-old girl in a posh Kentucky suburb, and in doing so brings the wrath of the community down upon him.
Directed by John Duigan (Flirting, The Year My Voice Broke, Sirens), Lawn Dogs is part magical-realist fairy tale, part critique of a United States in which the rich have started barricading themselves away from the poor in walled and gated suburbs.
“It’s a kind of David Lynch meets Edward Scissorhands sort of thing,” says Rockwell. His character in the film, Trent, is less manic than Box of Moonlight’s jittery Kid. There are fewer wild hand gestures and less mugging, but in a subtler way he exudes a powerful sense of exclusion. “For some reason, I’m always cast in Americana, Tim Roth kind of stuff – kidnappers, retarded people, drug- dealers,” he says.
It looks as if he has built up his body for Lawn Dogs. He has lost some of the boyish spindliness The Kid had, and with it has come a new maturity to his acting. After 17 movies, he is starting to look the finished article.
Rockwell has good looks, though they’re not classic looks. In Lawn Dogs he resembles a character out of a John Steinbeck novel. Pretty boy and weird kid battle for control of a face as long as a horse’s. His lips curve in such a way that you’d expect to find a row of higgledy-piggledy pegs inside, but when he opens his mouth they’re as regular as a Santa Monica orthodontist’s.
Like his looks, Rockwell’s background is a potent blend of conventional and wacko. Parts of it are as kooky as anything he has portrayed on screen. “My mother’s father was a theatre professor. My father’s father – Johnny Rockwell – was a test pilot, like in The Right Stuff.”
And yet, though they were from solid middle-class stock, Sam’s own parents were both struggling actors, poor enough to live in Harlem, after they’d frittered away an inheritance.
“It was a rough area,” says Rockwell. “We were the only white people on the block, but we were treated well. I’d have Cuban babysitters. I was the caso blanco – the white cheese.” Nowadays, he’s the only white member of a Latino theatre group in New York.
When he was five his parents split up and he went to California with his father, who had taken a “real job” as a printer.
“It was distracting. On vacation, I’d go back to my mom’s with all these crazy bohemian artists. I’d be smoking dope and drinking beer and kissing girls when I was 10, hanging out with wild, homosexual actors and big-titted women. And then I’d have to go back to school and conform and try to be good at basketball. Too fucking weird.”
Now he’s in therapy, he says, trying to sort the whole thing out. “I feel a little strange all the time, a little bit off-centre. I never feel that people are as nutty as me.”
It was just this quality DiCillo valued in Rockwell and he knew he was on to a good thing. Five years passed between the casting of Rockwell and the making of Box of Moonlight yet DiCillo stayed faithful to his young unknown.
Despite small parts in Last Exit to Brooklyn and In the Soup, as recently as 1994 Rockwell was still working as a burrito delivery boy.
That seems a long time ago now. A string of forthcoming comic roles includes a part in the latest Woody Allen, in which Rockwell plays a screwy groupie (“crazy hair, crazy clothes”) to Leonardo DiCaprio’s bighead of a film star.
He also (though he might now consider this a mercy) got fired from GI Jane. “I gave them no alternative, because I didn’t want to learn how to scuba dive. I wouldn’t mind learning in the Bahamas, but I didn’t want to learn at three o’clock in the morning.” Which is probably not the best cure if you’re already having problems sleeping.
He talks about his career with the slight puzzlement of a man who’s taken a long time travelling somewhere but isn’t quite sure if he’s arrived. “When people start paying attention to you, it naturally makes you start to look into yourself, and things start to come up. That’s why rock stars destroy hotel rooms. Something just ticks off and all of a sudden you’re five again. It’s definitely ticked off for me, and I need to watch it.”