If Sam Rockwell’s exuberantly outlandish turn as Bronco/Brutus in Jared Hess’ new Gentlemen Broncos doesn’t end up being one of the most purely entertaining pieces of controlled performance art in all of American cinema in 2009, I’ll eat Werner Herzog’s shoe. How many other films have dared to not only place their leading men astride flying, missile-firing deer but also force them to perform comic surgery on their own genitalia? Right, none.
But that’s typical of the patently atypical Rockwell, an actor whose checkerboard oeuvre ranges all over the SAG map, from his quietly affecting breakout performance in Tom DiCillo’s Box of Moonlight to his raging take on one of Stephen King’s most seething psychopaths in The Green Mile, and from there to the un-funhouse-mirror emotional battlespaces of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Choke, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
We caught up with Rockwell after the Fantastic Fest premiere of Gentlemen Broncos in late September and asked him, among other things, what makes a Sam Rockwell role and, while we were at it, how come no one’s ever seen him and Christopher Walken in the same room together?
Austin Chronicle: In his review of Choke, Roger Ebert called you a “latter-day version of Christopher Walken” and “your go-to guy for weirdness.” In some respects I agree with that, especially given your gleefully unhinged performances in Gentleman Broncos and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But do you think that’s a fair description of your résumé?
Sam Rockwell: You know, I love Chris Walken, so I’ll take that, sure. But honestly, I think that I just do what I’m told. I just show up and try to do diverse things. … I grew up watching movies like The Deer Hunter and then Caddyshack, or Taxi Driver and then Stripes, you know? So what I liked was all over the place. I loved Richard Pryor, and I loved Robert Duvall, Sophie’s Choice, and Private Benjamin. And I think they’re all valid.
AC: Would you consider yourself a character actor, in the classic sense?
SR: Yeah, I think any actor who wants to play different characters in films is a character actor. I’ve done leading men in films, but they tend to be quirkier or they tend to be antiheroes. They’re not straight-on. I might be in that same group of actors like Ben Stiller and Paul Giamatti and Phil Hoffman, who are leading men but a different version of leading men. It’s probably closer in spirit to what Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, De Niro, and those guys used to do. They were quirkier, you know, not like Brad Pitt. It’s really an antihero, I guess.
AC: One of the best and most human sci-fi films in recent memory was Duncan Jones’ Moon, in which your character, Sam Bell, a mining company grunt working and living alone on the moon, begins to crack up under the strain. It’s a stunner of a performance in a film that deserves far more attention than it received. How did you come to that role, and how did you prepare for it?
SR: Duncan had approached me with another film and I declined that one; he wanted me to play a villain. But he asked me what I was interested in and I said science fiction. So he went off and wrote the script for Moon, and then a year later, when I was ending Frost/Nixon, he sent me a copy. He said, “You better read it fast, because I wrote it for you and we’re about to cast it.” So I read it and showed it to some friends. I liked it, but the initial draft didn’t have as much humor in it as the final film. There was a movie I did with George Ratliff called Joshua which was kind of a similar situation, in that George and I ended up talking about how to infuse more humor into the situation, which was originally very dark material. The same thing happened with Duncan and I; we would read over the material, I would ad-lib, and then he’d rewrite the material. And that was our process of making the script for Moon more specific to what it was that Duncan was trying to do. It was a very actor-friendly process.
AC: In light of the very intense nature of the role, which had you playing off of multiple versions of yourself, was it a difficult shoot for you, personally? The only relatively recent role that bears any similarity to what you did, just in terms of the disturbing sort of self-destruction your character goes through, would be Jeremy Irons’ twin brothers in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.
SR: It was really taxing. I mean, you never stop thinking. We were shooting in London and I didn’t socialize at all when I was doing it. I didn’t have time. It was a 32-day shoot, and it was a lot. We never went over three takes of a shot, and they did one of the pingpong clones in a single take – and they kept it – so it was, yeah, really intense.
AC: Except for the nods to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, right?
SR: Right. Yeah, we tip our hat to Silent Running quite a bit, don’t we?
AC: Getting back to Roger Ebert’s backhanded praise of you, what is it that attracts you to a script? Is there something specific you’re looking for in a character, other than its proximity to (or distance from) the Christopher Walken-esque?
SR: I don’t think there’s any specific type, really. I’m interested in people’s pathos. And I’m not even sure that I really know what that word means, but I think it means people’s emotions and, you know, their pain. I’m interested in people’s deep feelings. But I don’t think you should ever take yourself too seriously. That’s why you do a thing like Gentlemen Broncos.
Gentlemen Broncos opens in theatres this Friday. See Film Listings for review.
This article appears in November 6 • 2009.