Have you ever had a Red Bull?” Sam Rockwell asks, apropos of nothing. “I don’t know if I’ve had a Red Bull.”
We had been talking about the tyranny of social media.
“I’ve never had an energy drink ever,” I tell him, unnecessarily proud of myself, while I try to figure out why he’s asked. I’m distracted. The reason I’m distracted is that I don’t want to be here. I don’t mean with Sam Rockwell—Sam Rockwell is delightful. I mean in this room. It’s the greenroom outside a midtown Manhattan video studio. It sucks.
He does that a lot too. He has a movie reference for everything, even this L-shaped hall-end space with a couple mini fridges; a table with some trail mix, chips, and granola bars; and, at the other end of the L, a couch and armchairs under the lone window, outside which a tree is swaying and it’s trying to rain. We’ll talk for 145 minutes and he’ll manage to mention thirty-two movies and fifty-three actors.
Forty-five minutes into our conversation, he gets up to take a leak. Upon returning from the bathroom, he sees the tree out the window metronoming back and forth. “Is it raining?” He walks over to the window and peers down at the street, where tiny creatures have sprouted umbrellas. He’s been inside virtually all day, shooting photos and videos in closed-off rooms. He furrows his eyebrows slightly, mouth half open, that look of coy appraisal we’ve all seen a million times now.
It’s hard to believe because of the boyish face and irrepressible energy, but Rockwell’s career stretches back nearly forty years. His first film was a low-budget 1989 slasher called Clownhouse, but by 1992 he was in Light Sleeper, directed by Paul Schrader, our foremost poet of male alienation and the writer of one of Rockwell’s favorite movies, Taxi Driver. That’s his career. He’s been in a Marvel film; he’s been in a Clint Eastwood film. He’s played the Big Bad Wolf and George W. Bush and the most influential choreographer of the twentieth century. He’s natural in everything. Last year, a monologue about wanting to be an Asian woman getting railed by white men, from season 3 of The White Lotus, which starred his longtime partner, Leslie Bibb, tipped him from an actor beloved among people like him—cinephiles—to someone everybody knows.
His new film, Wild Horse Nine, comes out in November. Rockwell plays Lee, a CIA agent who, along with his partner, Chris, played by John Malkovich (one of Rockwell’s idols), is part of a CIA misadventure in Chile in the early 1970s. Lee and Chris take a weekend trip to Easter Island, where Lee seems to be keeping tabs on Chris, watching him from the window of his hotel room or out the windshield of an ancient red stick-shift sedan.
Wild Horse Nine is the fourth collaboration between Rockwell and writer/director Martin McDonagh, after 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for which Rockwell won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; 2012’s Seven Psychopaths; and a 2010 play with the macabre title A Behanding in Spokane. I asked McDonagh why he keeps casting Rockwell. “His danger, his truthfulness, his sense of fun, his sex appeal,” he said. “I think especially the first one—there’s always something a little dangerous about Sam in everything he does.”
There is something dangerous about Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine, but he’s playing against Malkovich, who is not known for timidity. The two of them and McDonagh rehearsed for a few weeks at the Public Theater, a legendary institution in New York City. Rockwell, who has been rather relaxed, reclining slightly with boxing shoes flat on the floor, leans in to tell me about it. “We were doing this thing where he goes off on me,” Rockwell says. After a run-through, McDonagh asked Malkovich to “turn up the anger a little bit.” “He just says [lilting], Oh yeah, sure, no problem,” Rockwell says. “He talks kind of gently. And then, just like, WHAM! Out of the gate like a monster.”
Rockwell ate it up. “I was like, I got a front-row ticket to this? I get Malkovich to yell at me?”
I point out that some people might find this intimidating. “I worked with Gene Hackman once,” he says. “And I had to yell at him, and he loved it. He loved it. Because actors are so intimidated by him. If you’re a really good tennis player, you want a good tennis player opposite you.”
Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—
“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.
by Kevin Dupzyk, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Florence Sullivan
[ed. See also: Keanu Reeves Knows the Secrets of the Universe (Esquire).]
