[mr showbiz: 99/12/31 ]

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Rockwell Shows Range in Green Mile, Galaxy Quest
by Stephen Schaefer

Not every actor gets to be introduced to the mass movie audience with an image-tweaking flip-flop, yet that's exactly what's happening to Sam Rockwell, who has back-to-back holiday films that couldn't be more different.

In The Green Mile, Rockwell -- a familiar figure to indie moviegoers from little-seen gems like Box of Moonlight and Lawn Dogs -- holds his own opposite screen giants both figurative (Tom Hanks) and literal (Michael Clarke Duncan).

Rockwell is the scene-stealing personification of evil as William "Wild Bill" Wharton, easily the nastiest piece of work to ever end up on Louisiana's Death Row.

Wander over one theater in your multiplex, and you can catch the actor's about-face in Galaxy Quest, an inspired spoof of an old sci-fi TV series that lives on and on (and on) in fan conventions and reruns.

Here Rockwell aptly plays the one unknown castmate of the long-canceled Galaxy Quest among the show's stars, played by Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Alan Rickman.

Rockwell's character, Guy Fleegman, had such a brief run on the series, even his fellow cast members can't remember him.

"I was in Episode 81, which ran in '82," he must remind them as the film begins at the Galaxy Quest fan convention where he is the emcee.

Of course, when real aliens arrive on earth and ask the "crew" to fly to their galaxy and defeat bad guys, Guy impulsively goes along.

"They're great parts because they're complicated men," Rockwell, 31, says of his roles in Green and Galaxy.

"I want to be a character actor but also make some money, since character actors don't make a lot of change and don't have a lot of power."

For Green Mile, where his scenes were mostly with Hanks and David Morse, Rockwell is over-the-top outrageous, spitting gruesome-looking gunk in Hanks' face or just having an old-fashioned cackling fit.

"I almost lost my voice one time, and it's dangerous; it takes a day to recover," he says.

"But Wild Bill is a very charismatic villain. He's not that unlikable. What he does is terrible, of course, but that's not what it's about for me. You never see me do those things on camera. For me it's about qualities like resilience and the rebellious quality of breaking rules. That's what I liked about Wild Bill, his bravado, his peacock quality. He's a braggart."

And if anyone wonders, "What's to admire about a braggart?" Rockwell's got a ready answer.

"Watch somebody like Muhammad Ali," he suggests. "That makes you admire a braggart. I'm not that way really -- unless I've had a couple of margaritas -- because I'm not an over-confident person. I'm more a self-deprecating person. It's a great fantasy for me to play that character."

As for "oddball" Guy Fleegman, a coward and in a state of panic since he was already "killed" in his original Galaxy Quest appearance, Rockwell thinks, "Guy looks like Burt Reynolds on a bad day. He's actually kind of attractive, only his personality is exhausting."

The actor elaborates, "He was a day player on the TV show and killed, and when they get kidnapped and go up in space, he's afraid he's going to be killed by the aliens."

"Guy's actually one of my favorite characters, an homage to all those guys played by the likes of Steve Buscemi and Bill Paxton, those guys in science fiction movies who say, 'Hey man, we're going to die.' Which Bill Paxton did so great in Aliens."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Rockwell's parents, Pete and Penny, who divorced when he was young, are both actors.

"My mother was never a huge star, but quite an accomplished actress who did a lot of Shakespeare. My father toured in [the play] The Great White Hope," Rockwell says.

He was raised in San Francisco with his dad, but during the summers visited his mom in Manhattan, which was where he had his first real acting job at the age of 10.

"I was with my mom in a play called Joan Crawford's Children, which was like a Saturday Night Live-format sketch comedy of the '40s. It was during the Mommie Dearest thing and was very popular. For the show, she was doing Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, and they cast me, her son, as Rick. I came out with a cigarette and a three-piece suit."

Obviously, Rockwell's outrageousness started early -- and isn't likely to stop. He's now filming the big-screen Charlie's Angels.

"I'm Drew Barrymore's boyfriend. I'm the guy who gets kidnapped and Lucy Liu comes to rescue me," he says.