[interview magazine: 97/07]

this article belongs to Interview magazine. it was printed 97-07. it, as well as the images, appears courtesy sam rockwell online. it is provided for reference and preservational purposes only. the sam rockwell experience does not claim any copyright to it. if you use any of it, please make sure you give credit where credit is due. thank you.
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Rockin' Rockwell
text by Oren Moverman
photographs by Susan Shacter

Sam Rockwell is the kind of actor who doesn't need digital enhancement. He's got old-fashioned movie magic at his fingertips.

Every now and again, the movies cough up imp and genius with an ability to cast spells, whose effect isn't quite what they intended, but which are powerful nonetheless -- Mickey Rooney in A Midsummer Nights Dream, sorcerer's apprentice Mikey Mouse in Fantasia, Kristen Dunst in Interview with a Vampire. and when it happens, we realize what we've been missing.

Sam Rockwell embodies this quality with his off-center acting in the recently released Box of Moonlight.

"Kid's a weirdo combination platter: part Joe Buck, part Peter Pan, Puck, Huck Finn, with a touch of Richard Pryor and the Michael Keaton of Night Shift thrown in." says the 28 year old Rockwell of the whacked-out backwoods loner he plays in writer/director Tom Di Cillo's subversive slice of Americana.

Rockwell waited an "endless" five years to work with Di Cillo, who originally considered him for the role in Johnny Suede that Brad Pitt ended up playing. Given his chance in "Moonlight", Rockwell performs a miracle: Kid charms the pants off an uptight electrical engineer [John Turturro] whose spiritual rebirth he accidentally presides over one 4th of July weekend.

Behind his smirk, and beneath the stolen Davy Crockett suit that hangs off his runtish frame however, Kid is a damaged soul desperate to connect with someone. He isn't so much pixieish as pixilated, ever so slightly off his rocker.

Sure, this gleeful insanity is in Di Cillo's script, but you get the sense that it springs directly from Rockwell and that you'll see it in his future films.

Three months into a summer movie season of crunching metal and slick soullessness, here at last is the magic: It's the new Rockwellianism.