Johnny Rotten or Sunshine? : ...

Seeing a slightly disheveled David Thewlis sauntering through a somber room full of assorted levels of pricelessness in the L.A. County Museum of Art, it’s hard not to flinch just a little bit, even though you know better.

Thewlis’ retinue assures all comers that this Londoner is the gentlest of actorly souls. But his two most prominent performances so far, both as vicious, violence-prone street-dwellers--first, playing a likely sociopath in Mike Leigh’s film “Naked,” and, this week, a pedophile on the public-TV series “Prime Suspect”--have seemed almost too frighteningly good not to be true. And so when you see him walk up with the cowlicks in his hair not quite kempt and his clothes not quite pressed, you remember the two roles and forget yourself. And worry for the Hockney a bit.

Thewlis has come not to slash the Hockney, but to praise it, of course. He just met the painter the other day, and points out that David Hockney, like himself, is a Northern Englishman come to Los Angeles, a fellow “working-class bloke” in the land of plenty.

It’s Hockney’s own vision of local plenty that made Thewlis fall in love with L.A.; he just recently become a part-time resident, in fact. We’re standing in front of the artist’s wall-sized canvas, “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio,” an illogically colorful, slightly surrealist view of Hollywood as an inviting series of weird rolling hills, a wonderland cut up by friendly highways and unfettered by fires or riots.

“I’d been here before, but when my wife and I first came to the museum in June, seeing this painting was the first time I kind of fell in love with something about L.A.,” explains Thewlis. “I sat before it for about 20 minutes and just loved it so much it made me feel better about the city. It makes me see it in a whole different light, as less hostile, where there’s something possibly quite beautiful about it.

“It’s probably very romanticized, but that’s the L.A. that I like, there,” he says, with a nod toward the Hockney. “I found the things here that I’m happy with, and know what to leave aside.”

This is most definitely not Johnny talking.

Johnny is the accentuate-the-negative bloke Thewlis plays in Leigh’s “Naked,” an unforgettable role that won him the award for best actor of 1993 from the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics, the London Film Critics’ Circle and the Cannes Film Festival panel, among other accolades.

Johnny is the punk-rock ethos made flesh, a walking diatribe railing against God’s inhumanity to man, a brilliant, angry raconteur whose uncompromising insistence on alienating everyone he meets relegates him to haranguing fellow street people instead of his intellectual peers. Johnny is someone who, from his lowest-class London vantage point, sees only chaos and no order, and has become the world’s most engagingly sardonic rage-aholic, if not the most agreeably “anti” of all recent screen anti-heroes.

Demanding a sit as it was, “Naked” did only moderate art-house business in L.A. after opening in December, although it has played successfully in New York through this month, and was especially widely seen in the industry because of videocassettes sent out for a long-shot Oscar campaign on Thewlis’ behalf. Among his contemporaries, at least, Thewlis is already becoming the stuff of legend, based mostly on Johnny, the role of a lifetime.

Anyone who didn’t get enough of Thewlis’ nastiness in “Naked” can get more in the coming weeks with the third cycle of the gritty “Prime Suspect” series, which is extremely popular with audiences here as well as in its native England. (The four parts begin airing on a weekly basis this Thursday on PBS.)

“Prime Suspect” is a vehicle for savvy police investigator Helen Mirren, but although Thewlis’ guest part is fairly small, he basically has the title role, as a homosexual pimp, child molester and all-around bird of prey believed to be a serial murderer.

As the “Suspect” of record he’s even scarier--and far less bright--than Johnny, but the unsavory similarities between the two roles are unmistakable. Thewlis, who is reputable and peace-loving enough to have been given the run of the closed County Museum of Art for the afternoon, seems a little dismayed to think of the impression Americans might take away of him from these two parts alone.

“It’s strange that the two things that I’m gonna get known for here in the near future are those two projects, because I play such a sadistic bastard in both of them,” Thewlis says. “That’s really not the sort of work I’ve been doing before; I’m not typecast in Britain as those kind of characters, and I’d never played those kinds of desperate, self-destructive, violent, aggressive people. ‘Naked’ was a real departure, and that’s a credit to Mike, that he does allow artists to do something they’ve never done before.”

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This being a Leigh film--which at no point in its creation or end result resembles a Hollywood picture--there was no script drafted before the actors were assembled, and the players were responsible for writing their own parts in the months of rehearsal, creating situations and dynamics for the movie weeks in advance but usually coming up with the dialogue hours or minutes before the cameras roll. This demands a Method-ist devotion to the character, since without that kind of absorption on the part of the actor, there are no lines.

So Thewlis immersed himself in Johnny’s interests, devouring heady texts on evolution, biology, social science, theology and the likes, so that he might come up with convincing harangues on why humankind might be coming to an end.

Ironically, it was in direct response to the unrelenting negativity of his “Naked” creation that Thewlis deliberately chose to start wearing rose-colored glasses, as it were.

“I was perceiving the world in a very negative way, which was an adjustment that was difficult to make. But once I’d made it, it was difficult to come out of at the end of the film, because you’ve learned to see everything in such a dark light. You would find nothing beautiful or worthwhile. . . .

“I mean, the whole experience made me much more hippie and Buddhist,” Thewlis says with a slight smile. “That’s where all this research drove me. It drove Johnny into something much more nihilistic.

“I’m at a stage now where I only find natural things really beautiful. I still see even this kind of beauty”--he waves his arms at the naturalistic sculptures of the human form in one museum room--”as still synthetic and very man-made. No matter what one looks at and finds temporarily pleasing, it can never be as beautiful as just a tree, really.” He laughs slightly, admitting this is a philosophy he “never really had before.”

In selectively looking at his adopted second city of Los Angeles, he also misses the urban forest for the trees, as it were, and doesn’t concentrate on the blight.

“I couldn’t stay here if I had that image, if I saw this place in that way, because it would depress me too much. That’s how I see London, in a very depressing way--hence, a lot of ‘Naked.’ You always have to look for something beautiful wherever you go. So the way I’ve been able to tolerate spending this much time here--which I’ve needed to, for work reasons--is to find something poetic about it.

“Maybe,” he says, almost under his breath, “I’m deluded.”

Who would have guessed: The Johnny Rotten of screendom turns out to be a Norman Vincent Peale in real life.

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Thewlis’ age is hard to place: Even with a mustache and growth of beard, his pouty lips help make him look a little baby-faced, a quality that sets off his sadism in these two latest roles in an ironic way. In “Naked,” there’s even a scene in which another character guesses how old Johnny is and, because of the character’s haggardness, guesses way too high. In that movie, he was supposed to be in his late 20s but looked 40-ish; Thewlis recently turned 31.

Before coming to London, he grew up in a seaside town with parents who had bought a little store and made their way up to “shopkeeper class”--a step up from most of his working-class relatives who lived in Yorkshire and toiled in the mines, but still a good step below middle-class on the United Kingdom’s self-conscious social scale, he’s particular to point out.

His acting career has come along in moderate steps: studies at the Guild Hall School of Music and Drama, theater at the National and the Royal Court, small roles in movies like “The Trial” and “Afraid of the Dark.”

But most of his work has been on British TV--hence, how little of it has been seen in America. “It’s certainly true that television is definitely of a higher quality there than here. . . . There’s not as much distinction between TV and film and theater in Britain, because most actors move comfortably between the three. You can’t actually be just a movie actor in Britain, because we don’t make that many movies.”

Not that he’s quite jumped on the miserable bandwagon bemoaning the apparent slow demise of his homeland’s movie industry. “I’ve never really taken an interest in what it actually means to say the British film industry is dying, in terms of what can be done about it seriously instead of ‘Can we just have more money?’ I mean, they’re closing every hospital and school in England at the moment, and they’re not going to give it to a lot of maverick filmmakers to make seditious anti-government films.”

But Thewlis has worked extensively with the most seditious of them, including Ken Loach and the late Alan Clarke. His first fateful hookup with Leigh was on a short film, “Short & Curlies” (still seen regularly between features on Bravo cable). Their first feature together was the comedic “Life Is Sweet,” in which Thewlis had one of the smaller roles, as the well-intended suitor who, memorably, licks chocolate off ornery Jane Horrocks’ breasts.

Then came “Naked,” an experience so intense that Thewlis says he can’t imagine taking on another Leigh movie for a long time.

“We will work together again, but I don’t think it’ll be for a few years, because it takes over your life; it’s damaging, really, almost. Everything else is swept to the side--relationships and friendships and family and any other concerns one might have. If you don’t put in 100%, you suffer.”

Thewlis claims he doesn’t have a violent bone in his body and has never even hit anyone, let alone committed the borderline date-rape that’s Johnny’s hallmark in “Naked.” But inasmuch as he did invest parts of himself in the character, might that have been a scary thing to get in touch with, or just acting exhilaration?

“Well, it was both--I mean, it was exhilarating because it was scary. And what it was was ridding myself of a lot of stuff I might have repressed all my life. An enormous amount of anger rose to the surface and was allowed to be released. And it was very liberating, as I was given license to scream and run through the streets and speak my mind at all times and to have no fear, really--just somebody who doesn’t give a (expletive). And most of us do give a (expletive) and we don’t want to speak out of turn or do anything that would turn dissent upon us. My job was to basically irritate people most of the time, and in the research for the part and the exploring of the territory, I didn’t care about anyone. That was kind of a liberating thing to go through, not to care at all what people think about you--and in fact, quite the opposite, to really try and initiate hostility against yourself, so that you can rise to it.”

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Shortly after winning the first of his many best actor prizes at Cannes last year, he shot “Prime Suspect 3,” which he still hasn’t seen, though it has already been shown in Britain (“they even move the news for it; it’s that popular”). It’s riveting television that puts even America’s best-made progressive cop shows to shame, but Thewlis sounds a little wary about watching the tape he was sent. He says that filming the carefully scripted series after the long, grueling collaboration of “Naked” came as something of a relief. But he says that he did miss having extended rehearsal times like those on the Leigh films, and that he isn’t quite as satisfied with his performance as he might have been with more preparation.

“It’s also difficult because it’s hard to research something like that,” Thewlis says of his kiddie-pimp character. How does one actually come to feel like that man must have felt, without actually becoming perverse oneself and breaking the law? Although my wife would come back and find me looking at Robert Mapplethorpe books and get very worried about me. I was looking at pictures of homosexual bondage and trying to find something in it that was in some way mentally having to do with it. . . .” He sounds frustrated even now: “I think I never quite latched onto it.”

Stateside audiences will finally get to see Thewlis as something other than a nasty in this summer’s family horse fable, “Black Beauty.” Next up for him is a shoot in Wales, where he would like to settle down in the countryside with his wife and just paint, a la his new friend, the other David.

But his wife (Sara Sugarman, an actress who recently got signed to ICM, Thewlis says, by virtue of being funny at parties she would attend with him) would prefer to stay on full-time in L.A., and part of him would too, he admits. The recent flattery from the Hollywood film community hasn’t hurt.

“I met Spielberg the other day, and he told me he’d seen ‘Naked’ and really loved it, and said he’d sat up all night with Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese in their respective apartments arguing about the film. Wow, I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall.”

Now he’d like to write a script about an expatriate British actor, “just about how one’s life can change from one thing to another very suddenly, and getting swept along in a crisis of identity into the future and who you are and who your friends are.”

And now that the rage of the English art-movie crowd is getting congratulations from the unlikely likes of Spielberg and Sylvester Stallone, would this fictional identity-crisis story Thewlis wants to write be a cautionary tale?

“I’m certainly not complaining or suffering about it,” he proclaims. “It’s a wonderful thing to happen to one, as long as you keep an eye on yourself. All I did was I pretended to be someone else for a few months, and it appears I did it quite good, and that’s all.”

And yet, in daily life, he professes regularity. “I live in a very small flat in Soho. Most of my friends are out of work. I hang out in cheap coffee bars and clubs and at friends’ houses which are kind of squats. But as soon as Cannes happened, it’s like this little door opens and you’re invited into this little club, which is the rich and famous.”

Better he put off writing that particular script; like any actor who just graduated from friends on the dole to friends who just won Oscars, he sounds conflicted.

“I do find myself just thinking a lot of the time it’s just very strange what happened recently, just because I’ve been taken out of this one life and been put into this life here. I mean, here now--talking to the L.A. Times in the museum of art and getting David Hockney’s personal permission to have my picture taken here. . . . We’re surrounded by surrealist paintings, but I mean, it’s all surreal to me.”