His Box of Starlight

When “Box of Moonlight” premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, actor Sam Rockwell’s 10 years in the trenches of the independent film community began to pay off.

A variation on the “odd couple” theme, “Box of Moonlight,” which opens Friday, is the story of an uptight electrician played by John Turturro who finds himself marooned in the woods for a few days with Rockwell’s Buck, an eccentric outdoorsman who gives him a crash course in the simple pleasures of life.

Rockwell commandeers the picture, the third comedy by New York filmmaker Tom DiCillo, with such effortless charm that it’s hard to believe he’s never before starred in a movie. Critic Janet Maslin was smitten--she gave him a glowing write-up in the New York Times--and Rockwell promptly found himself deluged with scripts. Featured in the current issues of Details and Interview, and soon to be seen splashed across the pages of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, the 28-year-old actor is taking the flurry of attention with a grain of salt, however.

“My dad was at Sundance, so it was a pretty great experience for me, but I’d been with ‘Box of Moonlight’ for so long that I’d stopped thinking, ‘Wow, this could be my big break,’ ” says Rockwell, who was cast in the film five years ago. “I’d thought that [before] with a film I did in 1992 called ‘Jack and his Friends,’ and I also thought this NBC series I was on called ‘Dream Street’ was gonna rocket me somewhere--then I got fired because I wasn’t all-American enough,” he says of the short-lived 1989 series created by “Thirtysomething’s” Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. “I think I was a little flabby or something--I was still a boy and I guess they wanted a hunk.”

Apparently somebody likes him. Rockwell has wrapped four films (“Louis and Frank,” “Lawn Dogs,” “Arresting Gena” and “Safe Men”) since completing work on “Moonlight,” an achievement he admits has been exhausting.

“I just read an interview with Will Smith where he said he feels like everybody’s always going too slow, but I’m the opposite. Maybe it’s because I’m completely worn out right now, but I feel like everybody’s going too fast,” says Rockwell, who’s in L.A. during a brief break from “Tom and Jerry,” the film he’s presently shooting in Toronto. The story of the apprenticeship of a hit man, it marks the directorial debut of actor Saul Rubinek and stars Rockwell, Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy and Ted Danson.

Drinking tea and downing chewable vitamin C during an interview at a Hollywood hotel, Rockwell is nonetheless new enough to the business that he’s stoked that somebody else is picking up the tab for his posh hotel room. He’s also new enough to being interviewed that he doesn’t have pat answers to the questions he’s asked.

Rockwell’s character in “Box of Moonlight” is a kooky hybrid of Huck Finn and the Tex Avery cartoon character Screwy Squirrel, who dresses in a Davy Crockett suit and makes a modest living selling stolen lawn ornaments. Part of the venerable tradition of antiheroes that includes characters played by Dudley Moore in “Arthur,” Tom Hanks in “Big” and Geoffrey Rush in “Shine,” Rockwell’s Buck is a benign anarchist whose vigorous disregard for convention is completely irresistible.

“I don’t feel at all like Buck,” Rockwell says of the character. “I do if I’ve had a few shots of tequila, but I wouldn’t say I’m deliriously happy at this stage of my life. Whereas I daydream a lot and tend to be quite methodical, Buck is spontaneous and is always in a good mood.”

So how did he psyche himself up to play the indomitably buoyant Buck? “I put bologna in my shoes,” Rockwell deadpans. “Actually, that was the hardest part of playing this character. In fact, I really looked forward to my one crying scene in the film--that I had no trouble with!”

Born in Daly City, Calif., in 1968, Rockwell was an only child who describes his early years as “a little bumpy. My mom wasn’t smoking crack or anything, but things were fairly unstable now and then. My mom got an inheritance when her father died, and she and my father bought a nice house in the Bronx, burned through their money until they were broke, then moved to Harlem where we lived for a year. My parents acted in theater, and acting was part of the world I grew up in, so even though we were poor, my memories of that time are good.”

When Rockwell was 5 years old, his parents split up, and he moved to the West Coast with his father, settling briefly in San Diego, then moving to San Francisco, where they lived with Rockwell’s grandmother. Rockwell spent his summers as a child in New York with his mother, who was involved with various improvisational theater groups. It was there at the age of 10 that he launched his performing career, appearing in a play with his mother. That bit of experience led to his being accepted, in 1983, at San Francisco’s High School of the Performing Arts--a prestigious institution he almost flunked out of.

“I wasn’t focused on acting at that point--I was just smoking dope and chasing girls,” he laughs. “Then in 1987, when I was in my last year of high school, I was cast in a horror film called ‘Clownhouse’ that was produced by Francis Coppola, and I started to take acting seriously. (The film was released in 1988.) ‘Clownhouse’ gave me the confidence to at least have a go at acting, so I moved to New York after I finished high school.”

Working various odd jobs to pay his bills, Rockwell was steadily employed as an actor in theater and commercials, and landed small parts in the 1989 film “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” “In the Soup” in 1992 and Paul Schrader’s film of 1993, “Light Sleeper.” It wasn’t until 1994, however, that he was finally able to quit his last straight job as a burrito delivery man.

“I ran into Coppola again shortly after I moved to New York, when I went in to read for a part in ‘Godfather III,’ ” recalls Rockwell, who wasn’t cast in the film. “We were in an elevator together and he initially didn’t recognize me--I had my hair slicked back and was wearing a gold chain. He said, ‘Sam, you look like you’re trying to be Mickey Rourke!’ I told him I was a little nervous and he said, ‘Hey man, it’s no big deal--we’re just two guys from the Bay Area.’ ”

In 1990, Rockwell auditioned for the lead in Tom DiCillo’s first film, “Johnny Suede,” but DiCillo told him he was too young for the part, which went to Brad Pitt.

“I almost cast Sam because he did a brilliant audition and really understood the character,” DiCillo recalls. “So we stayed in touch, and when he read for ‘Box of Moonlight,’ I immediately knew he was the guy. I wanted the audience to feel that Buck was capable of anything and was a guy you should never turn your back on, and every time I saw Sam perform he came up with something that completely surprised me.”

Rockwell says, “The first time I read for the part I wore this big, weird hat figuring I’d shock Tom into casting me. A month later he called me in to read again and told me, ‘The part is yours, but we just lost the money for the film.’ Tom spent the next four years trying to raise the money for the film, and he kept his word over all that time. Tom’s very loyal and I owe him a lot.”

“Some fairly high-profile actors expressed interest in the part of Buck, but I stuck with Sam because I knew he was inventive enough to keep this character from becoming a cliche,” says DiCillo, who’s preparing for the February release of his fourth film, “The Real Blonde,” which stars Matthew Modine, Marlo Thomas, Catherine Keener (also in “Box of Moonlight”) and Steve Buscemi. “There are certain actors who blossom into something completely undefinable when the element of humor is added, and the improvisation and ad-libbing Sam came up with is really remarkable.”

Of Turturro, whose reined-in portrayal of the repressed Al Fountain serves as the perfect foil for the unfettered Buck, Rockwell confesses, “I was initially a little intimidated by John. He’s one of the guys young actors really look up to, so playing opposite John meant a lot to me.”

“Sam and I worked together in 1995 on a film called ‘The Search for One-Eye Jimmy’ that he was hilarious in, and I also saw him in a [1992] HBO movie called ‘Dead Drunk’ that was really strong,” says Turturro, speaking from New York, where he’s directing his second film, “Illuminata,” a story about a turn-of-the-century American theater troupe that was inspired by the films of Jean Renoir, and stars himself, Susan Sarandon and Ben Gazarra.

“I didn’t know Sam, though, and I really got to like him over the course of the shoot,” he adds. “There’s no way you can know in advance if there’s any chemistry between you and another actor as a comic team, but Sam had been with this character for so long that he was able to bring a lot to every scene.”

Turturro is one of a handful of actors who established their careers in the independent film community and opted to stay there when given the opportunity to leave it behind for big-budget industry films.

Rockwell, too, says, “I don’t feel a burning need to do movies that are bigger in conventional terms, and I’m happy making independent films. The parts I’m getting are big enough now that I get to have a trailer, and trailers are nice--you can take naps in ‘em.

“I recently got fired from ‘G.I. Jane,’ ” he says of his last close encounter with Hollywood. “Actually, I kinda quit because they wanted me to scuba dive which wasn’t in my contract, and I refused. I wanted to do the picture, too, because I’d love to work with Ridley Scott [the director of “G.I. Jane”], and I’d already been through the two-week Navy Seals boot camp. All the actors had to do it, including Demi Moore, who was real sweet. She took us to a local strip joint where we got our heads shaved and drank tequila. That was fun--generally, though, I’m not sure I like making movies.

“Film is hard, largely because it’s so tedious, and I’d almost rather do theater,” says Rockwell, who’s a member of New York-based Latino theater group Labrynth. (Rockwell isn’t Latino, but Labrynth made an exception for him when he showed up to read opposite his friend, Cuban actor Yul Vazquez, who was auditioning to join the company.) “Stage is where it really happens for an actor because it makes full use of whatever you have to give.”

Doing several movies back to back is new for Rockwell, who says he doesn’t relish the idea of spending the next few years going straight from one movie to the next. And understandably, the prospect of being famous in a world where journalism grows increasingly invasive doesn’t seem terribly alluring to him either.

“Fame seems scary to me because it’s out of your control,” he says. “The little taste I’ve had of it--I occasionally get recognized for a Miller Lite commercial I did in 1992--has been pretty weird.

“If I’m sounding negative it’s just because I’m so tired right now,” he adds. “I’ve been looking forward to some time off after ‘Tom and Jerry’ wraps, but I was recently offered a part in ‘The Thin Red Line,’ the film Terrence Malick is shooting in Australia. Of course I’d love to work with Terrence Malick--what actor wouldn’t? If scheduling allows, I’m probably gonna push myself that extra mile, then after that, I’ll just chill out for a while.

“I think of San Francisco as home, and I recently rented a house there where I plan to spend the fall getting some rest. For once, I think my fatigue level is higher than my fear of being out of work.”