ROCKWELL ROLLING

Spotlight

Lots of young actors wake up one day to discover they suddenly have what Hollywood calls "heat." Sam Rockwell is one of the few who have earned it. The 33-year-old starin-the-making reeks of old-school acting cred. He has been in 30 small films; he knows all about Sanford Meisner; he's done serious theater in New York; and he's survived his requisite eight-month stint in Los Angeles, where he slept on the couch of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named Leif and ate way too much Domino's pizza.

Rockwell has also obsessively taken in the 70s work of his idols Jon Voight, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, and Robert Duvall, and claims he has stolen from as many of them as possible. "That way," he says, "they can't catch you." In his first starring role in a studio film, a heist movie called Welcome to Collinwood, Rockwell transcends the labels Hollywood has slapped on him—"the next Gary Oldman," "the next Steve Buscemi"—and proves he's something rarer: a character actor sexy enough to get the girl.

No doubt this is what grabbed the attention of George Clooney, who gave him the lead in his directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Based on the cult memoir of Gong Show host Chuck Barris, who claimed to have been a C.I.A. hit man, and written for the screen by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), the film had Rockwell on edge: in the tradition of his heroes, he threw himself into the part, watching old Barris rehearsal tapes, hanging out with the eccentric man himself, and, perhaps most impressively, sitting through 200 episodes of The Gong Show. "It was almost, like, Too much information," says Rockwell.

EVGENIA PERETZ

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