nicole_powers

When Sam Rockwell walks into the room and shakes my hand, he looks distractingly like Eric Knox, his nouveau-riche hipster software mogul/villain from the tragically underrated Charlie's Angels. He's also easily distracted by the assorted bric-a-brac on the conference table -- my tape recorder, a bowl of candy, mini-sodas, etc. -- but despite our mutual distractions, we soon get down to business to discuss Choke, the new film adaptation of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's book, that's been picking up good buzz since its debut at Sundance in January. (Rockwell sat near me at the premiere, heavily disguised in a preposterous wig.)

Those who hold Palahniuk's work to be generational holy writ will breathe easy to know that Choke follows the material faithfully, telling the story of Victor Mancini, a Gen-X wastoid who spends his days working an absurd job as a historical actor at a colonial village and his nights perpetrating a scam in which he intentionally chokes on food at fancy restaurants. Oh, and he may or may not be Jesus Christ, reincarnated.

Ryan Stewart: Did you have some of the candy already?

Sam Rockwell: I had the little Hershey's. [picks up my tape recorder] That's very nice, baby. I got the cassette ones.

RS: I was just telling someone I grew up near one of those colonial places like in the movie. It was called Old Salem. You'd see people churning butter and counting the minutes till their next cigarette break.

SR: Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. I wish I'd had enough time to go and check one of those out.

RS: Rumor has it that you and Clark [Gregg] went out and shot the book's original ending for the film, where [spoiler alert] your character gets stoned, but for some reason you had to scrap it?

SR: Yeah, it just came down to what made sense. We didn't have the budget to really pull off the stoning thing, so it all just sort of fell apart. Hey, it was independent filmmaking!

RS: You went out and shot it and the footage just came out badly?

SR: Yeah, we did actually shoot it. It didn't come out right. So we cut it. Clark made the decision. Some of the fans were disappointed, but it's a better movie, so there you go.

RS: The ending I saw at Sundance, where you and Kelly Macdonald's character make out over the entire closing credits, went over well with the crowd.

SR: The kissing, yeah that was just an accident. That just sort of happened on the last day of shooting. They just kept on rolling. Kelly and I didn't know that was going to happen, that they were gonna keep the camera rolling.

RS: And you just never stopped?

SR: Well, he didn't say cut! [laughing] I think Clark was messing with us. We never thought that they'd use that in the film. We thought eventually they'd snip it, but they just let it go. It was funny.

RS: Were you into Chuck Palahniuk's writing before you took this gig?

SR: I knew the movie Fight Club. I don't read a lot of books, actually. It's a sad thing to say, but unless I'm researching something like Richard Nixon or whatever ... it's a terrible thing to say, that I don't read a lot of books, but I do read a lot of scripts. Reading for fun is just ... anyway. I'm lucky if I get to read the paper.

RS: You're definitely part of the Fight Club generation, though. The angry young man generation.

SR: Yeah, I'm definitely an angry young man. The answer is yes to that. I loved Fight Club. I loved the film even though I never read the book. And I've read Choke, obviously, and that's a great book. I think Chuck is a great writer based on that book.

RS: You worked in a lot of restaurants when you were younger, right?

SR: Like every other New York actor.

RS: Did you ever witness any fake choking? How do you pull that off as an actor?

SR: No, no, I've never seen the Heimlich or anything. We used watermelon or something that would break up very quickly. It was usually watermelon or a marshmallow, something like that, so it wasn't as dangerous as it appears and we had a medic close by. The producers were a little nervous, cause you gotta sort of stop breathing for a few seconds to make it look real, but it's still just pretend. It was fun.

RS: Tell me a little more about your method in general, how you prepare.

SR: I have to kind of do a little research, but I wouldn't say I'm really method. I studied a technique called the Sanford Meisner technique, which is really about imagination, but I do research. I researched the sex addiction. When I did Frost/Nixon I researched the Nixon stuff and I kept up on politics and hung out with the real guy. When I did Chuck Barris [Confessions of a Dangerous Mind] I watched a million Gong Shows. For Snow Angels, I did a lot of research on the born-again Christian stuff. I always do something, probably. The two things that come to mind that I didn't do a lot of research for are Matchstick Men and Safe Men, maybe. But Matchstick Men, even for that we talked to an FBI agent at one point, about these con artists. He played us a conversation. So there's always something, or usually there's something. Even for Galaxy Quest I watched Trekkies, I watched a couple of things like that to kind of get me into that world.

RS: Working with Anjelica Huston must have been a great treat for you as an actor. Was it weird doing scenes together because she has to play a character drifting in and out of sanity?

SR: Yeah, she's phenomenal, she's really something. It was just sort of an impediment for her, but it was really fun to work with her. She's very emotional and actually really connected and present with you. She's really emotionally available as a person and as an actor, so the character thing is just like a sidenote, you know? It's a fun relationship for us to act.

RS: And you kept the best stuff from the book.

SR: Yeah, most of it's all from the book, you know? All the jokes and everything -- it's the book, the book, the book.

RS: There were a lot of moments in those scenes where you could have gone for the laugh more, but you just played it straight.

SR: You don't want to go for the joke all the time. This movie gets at some deeper stuff, some kind of Freudian stuff, and hopefully that comes through because people care about the characters. They don't just laugh at them, but I'll go for the laughs if it works. Why not?

RS: Right. You injected a lot of laughs into Jesse James, the most dour movie ever, so why not this?

SR: Yeah, sure. You gotta add a little comedy to your drama and a little drama to your comedy. We needed some laughs in that movie, it's such a dark movie. You know what I mean? Jesse James, that's a dark story.

RS: Doing a low-budget film like this one, I assume one of the perks is that you get more say over things like the tone of it, and so on.

SR: Sure. Yeah, you get a little more. Like, I'm doing a movie now and I'm gonna be a producer on it and that helps. Clark and I talked about the cast and stuff like that. So yeah, it's obviously nice to have a little say in what's going on.

RS: What do you think is your best work to date?

SR: Dramatically, I think Snow Angels is the best thing I've done to date, on film. Did you see that one?

RS: Not yet. David Gordon Green is great, though. I just saw Pineapple Express.

SR: Yeah, I think that's probably the best thing I've ever done on film. That and Chuck Barris. This isn't bad either, but Snow Angels, that was a very challenging kind of character. But Charley Ford was really fun, a fun character to do but not always fun, though.

RS: You zig and zag around a lot in your career. I remember being surprised to see you as the straight-arrow dad in Joshua.

SR: You try to do different parts. I aspire to have a career -- which you have no control over -- like Jon Voight or Robert De Niro or Dustin Hoffman or Jeff Bridges. I'm a huge fan of Jeff Bridges. Those are unique actors in that they're leading actors and they're character actors. Not everybody can pull that off and not everybody has those opportunities. Just recently David Strathairn and Chris Cooper have gotten attention and they've been doing it for years. Now, finally they give Chris Cooper a movie like ... what was that movie where he played the corrupt CIA guy?

RS: Breach.

SR: Breach, thank you. He just did his first lead in a studio movie, which he was great in. Those are the kind of actors that I look up to.

RS: You've got several things in the pipeline -- what should we look out for?

SR: Fuck, I don't know. There's a couple. Frost/Nixon, there's a Robert De Niro movie, Gentlemen Broncos, there's the clone movie.

RS: You're doing a movie about clones?

SR: Yeah, a clone movie. It takes place on the moon. It's called Moon. I play two characters, two clones.

RS: Far out.

SR: Yeah. Kevin Spacey is a robot. You ever see Silent Running? It's kind of like that, so look out for that.

RS: Will do.


Choke opens in limited release on September 26.