Sean Astin

What was the prank?

Just going there. Dick had said to us throughout the movie, “I can’t wait to get away from you brat kids.” One day Jeff Cohen, who played Chunk, shows up with his mom and his sister Edie, and they’re all wearing Midwestern tourist with the hats and camera and flower print shirts and they’re like, “Dick, we’re going to Hawaii with you!” He kept saying he wanted to get to his house in Maui, get away from us brat kids. They’re like, “Dick, we’re coming with you.” He was on the floor laughing because it just was so cute. It was so funny. The next thing you know, they were like, “Let’s tell Steven. Maybe we really will trick him, we’ll surprise him.” So he sent us, somebody brought Dick out to the supermarket and we came back, all the Goonies and our family and friends had all trashed his place and we were hanging out there. It was pretty funny. I thought he was going to have a coronary. He looked really funny.

Do you think kids today still have Goonie like adventures, in the age of Facebook and Twitter?

Yeah, I think it’s different but I’m sure they have adventures. They have to. It’s just the nature of being a kid. Now with the technology, gosh, what we wouldn’t have done to be able to iChat or some of the walkie talkies. It’d just be fun. That thing that people love about The Goonies, that sense of adventure, is something that’s intrinsic to kids. I think some elements of our culture kind of work against it. The world is dangerous. Kids have to be careful where they go. There’s bad people out there so people have to be careful. That kind of stops you but one kid flew around the world in a Cessna who was 10. Their dad orchestrated that, made it work out for them. That’s an adventure. That’s as cool as finding pirate treasure. “I flew myself around the planet when I was 10.” Pirates always have an allure. You have the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that come out. Yeah, it changes, it grows, gets better. It’s all good. I’m blown away that a movie like Goonies has such staying power. That’s a pretty amazing thing.

It’s been 10 years since Lord of the Rings. Do you have a different perspective on it now than when you were in the middle of it?

We just did a photo shoot for Entertainment Weekly. Elijah, Dominic and I were in the photo shoot together and they’re going to do a lot of other cast and composite it together for the 10 year anniversary of when we started filming. It only took about an 18th of a second being together where it felt like we’d just been doing these photo shoots and making the movie together. In a weird way, I think my thoughts and feelings continually grow and change and in some ways, it’s really the same.

When you hear about The Hobbit does that seem like something some other guys are doing, or is it still the same family?

Both. It feels like both. It seems like the same family because I know them but it’s been a lot of years now and their production apparatus has changed a lot down there. They’ve grown. They’re making lots of movies all the time so there’s probably a lot of different crew and a lot of different people down there than I know. There are some people that I know but my character Sam does not appear in The Hobbit to the best of my knowledge. They could do whatever they want so I’ve heard different things about what they might want to do, but it feels like a cousin that you grew up with that maybe when the next person gets married, you’ll all see each other again. But there is a little bit of distance there.

Is there anything we don’t know about those films yet?

Of course. I’m sure most of the really fun stuff that’s publishable has been mined, but you’re talking about two years of people’s lives. It was a pretty unbelievable experience. A lot of times when stories are told, there’s usually an angle on it, so I don’t know what other angles there are out there. I’m sure there are a lot. I feel like even with the total wealth of stuff that’s been put out there, that kind of stuff only reflects part of what my experience was. But I don’t know that what my experience was is going to be entertaining for readers to hear about. What kind of vegetables we had in New Zealand that were in season that time of year.

Do you remember that?

Well, I could never keep up with it then. The one thing they always have in New Zealand, it’s kind of like a squash. I can’t remember the name of it now. Yeah, put that in there. A signed autographed poster by the cast of Lord of the Rings if anyone can name the vegetable that was the predominant vegetable.

I remember when Rudy came out, it was compared to a Rocky type story. Now do you find movies are compared to a Rudy type story?

Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot. It’s sort of a classic underdog tone that the movie put out there. You see journalists who’ll write about movies. This movie is a horse racing movie so you’ve got Seabiscuit, but there’ve been so many movies, every sport now it seems like. We haven’t done a curling movie, but that feeling, that idea. What I love about Rudy, one of the many things I love about it, is that it’s an upwardly mobile social treatise, that if you work hard and you get an education and you believe in yourself and you get a little bit lucky, you can raise your station in this world. That’s a quintessential American narrative. People love dreamers. It’s ripe for satire too. It’s easy to make fun of that but when I’m walking through the airport and a group of guys sees me, they’ll just go, “Rudy! Rudy!” They’ll start the chant. I mostly hear it when people say, “Well, it’s like that. It’s like a Rudy or it’s like a Hoosiers or Rocky.” There’s a group of them and there’s usually lists that come out. Rudy has found its way onto some of those lists.

You must get attention from sports fans and fantasy buffs.

I do. It’s a good thing. Now hopefully horse racing fans. Hopefully they don’t hate me for being such an idiot. There’s good idiot and bad idiot. I hope I’m a good idiot in this.

One thing that annoyed me when Rudy came out, my local newspaper critic complained that it wasn’t a Rocky story because he didn’t help win the game. He only made it to the final plays. I wanted to write in and remind him how Rocky 1 ended.

No, but Hoosiers was made by David Anspaugh and Angelo Pizzo, the director and writer. It was the story of the unbelievably wild success story of an Indiana basketball team that came from nowhere, a small town team to go on and win the national title against teams with guys who went right to the NBA. And they did that. They won the championship. It was a buzzer beater. Dennis Hopper’s character was an alcoholic who was on the bench, all this amazing stuff and it was about a winner. The guys wanted to do a story about the last guy on the bench. They liked that for him, winning was relative. It was specific to him and his life. You think of Patton, at the beginning of Patton he goes, “America loves a winner! Nobody ever won a war dying for their country. They won a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” You look at Rudy and he’s exactly right on the one hand. He doesn’t help win the game. The game is over. Even if they’d have been run back for an opposing touchdown, they still had a three touchdown lead. It was what it meant to him and what it meant to his family, what it meant to the people that knew them. You’ve got to be a pretty coldhearted son of a bitch if you hear about somebody’s life story and they tell you a moment that was a signature moment in their life and that their family responded to, and you’re like, “Oh well, whatever.” Should every family’s moment be made a movie? I don’t know, but when you factor in Notre Dame, it’s the first time since Knute Rockne, All American with Ronald Reagan playing George Gipp that they had let the movie be shot on the University campus.

But Rocky 1 isn’t about winning in the end either. It’s just about making it, so I think that critic missed the comparison. He was thinking of the Rocky sequels.

No, but I’m getting at what’s underneath that. Yeah, arguably the Rocky movies, when he goes back and wins in the second one and goes to Russia, each of those movies, Seabiscuit, Tin Cup. Did he not like Tin Cup because Tin Cup didn’t win? Tin Cup fails so spectacularly that it becomes a signature thing.

We’ve seen you play characters from dramatic to outrageous comedy. What kind of guy is Dusty?

Dusty is an eternal optimist and he is a guy who didn’t come from much. He didn’t have a background in money or anything. He’s earnest and he’s fun and he’s a little dumb, flat out. The director would probably be very upset. He’s not dumb. He’s just so confident when he shouldn’t be. He makes lots of mistakes but he perseveres. I think the fact that I portrayed Rudy, I think Rudy and Doug from 50 First Dates, if you could combine their DNA and just plop them into the horse racing world, you’ve got Dusty.

Are there great sports cliché training montages?

There’s a lot of clichéd moments in this movie. They should have called it Cliché. We should have had a horse named Cliché. “That’s Cliché coming around the outside.” Like Rocky, maybe there’s a couple. Those aren’t the moments that jump out the most to me about this movie. This movie’s about little personal moments that you see and happen in little steps along the way. A lot of people don’t know anything about horse racing but a lot of people who do know about horse racing don’t really know anything about what goes into it. Even the fact that people who own the horses hire people called trainers, they go and train the horses and hire the grooms, get all the feed right and the medical stuff and make decisions about what races to enter them in. They talk to the jockeys’ agents and have to deal with all the rules. There’s that kind of stuff.

With this knowledge you’ve gained from the film, would you feel comfortable making a bet?

See, here’s the thing. I bet my house on Friday night and my children are homeless now. No, I got very excited about having a particular system of betting. Alex Rocco who plays and owner that I work for who fires me in the movie, everyone was talking about, “Oh, Sean’s got a system, Sean’s got a system.” So I sat down and described the system and he said, “Don’t ever tell anybody what you just told me. You can’t do that.” And went on to explain what it was. So I bet, I had fun one night, actually for a day and a half of racing here at Hollywood Park. I bet a bunch and I pretty much lost everything I bet. When it was over, I thought that’s not the most fun part. And my brother won everything. He won three exactas, three trifectas in a row and one two long shots. Exacta is two, first and second, trifecta is first, second and third. You can box them, which means you click the box and you play three times as much. Then if those three horses come across the finish line in any order, first, second and third, you win. He won three of those right off the bat, three trifectas which is really, really rare for that to happen. So with two dollars, he turned it into $300. I took $200 and turned it into nothing.

What was your faulty system?

The way I wanted to look at it was just look at their most recent six races and say, “Okay, who’d won the most races, who’d come in first and second the most in their last six races.” Then I would group them together and then come up with little combinations of how to bet on those people so that if even most of the bets didn’t pay off, one or two of those front runners should come in at least third and then that third would pay it off. It certainly made a lot of sense to me but the odds are tricky, because if it’s a front runner, the better chance it has to win, the less it’s going to pay if you win. That’s the guy I’m looking for to pay off my downside if I don’t win everything else or some of the other things. You can’t bet on every horse in the race. You’ve got to pick a horse. It doesn’t matter how good they are. Part of the problem with that system is the horses are in different classes, so this one horse could’ve won or come in second in four of its last six races. But now it’s running a longer race against a different class of horse. It’d be lucky if it comes in third or fourth. There’s the newspapers you get and the betting guides, there’s so much detail and so many different factors that you can choose to focus on when you’re placing your bet. Then you’ve got handicappers who’d tell you things. There’s all different kinds to think about but your little girl can walk in and say, “Daddy, I like Runs Like a Rose” so you bet on Runs Like a Rose with 50 to 1 odds and Runs Like a Rose wins and you just won a ton of money because your daughter picked one.