02/28/07
Text: Lilibet Snelling
Photographers: Dustin A. Beatty
Joseph Gordon-Levitt has put on a tie, as he does before every interview. This wouldn’t be noteworthy if not for the fact that we’re talking to each other on the phone. “Yeah, I put on a tie to talk to you,” he admits, laughing at the absurdity. “Doing interviews requires a certain mindset. You have to speak in a way that’s quotable and translates to text—if I put on a tie it helps me remember that.” Professional attire or not, the 26-year-old possesses an air of sophistication and professionalism that is well beyond his years. (This is a kid who, at 18, quit acting to go to Columbia where ended up taking classes only in French, which he found more interesting. “Even if some student was saying some bullshit, they were saying it in French, so it was still teaching me something.”) He’s been a part of Hollywood for over twenty years and has, against all industry odds, turned out to be shockingly normal. After a very successful run as a child star (his performance in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It won him a Young Artist Award as the “Best Actor Under Ten”) and a teen actor (yes, he is that dude from 3rd Rock from the Sun), Gordon-Levitt has also emerged as one of the most powerful young actors in independent film. In 2004 he won critical acclaim, and the top award at the Seattle Film Festival, for his portrayal of a homosexual prostitute in Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin. He starred in 2005’s postmodern film noir Brick, which won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for its “Originality of Vision.” And while there are two camps that know this kid quite well (those who watched him for six years on said 3rd Rock, and those for which the indie films are cult obsessions) he is relatively unknown to the majority who find no home in either faction. That’ll change soon enough, since in 2007 he returns with leading roles in three major films. In March, he stars in The Lookout, Academy Award-nominated writer Scott Frank’s (Out of Sight, Get Shorty) offbeat heist flick. He plays a once-promising high school hockey player who, after suffering severe brain damage following a car accident, takes a job as a janitor on the graveyard shift and finds himself entangled in a bank robbery. Following that, he will play an American solider in Iraq alongside Ryan Phillippe and Channing Tatum in a film by Kimberly Peirce (the director who made Hillary Swank a household name in Boys Don’t Cry). And then there’s Killshot, a film by John Madden (Shakespeare In Love, Proof), where he stars as a psychopathic young killer in a cast that includes Mickey Rourke, Rosario Dawson and Johnny Knoxville.
While his recent work has been fairly mainstream, Gordon-Levitt believes that the days of the multi-multi-million-dollar studio film are coming to an end. “The only reason that those crappy movies have made money is because, in the past, there haven’t been other options. But now all you need is a video camera and a computer and an Internet connection to make something and put it out there. The people who are just apathetically making bad stuff to make money are gonna be out of job, which will be great. The difference is: what are people doing it for? Do they love it or are they just trying to make some money? Is there a story to tell here, or is it just a marketing ploy?”
