Joseph Gordon-Levitt has come a long way from TV's Third Rock from the Sun. After five years on the hit sitcom, the talented young former child actor has exploded on the indie film scene with riveting performances in Manic, Brick and, especially, the searing Mysterious Skin, in which he played a gay hustler struggling with the long-term emotional fallout of sexual abuse.
Now he returns with another portrait of disaffected youth. In The Lookout, Gordon-Levitt plays the physically and emotionally damaged Chris Pratt, who has memory problems after a debilitating car accident and becomes involved with a gang planning a bank heist where he is the night janitor.
Windy City Times: You're really good at playing these conflicted, screwed-up guys. What appeals to you about these parts?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I think human beings in general are complex. It's pretty unfortunately common in the movie business to write characters who are simplistic. Maybe it's because they're talking down to their audience or because they're just lazy writers or what. But to me, the most interesting characters to watch and to play are the ones who have more than one thing to them. There's lots of things to them—they're complicated. There's no black or white; there are lots of shades of gray and maybe they do contradict themselves. Those are the ones I'm always attracted to.
WCT: Are you looking for a lot of direction?
JG-L: It [ varies from ] moment to moment. Sometimes you need more and sometimes you need less and sometimes as an actor you can really pay attention to yourself. With the character of Chris, I couldn't. I couldn't go over and watch the playback. It would make me self-conscious in a way I just couldn't be. So I had to totally trust Scott [ Frank, the director ] that when he thought something was good for me.
WCT: About your process to get to the essence of a character like this: It seems kind of tortured, from what I've read. Are you able to separate the character from yourself at the end of the day?
JG-L: I don't think I walk around as the character, but when I was up in Winnipeg shooting The Lookout there wasn't anything else on my mind. I wasn't concerning myself with anything else, so even when I would go home at the end of the day it's not that I was in character, but I was definitely absorbed with and thinking about what I was going to do the next day. And everything that I would do would be aimed at making sure I was ready for the next day. It turned out that, for me, it was important to go away from the character so that I could spring back to it the next morning. For example, pretty much every night I'd come home and read the news for a little while—just to stretch out that part of your mind that Chris just doesn't have access to. It's like scratching an itch that I can't scratch all day.
WCT: Very interesting. I want to switch films for a second. I'm writing for an LGBT audience so, of course, I've got to ask you a little bit about Mysterious Skin. I wrote in my review that your work was 'exquisitely textured.'
JG-L: Thank you!
WCT: But I have to tell you that it was terribly difficult to watch somebody in such terrible emotional pain. Can you talk about making that amazing film for a moment?
JG-L: Well, thank you. I'm glad you liked it. What can I say? I'm not sure where to begin…
WCT: There's a lot there…
JG-L: Yes.
WCT: Well, how about just talk about working with Gregg Araki?
JG-L: It's interesting that you brought up, 'How much do you like to be directed?' because it does differ from character to character. On Mysterious Skin, Gregg showed a lot of wisdom real early on. I remember that one of the first times we sat down to talk about how to approach the character and I came with my novel and my script and I'd made my notes and underlined stuff in the novel. I kind of had it in my head that I wanted to map out what was going on with the character in each scene and make sure the beats landed, etc. Gregg answered all the questions that I had for him but then he said, 'I don't think you should think about this too much.' It made me sit back and say, 'Oh you know, he's probably right.' From that point on I didn't think about things very much. I did my homework and some preparation—I learned an accent—but mostly I just took that shoot really easy.
WCT: More of a sensory process?
JG-L: Yes, it was just kind of letting everything in and letting everything out. I was trying not to try.
WCT: I imagine it would have been very hard to prepare for the last scene in the film.
JG-L: Yes, there was no preparing for that and there wasn't any intention to it, either. It just kind of happened.
WCT: You've now played a gay hustler, a Mormon, a high school teen detective in the Humphrey Bogart mold and, now, an emotionally and physically damaged Everyman—not to mention a comic alien on TV [ JG-L laughs ] . So what's next in the JG-L rogues gallery?
JG-L: Well, there's a movie that's going to come out this year called Kill Shot. I get to play a psychopathic redneck killer with Mickey Rourke. That was real fun.
WCT: Hmmm. No musical or comedy in the works?
JG-L: [ Laughs ] Not yet, not yet.
