Joseph Gordon-Levitt gained fame in the hit comedy series ThirdRockFromtheSun,as a 1,000-year-old interstellar life form that had assumed the shape of a wisecracking teenager. Now, in MysteriousSkin,New Queer Cinema "bad boy" Gregg Araki's adaptation of Scott Heim's novel about the traumatic aftereffects of pedophile seduction, Gordon-Levitt has a decidedly different role, that of a cynical, stone-cold gay street hustler. There hasn't been a part like it since River Phoenix starred in MyOwnPrivateIdaho.And just as it did for Phoenix, MysteriousSkinhas given this longtime child performer (whose screen career began with ARiverRunsThroughItwhen he was all of 10) the "transitional role" of a lifetime.
OCWeekly:Didyousensewhenyoureadthescriptwhatthisfilmcoulddoforyou?
JosephGordon-Levitt:People always talk about how you're perceived and what's going to happen to you as you get older. The worries are valid, but if you get wrapped up in that, you're lost. So many people I've talked to about this movie frame it as a "career move." As if I wanted to change people's perceptions of me, and so I chose a role where I could blah blah blah. I'm just very lucky to have found Gregg, and I'll always be grateful to him for seeing this part in me. ThirdRockstopped when I was 19. I did MysteriousSkinwhen I was 22. In between was my freshman year in college—those nine months of the first two semesters at Columbia were by far the longest break I'd had from acting. Most of the scripts you get aren't any good at all. Here, you could really tell the writer put in a lot of thought and care. I hadn't seen any of Gregg's movies before I read the script. Then I watched DoomGenerationand Nowhere,and it was, "Wow, this guy really knows how to manipulate sound and vision." Even for Gregg, though, MysteriousSkinis a really special movie. It's not like he's totally departed from all things Gregg. It's a Gregg movie. But it's a big turn of the page for him. Partly because it's the first time he's adapted someone else's book, and partly because he's grown. Obviously a Gregg Araki fan would love it. But for people who don't know him, or who think they know him, this is something new.
IwouldimagineafterTen Things I Hate About You youweregettingalotofteencomedies.
There are certain formulas that big movie studios follow, and I'd worked within them. I'd been kind of a "trustee" to a formula. Gregg was the first one with the wherewithal and the confidence in me to see past my résumé.
Well,youwereonThird Rock forsixyears.
It was beautiful, and I would never say anything against it. I loved ThirdRock.Everyone in the cast were theater actors, and we had such a great relationship with our audience. That was a really lively show.
Herewereallthesereallybigactors,notjustphysicallybutstylistically.Andthereyouare,thiskid,makingyourmarkintheirmidst.
It's funny you should use the word big.That was one of our mantras: "Bigger, faster, funnier." It was all of my teenage years—we did the pilot when I was 13 and finished when I was 19. It was the best training that anyone could possibly hope for. It really taught me what I know about acting. You know, it's funny, but I really didn't take this part apart. I have done that with other roles. For MysteriousSkinI didn't, largely at Gregg's behest. He was like, "Don't worry about it too much. I don't want you to think about it too much." So this performance is really about not trying too hard and trusting Gregg.
Fromwhatyouweresayingearlier,itsoundsasifyoumighthavebeenthinkingofgettingoutofthebusiness.
When I was a teenager, I was so scared of being called a celebrity. I hated that whole hegemonic idea that they had cooked up for us—that certain people are more important than other people. I didn't want to be part of that. When I was young, I would have preferred to have gone to work every day, made those shows and had no one ever see them. I'd lived in a small world, and I was a selfish 15-year-old. I wasn't doing it for anybody else. I had grown pretty cynical. All my friends had graduated high school and had that thing of "Well, you can do anything in the world, it's up to you," and I envied that, I wanted that. Moving to New York, my whole world got a lot bigger. I felt a different sense of what the world was, and what I was in the world. And I figured out that the way to relate to the world is through what you're really good at. In my case, that's acting.
Iimaginethisfilmhascementedthatfeeling.
I'm so excited to be coming home for this. I was born and raised in the Valley, so I put the Sunset 5 [the West Hollywood theater where MysteriousSkinis also playing] on a pedestal. 'Cause when I turned 16 and got my driver's license I was so excited to drive over Laurel Canyon and go to the Sunset 5, because that was during the big boom of indie movies like TreesLoungeand SlingBlade.That's the really big deal to me. I've never had a movie that played the Sunset 5!
EDITOR'S NOTE: WHAT FOLLOWS DID NOT APPEAR IN THE PRINT VERSION OF THIS STORY. SHOULD YOU READ ON, CONSIDER THIS A LOUD WARNING ABOUT SPOILERS. OKAY, CARRY ON...
