You're just not ready to do this movie." So I said, "Well, I better listen to Gus Van Sant." I'm a huge Drugstore Cowboy fan. You're not ready for this-but you should go to acting class. Gus stopped me and said, "Simon, this is not going too well. I went in, I read with Matt Damon, did a cold read.
#Simon rex house movie#
Then when I was at MTV, Gus Van Sant called and said, "I want to read Simon for a movie I'm doing called Good Will Hunting.” This was in 1996. And I went off to Europe and did modeling, and MTV hired me based on that. I was approached-when I should have gone to college-for this modeling job. I don't think I ever had delusions of grandeur in the show business world. Had you always dreamed of being an actor? Jamie Dornan came up to me at the Telluride Film Festival and shook my hand and said, "I think you gave the best performance I've seen in a long time, and I could have never done what you did. I just got to read lines." It's kind of cathartic. I remember after doing stand-up, I'm like, "Oh, now I can do any audition. It's almost like when I did stand-up comedy. Surprisingly enough, acting naked is actually easier because you're completely vulnerable and there's nothing to hide. Is it difficult to act when you're naked? And it worked, because I think the role required it. I was just like, "Let's just go for it." It was just like jumping into the deep end of the pool.
Basically, it felt like the world was ending anyway. You weren't nervous about being the star of a movie when you'd never done that before? I deleted all my social media off my phone to not be distracted, drove to Texas, memorized it, and off we went.
So I was a little intimidated by the amount of dialogue to memorize. I mean, it's a two-hour movie, and I think I'm on every page. You have a rental car down the street-hit the road right now." He sent me the script, and it was a lot of dialogue. But if you fly here, we have to quarantine you for a week. He said, "Okay, I need you in Texas in three days. I do a cold read on my telephone, in my kitchen, out in Joshua Tree, where I live, and I send it to him. He sends me a paragraph of the opening scene of the movie. I got a call from a friend of mine who knew Sean Baker and his sister, and he said, "Hey, Simon, what are you doing for the next month?" I said, "Nothing." And she said, "Can I introduce you to Sean Baker? He's interested in talking to you." He gets my number he calls me. I was sitting around during the pandemic, in July of 2020-as we all were-kind of not knowing what's going on. This project came to me in a very random, different way. For W’s annual Best Performances issue, Rex tells Lynn Hirschberg about his childhood obsession with A Christmas Story and what being an only child taught him about a sense of humor. It's been really amazing." Despite spending most of his time almost three hours outside of L.A., the actor and musician has still been plenty busy, making his starring-role debut in the critically acclaimed black comedy Red Rocket. It was more to decompress from the chaos of the city, get into nature, and breathe, have space. "Moving to Joshua Tree was never a full-time plan. "I'm overstimulated in Los Angeles or New York or San Francisco or wherever there's too many people," he tells W. Son’s Strawberry fills in the blanks of a character that never fully transcends Lone Star Lolita status (though many critics, female and male, see it otherwise).The actor Simon Rex gets bored in the desert town of Joshua Tree, California, which he calls home. The first hour is terrific the second one, disappointingly, grows weaker and more conventional. Baker’s eye for composition is strikingly good he knows when to pivot off Mikey and over to the long-suffering women in his scattershot life. The film does not lionize the character, but building a film around this character, today, will be several bridges too far for any number of viewers.īaker and cinematographer Drew Daniels shot “Red Rocket” in a hurry, on 16 millimeter film, with a slew of non-actors or first-timers backing up the pros. The premise here, of course, is galling: Mikey and Strawberry’s relationship is both sexual and, as Mikey hopes - he’s grooming her for a career in porn, and a return to the business for himself - transactional. Simon Rex in a scene from "Red Rocket." (Courtesy of A24 Films/AP)īaker is on a streak: “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project” were among the most distinctive, ground-level slices of life of their respective years.
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