Sam Rockwell – The Visible Man

Long celebrated for his ability to disappear into characters, actor's actor Sam Rockwell finally gets some limelight of his own.

- By Jesse Will. Photographs by Michael Schwartz

THE ATRIUM OF THE BOWERY HOTEL IN Lower Manhattan is extremely dim, aside from a few spots, including the glowing iPhone Sam Rockwell holds in his palm. It’s a Friday evening, and he’s giving me a rodeo demonstration of a sort, showing me a slow-motion video of some downtime on the set of the Nazi farce Jojo Rabbit. Rockwell plays a closeted gay officer in the film, disillusioned with the regime; in the video on his phone, the actor appears in half costume, standing in jodhpurs on a windy hilltop outside Prague, rope in hand, churning a lariat in an even circle.

“You have to make your hand like a cobra—keep your palm down, see?” the actor tells me. “This is a head rope, here— I’m not sure I could do a heel rope.” Seconds later, the video shows Rockwell flinging the loop, landing it cleanly around the torso of Roman Griffin Davis, Jojo’s toothy, tousled 12-year-old lead, costumed in his character’s Hitler Youth getup. Davis, hands at his sides, giggles as he’s caught.

“There you go. Roping Nazis.” Rockwell says, setting down the phone.

The scene is surreal and suitably Rockwellian: There’s no lassoing in Jojo Rabbit. Between takes, the actor was just brushing up on some of the myriad of strange skills he has picked up over the course of 70-plus films, in which he has portrayed spacemen, politicians, psychopaths, dirty cops, and, of course, cowboys, most of whom dwell in the dusk between good and evil.