Now twenty-five, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been acting since he was seven, appearing in films like Angels in the Outfield and The Juror, and TV shows like Roseanne and 3rd Rock From the Sun. His six seasons on 3rd Rock, where he played one of four aliens living on earth, are what he's best known for, but even as early as 2001's juvie mental institution drama Manic, he was showing that he was a formidable dramatic actor as well. Manic went largely unseen (and wasn't distributed till 2003), but his fearless appearance three years later in Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, in which he played a charismatic pederasty-victim-turned-gay hustler, effectively established him as one of his generation's most promising dramatic leads. Last year's Brick, in which he starred as an eccentrically withdrawn high school version of Sam Spade, both continued his streak and demonstrated his versatility.

Gordon-Levitt's newest film, The Lookout, finds him again as the lead, this time playing a young man with severe brain damage who gets embroiled in a planned bank heist. His future work includes supporting roles in John Madden's Elmore Leonard adaptation Killshot, also starring Diane Lane and Mickey Rourke, as well as the Iraq drama Stop Loss, Kimberly Peirce's long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don't Cry. — Matt Prigge

In an interview from before shooting The Lookout, you said this would be your hardest role. Did that turn out to be true?


I think it did, yeah. Partially because I'm in the whole thing, and because it's a bigger movie. I've been in whole movies recently, but they were smaller budgets. They were maybe five-week shoots, whereas this was two-and-a-half months. So that made it harder. But more important than that was the character. He's been in this accident, so little things we can do automatically he has to focus on. Life's hard for him. And I wanted everything to be hard for me, too.



How did you prepare to portray a character with severe brain damage?

I did some reading about the condition. But what was more helpful than that was hanging out with guys who had been through it. What I learned when hanging out with these guys was that you can't put anybody in a box. Hanging out with them was mostly like hanging out with anybody. And that made me want to make the character a whole person. I didn't want the character to have a big sticker on his forehead that said, "Look at me, I'm brain-injured." I wanted him to be just another person.



Were there any ways you developed to convey his condition? Any tricks?


That's exactly it: I didn't want to do that. I think if you try to reduce it to a trick, you're not really trying to convey it. It will just come off fake. First of all, the manifestations of his disability were already there in the script — when he locks his keys in the car, or his speech habit, where he can't control what he says. Scott Frank, the writer and director, had done his homework. So those explicit moments were already in the script. So I didn't want to add any more. But to me, rather than reducing the condition to quantifiable little nuggets, more important was just hanging out with people who've been through it, and letting it seep in. And really focusing in on who the character is as a person, rather than only focusing on his head injury. Focusing on his feelings of what's going on at any given scene, whether he's attracted to the girl he's talking to or whether he's remembering his past and regretting what happened with his accident.

Was the fact that the script focuses more on character than on gimmicks one of the things that attracted you to the Lookout?


Yeah. But the script is so well written. I think part of what's well-written about it is it's not simplistic or reductionist. In so many scripts, the characters are shallow stereotypes — the good guy who's nothing but good, the bad guy who's nothing but bad, the girl who's nothing but pretty. Scott wrote these characters as whole human beings. No human being that I've ever met was all good or bad. It's boring to try and play a character who's all good or all bad.



In what ways was it harder to play this character than the one in Mysterious Skin?

You know, it's funny, the discrepancy between the act of playing the role and then how it turns out in the movie. Playing the character in Mysterious Skin, I went out of my way to not make it hard. Because for that character, everything is easy, everything kind of comes to him. So I really was all about not trying too hard. And yet it's very hard for me to watch the movie, it's painful. The Lookout is the opposite. It was really painful for me to do, it was a real struggle everyday. And yet watching the movie, it's an entertaining, snappy bank heist movie.



What was it like doing the film noir of The Lookout as opposed to the more stylized film noir of Brick?

It's interesting. I've heard people make that comparison. I never really looked at [The Lookout] as film noir. I guess you could. But then again, I never really looked at Brick as film noir, either.



Did you always plan to continue acting as an adult, even when you were a kid?

I don't know. I really loved acting. And I quit for awhile. When I was nineteen, and I finished 3rd Rock From the Sun, I quit for three years. I moved to New York. And I went to college and didn't know what I was going to do. And I came back to acting because I found a new reason to do it. Before I did it because it was fun. But I really didn't like people seeing the stuff I'd done. I was kind of neurotic about it. I wanted to go to work because I loved doing it. But I kind of wished we could burn the film afterward. I think after moving to New York and growing up a little bit, I grew to realize I was part of the whole world. And that led to the question of how I connect with the world. And I came back to acting. It's different now. When people see something that I've done, I'm not scared of it anymore. I'm really appreciative if people say they loved Brick or that Mysterious Skin meant a lot to them or that 3rd Rock From the Sun made them laugh. It's so different now than when I was a kid.



Did you have any role models for graduating from child actor to adult actor?

I can't think of any. I never really thought of it that way.



I would've thought at least Jodie Foster.


She's a hell of an actor, yeah. That's a good one. She was really good when she was young and she's really good now. She actually came to the premiere of The Lookout because Scott Frank wrote Little Man Tate, which she directed. It was really an honor to meet her.

What kind of scripts were you getting around the time 3rd Rock From the Sun was coming to a close?


For awhile, I didn't look at any scripts because I had quit [laughs]. But when I decided I wanted to work again, for awhile it was all this pigeonholed stuff. Because movies are a business and for most movies, businessmen are in charge. And businessmen don't want to invest their money in something that doesn't have a history of making money. So the scripts that I would get from them were. . . you can imagine what they were. But the parts that I was lucky enough to get I didn't get because the businessmen approved me. I got them because they were movies where the filmmaker was in charge, and they didn't have to get the approval of businessmen. Like Manic. Jordan Melamed chose me because he thought I was the actor that could do it. He related to me not as a commodity but as a director to an actor. I will always be grateful to him, or to Gregg Araki who made Mysterious Skin . Or Rian Johnson who made Brick, or even Scott Frank who made The Lookout. All these guys believed in me as an actor and defied the businessman's formula.

A lot of people said Mysterious Skin was the movie that helped you shed your 3rd Rock From the Sun image. But it was really Manic, from a couple years before. Did Manic help you get the Mysterious Skin role?

Well, I hope I never shed my 3rd Rock From the Sun image. I'm deeply proud of that show. But yeah, Gregg Araki saw Manic and that was a big part of why he cast me, and Scott Frank saw Mysterious Skin, and that was a big part of why he cast me.



On your site, you have a short film you made called Pictures of Assholes, where you filmed a pair of paparazzi harassing you. Does that happen often?

No. No, it really doesn't happen. It just so happened that when it happened that one time, I had my camera.



They asked if you're an amateur filmmaker. Well, are you?


I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, I put stuff up on the site. I just like making and recording things, whether it be video or audio or text or whatever.



What kinds of things are they? Experimental? Narrative shorts?

I wouldn't put any of them in any categories. One that I'm probably the most proud of is based on a French poem. French is what I studied in school. I made an audio recording of the poem and recorded music to go along with it. And I shot images to correspond with the poem and made some different animations. That's what I worked on the hardest, that I'm probably most proud of on the site.



Your characters have been fairly different lately. What is your character in Killshot like?


He's a sociopathic killer who won't shut up. He sticks up 7-Eleven stores and rides shotgun with Mickey Rourke. He's fucking crazy.