With his hair long and approaching that iconic bob, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is back to looking like he did during the first seasons of Third Rock from the Sun nearly 10 years ago. That's putting a little bit of a crimp in the 24-year-old's leading-man status, but while there's not much he can do about his baby face, he's doing everything else in his power to put his days as a cute, sunny child actor behind him.
The start of that campaign is the sexually explicit independent film Mysterious Skin, in which Gordon-Levitt plays a gay teenage hustler who was abused by his Little League coach long ago. Lean, muscled and with his hair cropped close, he is almost unidentifiable as that kid from Angels in the Outfield.
After Mysterious Skin comes Brick, a sardonic drama coming out later in 2005 where his character breaks into a high school mafialike clique in order to rescue his ex-girlfriend. Cloaked in a trench coat and speaking in a highly stylized noir-thriller manner, he's as far from the patter of Tommy the alien as he can get. The two films premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January as kind of a double feature of Gordon-Levitt's dark new mood.
"In movies, in order to show light you have to show dark," he says. "If you just show light, then you're just showing bulls**t. That's not real life. It's just paper thin."
Gordon-Levitt started to be attracted to violent low-budget films as soon as he turned 16 and could drive himself to the movie theater. "It was just when the boom of indie movies were coming out, like Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects," he says, sitting in the lobby of a SoHo hotel during the Tribeca Film Festival, where Mysterious Skin was screening. "At the time, I was working on Third Rock ‑- which was a great experience and taught me a lot ‑- but of course the grass is always greener on the other side. I wanted to be in indie movies."
He immediately landed a role playing a teen drifter with AIDS in a gritty little drama called Sweet Jane, which very few people saw. He followed that with a string of similar roles in equally obscure indies and with small parts in "mean" teen genre flicks like 10 Things I Hate about You and Halloween H20.
"Since I stopped acting for a few years [to go to Columbia University] and started again, I haven't done any studio movies," Gordon-Levitt says. The last Disney-related thing he worked on was Treasure Planet, which was released three years ago but which he actually finished when he was 17.
"I don't think people are quite sure what to make of me right now," he adds. "I just want to do movies that I think are good. If certain people can't get beyond the fact that I was on TV, then okay."
As for what the low-budget approach to his career is doing for his independence in life as a freewheeling bachelor jetting between New York and Los Angeles, Gordon-Levitt can only shrug.
"Luckily I made some money on TV," he says.
See Joseph emerge from our Revolving Door and find out what Hollywood heartthrob he's replacing.
