Sam Rockwell, among the many other positive things you can say about the guy – that he’s versatile, almost unfairly talented, and always picks interesting projects – happens to be intrinsically likable performer. It’s why we don’t get bored of watching two versions of him in Duncan Jones’ sci-fi head trip Moon; it's also why we buy him as the lead of a lighthearted rom-com in Lynn Shelton’s 2014 charmer, Laggies. Rockwell, with his scruffy charm and inimitably sardonic line delivery, is quite simply a winning screen presence. We want to watch what happens to him because, as an individual, he projects the relatable, rough-around-the-edges aura of someone we might know in real life.

That said – and really, this is a crucial distinction to make – the characters that Rockwell chooses to play are often far from charming. Best case scenario, they're rascals. Worst case scenario, they are wretched, loathsome, morally bankrupt psychopaths (and yes, we are aware that Rockwell is arguably the most memorable component of a film quite literally titled Seven Psychopaths). There is obviously a kind of sliding scale when it comes to embodying fictional archetypes that could be charitably deemed unlikable or even monstrous: in other words, there’s a world difference between playing a literal Nazi (in 2019’s “anti-hate satire” Jojo Rabbit) and playing a disturbed man struggling with familial insecurity and addiction (in David Gordon Green’s small-town noir, Snow Angels).

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Sam Rockwell in Moon
Image via Sony Picture Classics

With these films, Rockwell is bravely challenging us not to like him. He wants us to keep watching, to pay attention to all the moving pieces of his performance. He also wants us to reserve our judgment, to have something complex to talk about on the drive home from the movie theater. As an artist, Rockwell's interests clearly go beyond reductive concepts like "likability." Rockwell wants to show us the damaged, but ultimately very real side of these lost, often disagreeable oddballs. His continued quest to do just that has made him one of America’s consistently brilliant character actors.

Rockwell began popping up in movies throughout the 1990’s, injecting notes of sleepy, eccentric menace in everything from 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (where he’s simply credited as “Head Thug”), the N.Y.C. indie-cool landmark In The Soup, and the Paul Schrader-directed drug-world character study, Light Sleeper. The California-born Rockwell, clearly a star in the making, finally got his break with a pair of enduring, beloved cult movies, Safe Men and Galaxy Quest. With those pictures, Rockwell was inching closer and closer to landing on Hollywood's larger radar.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind – where Rockwell stepped into the shoes of Chuck Barris, the former game show host who wrote an unauthorized biography where he claimed to have worked for the CIA – tipped the scale in terms of Rockwell's celebrity and public visibility. The Charlie Kaufman-penned black comedy is also arguably the first instance where Rockwell plays a morally compromised, even monstrous character. While not completely without endearing qualities, Rockwell’s Barris is still an arrogant, amoral, id-driven striver, and the performance that the actor hands in is astonishing for how raw and un-polished it feels (this is particularly worthy of mention when one considers that Confessions was the feature film directing debut of the famously polished George Clooney).

snow angels sam rockwell image
Image via Warner Independent Pictures

2007's Snow Angels, while it remains a fairly under-discussed entry in Rockwell’s filmography (the guy has 100+ credits to his name on IMDB, after all), saw the actor continuing to defy audience preconceptions. Rockwell commits fearlessly to the part of Glenn Marchand: a born-again Christian who falls off the wagon and begins acting out in frightening, violent ways when his daughter goes missing in their family’s Pennsylvania town. We see Glenn come unglued over and over again, and while it never gets any easier to watch, Rockwell nevertheless resists the facile urge to turn the character into a monster – which becomes a tricky prospect for the audience when we learn what Glenn is capable of.

Rockwell is similarly mesmerizing in his refusal to whitewash what could be perceived as his character’s “flaws” or even monstrous qualities in that same year's The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. In Andrew Dominik's film, Rockwell, plays Charley Ford, the dim-witted, tragic brother of Casey Affleck’s disturbed gunman Robert Ford. Charley is not totally a monster... unless the mere act of existing among monsters makes one a monster. At his worst, Charley is merely complicit in monstrous acts. He is a happy-go-lucky hayseed: a less-than-holy fool who knows that life is infinitely easier when you keep your head down and simply mind your business. Charley is too fundamentally pure-hearted to ever be labeled as monstrous, but in the film’s unsettling, protracted coda – where Charley takes to a life as a theater actor, only to essentially exorcise his culpability in the murder of Brad Pitt’s Jesse James, in front of a live, paying audience – is a riveting bit of Meta-critique, offering up some of the most purely visceral screen acting that Rockwell has given us.

three billboards outside ebbing missouri sam rockwell
Image via Fox Searchlight Pictures

The scumbum lawman that Rockwell plays in Martin McDonagh’s divisive 2017 satire Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri possesses little in the way of Charley Ford’s charm or moral ambiguity. Officer Jason Dixon is a bigoted, under-educated, proudly ignorant enforcement cop who patrols his beat in the fictional town alluded to in the movie’s title. He is also a vile, prejudiced monster, plain and simple. The tightrope walk of McDonagh’s movie – and the reason why many viewers, this writer included, are not particularly keen on it, Rockwell’s remarkable work excluded – is that we are ultimately asked to excuse Dixon's frankly inexcusable behavior in favor of something approximating “humane” portraiture. McDonagh clearly wants us to peer beneath this lost soul’s veneer of hostility and see the concerned citizen lurking underneath the mound of reactionary hatred. Yet, while the movie’s confused political intentions end up buckling under the weight of McDonagh’s overleveraged writing, Rockwell transcends the mess of the film surrounding him. He not only delivers one of his most galvanic performances, but one that would go on to cast a considerable shadow of influence over the next half a decade of his career.

As if determined to one-up the reprehensibility factor of a character who uses racial epithets with the same frequency and enthusiasm that some California residents use the word “dude,” Rockwell played an even more terrible person for his next major role: that would be 2018’s Vice, where Rockwell turned former U.S. president George W. Bush into a grinning, oblivious man-child idiot without softening his edges in the slightest. Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi's bizarre and whimsical comedy about a precocious Hitler youth whose imaginary best friend is the führer himself, presented a similarly risky gamble. Was Rockwell seemingly taking these parts to see if he could mine humanity from these monstrous characters? In the film, Rockwell plays a nasty, Jew-hating Nazi Captain, Klenzendorf. Yet, because Waititi possesses a gentle storyteller's touch, Rockwell makes his fascist character more of a doddering buffoon than an actual threat. Klenzendorf, in the end, is more a Nazi version of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp then Hans Landa.

A shallow argument would posit that that it is irresponsible of Rockwell to humanize these monsters. It is admittedly true that Nazis, racist cops, and corrupt politicians are not villains that exclusively exist on the big screens. They are unfortunately very real, and they present a legitimate threat to good, ordinary people every day.

mr-wolf-the-bad-guys
Image via Dreamworks Animation

Alas, this line of thinking gets dangerously close to the notion of examining art through a strictly moral lens. Rockwell, in many ways, is an exploratory performer. He's not someone who traffics in broad, self-flattering gestures. He’s a dreamer, a perpetually curious mind, constantly in search of the things that excite and challenge him. One gets the sense that he would rather retire than hand in the same performance twice, and when the scope of your talent is as vast as his is, you’re bound to play a few bad apples during your time in the spotlight. It can’t be a total coincidence that Rockwell’s most recent major screen credit was a kid-friendly animated caper literally called The Bad Guys, can it?

As audiences, we have become accustomed to thinking about heroes and villains in fairly two-dimensional, cut-and-dry ways. Heroes save the day and protect the interests of our planet and its people; villains are the ones with silly-yet-sinister catchphrases and tics that signify their obvious evil. Of course, there is nothing obvious about what Sam Rockwell does as an actor: he understands that, at their core, people, even villains, are messy, deeply complicated creatures, and that even the worst among us have a human quality or two that can be latched on to as a conduit through which one can tell a powerful story. Rockwell still stands as one of our most daringly original American actors, and it’s largely because he’s not afraid to play anyone, no matter how terrible that person might seem to anyone else. Bless him for that.