INTERVIEW: Sam Rockwell on his long and eclectic acting career

"The audience is laughing at your tragedy or crying at your tragedy — but in comedy you have to find the tragedy as well"

A Single Shot
(Image credit: (Facebook/A Single Shot))

There are few actors with tastes more eclectic than Sam Rockwell. Since his big-screen debut in the 1989 horror film Clownhouse, Rockwell has spent his career ping-ponging unpredictably between roles in every genre imaginable: drama (The Green Mile), comedy (Galaxy Quest), action (Charlie's Angels), western (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), sci-fi (Moon), superhero (Iron Man 2), and even a 3D children's comedy (G-Force, in which he voiced a guinea pig that doubled as a government agent).

Rockwell's latest film, A Single Shot, is a rural noir in the vein of Winter's Bone or A Simple Plan that sees him forging, once again, into new territory as an actor. Rockwell stars as John Moon, a stoic backwoods hunter who accidentally shoots a woman while he's out chasing a deer. When he discovers that the woman was carrying a bag filled with cash, he decides to keep it for himself — a decision that doesn't sit well with the backwater criminals intent on recovering it. (Watch a trailer for A Single Shot below.)

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Scott Meslow

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.