The star of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket talks non-stop about rooting for the bad guy, learning how to listen, and the Letterboxd review that started it all.
When Sean Baker decided to take a chance on Simon Rex—the actor, model, comedian, and rapper (if you’ll call him Dirt Nasty) who’s been toiling away in Hollywood for the last twenty years without many lucky breaks—he was painfully aware of the stakes. “I gotta hit a grand slam on this one,” Rex re thinking after first reading the script for Red Rocket. “I can’t fuck this up.”
Rex is fizzing with energy, wide-eyed and never not gesticulating, as we meet over Zoom for his first conversation of the day in a seemingly endless stream of days full of interviews. He leap-frogs over questions, meandering amusingly into anecdotes unrelated to what he’s asked. He’s working the awards circuit hard, embracing the acclaim coming his way for his performance as washed-up porn star Mikey Saber who, I suggest to Rex, might fit a description coined by none other than softly-sung indie-slash-emo queen Phoebe Bridgers last year, with her sophomore record Punisher.
“I call them energy vampires, but I like ‘punisher’, too,” Rex says of his character, one of those archetypal people who really cannot and will not stop talking. “We all know this guy: he, or she, is in our family or social circles and it’s just exhausting,” he adds. “It was easy to click right into place when I read the script, because I was just like, ‘Yes. This is hilarious. He doesn’t shut up. He doesn’t listen.’”
The actor does listen to me, saving Bridgers’ record to his Apple Music playlists immediately (“That’s how you know I’m old,” he says of his choice of streaming platform) and taking my recommendation to watch Promising Young Woman in order to catch his longtime friend Paris Hilton’s song ‘Stars Are Blind’ finally given the respect it deserves. Still, the mile-a-minute performer does show eerie parallels with Mikey, even if he might not want to believe it. Not the “blind, narcissistic, sociopathic” bit, but in the way Mikey can be “boyish and charming” and has a relentless self-awareness of just exactly where his strengths lie.
“I took it really seriously,” Rex says of the role that brought him back into the spotlight. “I think I pulled it off, because what I’m hearing is that you and the audience enjoyed watching this guy make a mess of everything.” He’s right, we did: there’s a daring, irritating charisma to Mikey that keeps you hooked for the whole 130-minute runtime as he tries to make a name for himself back in his native Texas after decades spent in Hollywood. “I’ve lived in LA for the last twenty years,” Rex tells me for the first of many times during our conversation, “So there are plenty of people like Mikey. In this film he’s an adult-film star but, oh my god, this guy is everywhere. All over any career.”
Writing on Letterboxd, Shookone captures, in one paragraph, the essence of Red Rocket: “Shifting between low-life existence and omnipotence, white-trash America and malignant narcissism, happy-go-lucky easiness and manipulative mania, bon-vivant gold-digging and twisted morals, a man free like a bird and trapped in a society where an antisocial lifestyle can bring you far, if sold in the right fashion.” Their description feels keenly aligned with the enthusiastic, almost excessive detail and focused showmanship with which both my conversation with Rex and Red Rocket itself play out. The movie takes place during the 2016 US election, and the chilling truth of watching it in 2021 is that, as Laird points out, you now know of Mikey: “He could be president someday.”
Still, Rex will not take for granted how much painstaking work went into finding the right balance for his character. “Unlikeable is hard to pull off,” he says. “It can be done, if you think of Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm, or Taxi Driver, but it’s hard.” (Perhaps these titles could sit pretty in the microgenre Ethan Warren calls “the dirtbag picaresque”.)
Rex is happy to describe how much he did to make us like this despicable man so much. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an actor-y guy, but if you just read the script without seeing what I decided to do with it, it’s like, ‘Holy shit, this guy is horrible. Why would I root for him? Why am I going to watch him for two hours and care what happens?’” Looking me square in the eyes—hard to do over Zoom, but the lively actor nails it—Rex adds, “I always say, as a movie fan, if I’m not invested in the first twenty minutes the movie just falls flat for me. I wanted to make him somewhat likeable so the audience stays invested. Otherwise it’s like, ‘Well, who cares?’”
His stamina is almost overwhelming. He is now, as he was while shooting, trying so hard to distance himself from Mikey. “I just looked up my name in Hebrew,” Rex tells me, apropos of nothing, “and it means ‘to listen’, which is funny because it’s the opposite of Mikey!” The actor explains that the major lesson on the set of Red Rocket, a film populated with first-time and non-professional actors (nobody does this better than Baker, who, as Luke writes, “has his finger on the pulse of these American-underbelly stories”) was about learning when to, if you’ll believe it, stop talking.
“The magic happens when you’re genuinely listening and reacting,” says Rex. “The audience isn’t dumb, they can feel when something is fake or over-rehearsed. I was learning how to listen, so when Mikey does shut up—which is very rare—I found moments to respond and react, which is harder than it seems, believe it or not!”
I am interested in what Rex might have learned about his craft (twenty years in Los Angeles, ?) from his younger co-star Suzanna Son. In the film, she’s luminous as the seventeen-year-old Strawberry, a good girl and polite Donut Hole employee who Mikey decides he’ll take under his wing and make into a porn star (this, after he’s started hooking up with her and tried to intimidate her on-off young tomcat, Nash). “I’ve been in this business for 25 years,” Rex reminds me, “so at first I was like, ‘Is she gonna deliver?’ I’ve worked with people who have been in the business fifteen, twenty years who don’t. But everyone blew me away.”
He’s also referring to the likes of Bree Elrod and Brenda Deiss, who play his estranged wife Lexi and her mother Lil. “They were so new that it felt raw and magic,” he says. “It wasn’t like working with a jaded actor with an ego, or someone who came to work with their bullshit. So often, you’ve got a bunch of entitled, rich, famous actors complaining about why they haven’t gotten home yet, but we were all just happy to be there.”
Rex never fails to credit Baker for just how lucky he got. “I’m just a vehicle for his work, I didn’t want to let him down because he gave me a chance when not a lot of other people in Hollywood were giving me opportunities.” Rex is a revelation as Mikey, in part because of how well both men suit one another, but also because nobody saw this coming from the former MTV VJ. (It’s worth noting that Red Rocket received a rapturous five-minute standing ovation at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this summer—which Mikey would probably just think was a bit too short, to be honest.) Or, as Sam Herbst writes: “Did not see Simon Rex becoming the first Scary Movie cast member to get an Oscar nomination before Regina Hall.”
Except Baker knew exactly what he was doing, and has done since the ’90s when he first spotted Rex on MTV. His determination was crystallized on November 18, 2018, when Baker, a Letterboxd member, rewatched Joseph Kahn’s Bodied at the Rio Theater in Vancouver, and wrote this in his review: “Simon Rex has an extremely amusing cameo. Love him. I’d like to see him tackle a dramatic role.”
Rex nods and smiles when I ask him to read this quote aloud, and confirms Baker did indeed approach him after this diary entry. “He saw the movie and put me in the back of his brain,” he says. He praises Baker’s “brilliance” at forcing audiences—never far from Rex’s mind—to take a look at themselves, too. “Our movie holds up a mirror to yourself and makes you reflect. What does it say about you? Any good art is in the exchange between the artist and the viewer.”
And so what does Red Rocket say about Simon Rex? The actor claims he never wanted to be an actor, saying he never thought he’d have a shot. “I never had delusions of grandeur like Mikey that I would make it,” he says. But here we are, firmly in grand-slam, home-run, outta-the-park territory. Yet the moment of the film Rex holds closest to his heart is one of stark, surprising modesty. “At the very end of the movie when Strawberry’s driving, she says, ‘Mikey, you make me so happy.’ She’s about to cry. It’s so beautiful, poignant and simple,” he says, before a flash of his definitely far-removed character glimmers once more. “Wait, what was the question?”
‘Red Rocket’ is in theaters now.
