Hands down, actor Michael Rooker is one the funniest, nicest, slightly insane gentlemen you are likely to meet. Although he was born in Alabama, he moved to Chicago shortly after becoming a teenager. While in college in Chicago, he started taking acting classes and became a fixture of city's theater scene, although not with any particular company; he was a more of a journeyman actor. It's hard to believe that his first film role was 30 years ago as the title character in the cruel and captivating HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, directed by John McNaughton and based loosely on the crimes of one of America's most notorious serial killers Henry Lee Lucas.
I have such a vivid memory of seeing HENRY for the first time, because I had just started college at Northwestern University, and my trip to Chicago International Film Festival’s premiere screening of it was in a slightly scary neighborhood, and it was my first time going solo on the ‘L’ train. The scary part wasn’t going to the screening; no, it was far worse leaving the movie and going out into the night in Henry’s city. It took the film several years after that debut to actually get released in America, but for years after I saw it, anytime I saw Rooker in another movie, I would think “Oh, there’s Henry.”
For a time, it seemed the Rooker was in roles of various sizes in damn near every movie released. Based on his work in HENRY, John Sayles plucked him up for a role in EIGHT MEN OUT. After that came fantastic performances in MISSISSIPPI BURNING, SEA OF LOVE, MUSIC BOX, DAYS OF THUNDER, JFK (probably my favorite of Rooker's supporting parts), THE DARK HALF, CLIFFHANGER, MALLRATS, BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA, KEYS TO TULSA, THE TRIGGER EFFECT, ROSEWOOD, THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS, THE BONE COLLECTOR, JUMPER, and as the disgusting man-turned-monster in James Gunn's SLITHER.
His recent resurgence comes courtesy of two roles: as the now deceased Merle Dixon, on AMC's "The Walking Dead”; and as the blue-faced space pirate Yondu in Gunn’s GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (and the upcoming sequel, due next May). And just for good measure, keep an eye out for Rooker in the Gunn-penned social experiment/horror film THE BELKO EXPERIMENT, directed by Greg McLean and set for release in March 2017.
Our reason for getting together recently was the Chicago premiere of the 4K restoration of HENRY, which premiered, as the original film did, as CIFF. Before the screening over lunch, I talked with Rooker about his life before, during and in the wake of HENRY, and even managed to squeeze in a couple questions about GUARDIANS VOL. 2 (which he expertly deflected, I might add). The restored version of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER begins hitting theaters (check out your local midnight showings) this weekend. With that, please enjoy my conversation with the always gracious Michael Rooker…
Capone: So take me back. What was going on in your life in the mid-’80s when Henry first entered your world?
Michael Rooker: My wife was pregnant with our first child.
Capone: And you were working?
MR: I was working doing HENRY during that time.
Capone: But just before Henry came into your life, what were you up to?
MR: I was doing a play. I was doing theater. I was doing a play called “Sea Marks.” It’s a two-person play. A little love story. They shoot letters back and forth to one another, that kind of thing. And the director of the play, Jeffery Lyle Segal, he did all the prosthetic work for HENRY. He let me know there was this little independent, and they had been auditioning. They couldn't find an actor, and he thought I should go and audition.
Capone: So that was it? Just straight-up audition to get the part? If I remember correctly when we spoke a few years ago, you mentioned that a lot, if not all, of the clothes you are wearing in the film were yours.
MR: Oh yeah, they were all mine.
Capone: Or they were clothes you wore to your other jobs.
MR: As a matter of fact, I was on my way to work and I stopped off and did the audition in my work clothes.
Capone: What was the job?
MR: I cleaned offices at an architectural business. There were two floors, about 14 little spaces. I did those and I did it all through school.
Capone: Was that your only outside job at the time?
MR: Pretty much. I could never be a waiter. Although, I’m social, I like people, but I don’t like serving people [laughs].
Capone: So what we’re seeing is in the film is your janitor’s outfit. And the shoes—I always remember he has white socks and these black loafers.
MR: Yeah, they were the shoes that I used on a pervious job as a CTA bus driver. Those shoes were a part of my driver’s uniform, and the rest of the clothing was what I wore when I cleaned the offices.
Capone: It’s because of the clothes that Henry blends in and doesn’t stand out. He has all of these theories about what to do to not get caught, but really blending in is the biggest secret.
MR: Being a regular guy.
Capone: Exactly. When you read the script, do you remember anything that jumped out at you that made you think that he was something unique and special as a character?
MR: Well, the script was in transition. It was still be written. All I got when I went up for the audition were a couple of 3x5 cards with some lines, and that’s basically all I auditioned with—some lines from the piece.
Capone: So when you got the final script, you already had the job?
MR: Pretty much. I had gotten the job almost instantly. John liked my look right away. Soon as he opened the door, he thought—and I’ve heard him repeat this—“I hope this guy can act,” because I completely looked the part right away. Just a regular guy.
Capone: So when you did get the screenplay, did you remember anything standing out and thinking, “This is different. I’ve never seen this done this way before.”
MR: No.
Capone: No? It was just a job?
MR: It was just a job [laughs].
Capone: Even today seeing the film, do you see something there that maybe you didn’t see when you read it?
MR: A lot of the stuff there is from our imaginations. The script was the script, but honestly the way we shot it and the way we did it, a lot of that wasn’t in the script. We just did it, if I remember correctly. So it was mostly just the lines, the script. The writer thought it was a good idea if we read the script and switched roles and stuff. And I nixed that right away. “I’m not fucking doing that shit. We’re not in school.”
Capone: It’s like an acting class.
MR: Yeah, forget it. Forget it. I’m not doing it. But I did agree to do my bio, but I didn’t agree to write my bio. I disliked the idea of writing bios, never liked the idea of writing bios. So instead of writing my bio, I sat on the commode and audio taped my bio.
Capone: Do you remember anything that you included in that?
MR: Everything that’s in the table scene. All my stuff in the table scene, almost verbatim was from my bio.
[At this point, the publicist that set up this interview comes to the table with copies of that day’s Chicago Sun-Times, which has reprinted Roger Ebert’s original 3.5-star review of HENRY, in honor of the restoration’s premiere that night.]
Capone: What do you remember about reading this for the first time?
MR: Dude. I was as surprised as anyone.
Capone: That he liked it?
MR: Than anybody liked it. But this was the review that knocked it out of the park. After this ran, every critic I feel like had to see it and review it.
Capone: I don’t remember if there were any reviews when it premiered in 1986, but there certainly were afterwards. Looking back at the place of HENRY in the lexicon of serial killer films, there really is nothing else quite like it. Was that something you tapped into when you were shooting it in an effort to strip away all of the mystique and glorification of serial killers in films at the time?
MR: I just wanted to do it as simply as I possibly could. My training is more internal work. Most of my work is internal work and thinking, not just going over lines, and “Why do I say this line?” I don’t think about that kind of stuff. I think about why I say the line, but I don’t worry about it. I just let the words affect me and I don’t like talking about acting that much.
Capone: Well, you’re in the wrong place today.
MR: [laughs] But you know what I mean. People talk about it all the time, and you can’t explain some of the shit that happens. There’s no explaining how you get to where you get to. Sometimes, you get to that place without planning to get there. If you’re planning to get there, then you've fucked up already. So you just allow the work and the other actors to affect you and go with it and do it, and that’s what happened with HENRY. I got into that rhythm and mood and just stayed there, and I stayed there all day throughout my work. So I found it very, very difficult. I started work, found it very difficult to go in and out. It was not good. I wasn’t happy.
Capone: Being in that headspace for so long.
MR: Yeah, yeah. I think I requested a space so that I could go away and not talk to anybody.
Capone: Like a physical location?
MR: A physical location. So they set up one of the rooms for me, and after they say cut, I’d get up, walk to my room, close the door, and wait there till they knocked on the door, and I came out, did the scene, cut, go back to my room. So I did that all day for the whole movie.
Capone: That probably not only had an impact on you but on your other actors too. You’re just this force, this unnerving presence.
MR: Still, we bonded as the characters.
Capone: That’s true, that’s true. That’s part of what the movie’s about. Tell me about the importance of injecting a bit of humanity into his character, because he does have a strange moral code. There are certain things he won’t do, and he only seems to target people that he resents on some level. But the reason he’s so scared isn’t because he’s a monster, it’s because he’s human.
MR: [laughs] Isn’t it amazing, though? I didn’t consciously think of anything like that, but that’s what was so cool about the piece. It just ended up developing its own life. It’s amazing how the actual movie itself developed into its own entity. This movie is never going to go away, and no matter how much people disliked it, how much people didn’t want anyone to see it, how much the MPAA tried to fucking ban it. If they could have banned it, they would have. They would not go away. I mentioned to someone earlier that one of the main reasons this movie is where it is today is because the fans.
The very first people who saw this movie did so with their bootleg copy of HENRY that they found. There were bootleg copies because people would copy it and send to their friends. They would see it at work, because the distributor made all these copies of HENRY and sent them out to all these producers—a grassroots mass mailing if you will. Toss it in the trash, as they do with most of their mailings like that. The mail guy would come by, pick it out of the trash, watch it. “This is fucking great!” Copy it, send it to their friends and say, “Come see this movie.” That’s how it got out there, unbeknownst to anyone. It had a following way before it officially opened. As a matter of fact, I got recognized on the street for HENRY before I got recognized on the street for EIGHT MEN OUT. It had already been out there.
Capone: You know what’s funny, because I had seen HENRY so early that when I saw SEA OF LOVE the movie was ruined for me because I knew it was you. I knew you were going to be the killer, because you just show up in the scene in the background and you make some crack and I’m like “Wait, what’s he doing in this movie? He’s got to be the killer; it’s Henry.” It completely ruined the movie for me.
MR: [laughs] Good for you.
Capone: And you were played a cable repair man.
MR: Yes! I had a similar outfit [to Henry]. It was totally a very similar outfit. Oh, that’s funny. And at that time, I had just finished shooting MISSISSIPPI BURNING. Because SEA OF LOVE, they were waiting to cast the role to see me first, because they had the idea that they just wanted to see me. They had heard about my work in MISSISSIPPI BURNING, which was also a very dynamic role, and they heard about what was going on on the set with this actor. So they really wanted to see me and they waited until I was done with the movie and I had time to go to New York. HENRY was not out yet. As a matter of fact, HENRY was in theaters at the same time DAYS OF THUNDER was in theaters. And HENRY V was in theaters the same time, and people in New York were going into the wrong HENRY [laughs].
Capone: In that era, Hollywood casting agents descended on Chicago—the mid-’80s, early-’90s. They were just plucking actors out of the city.
MR: Chicago actors could do no wrong. In that period, it was like “Are you a Chicago actor?” It didn’t mean you were going to get the gig, but it did mean you were going to get your foot in the door and get the audition. And Chicago actors, baby, we were tearing it up. Nobody had seen anything like us. Me, Malkovich, all those other guys, we’d audition and no-fucking-body was doing auditions like we were doing. Nobody was doing anything like we were doing, because we were real. We weren’t acting. We would come in and do the shit, and that’s it. You like it, you don’t like it? Who gives a fuck?
Capone: You weren’t affiliated with any theater company either, right? You bounced around a bit.
MR: Yeah, I was freelance. I did, I bounced around from theater to theater, auditioned for whatever I wanted to audition for. I never really felt like I wanted to be a part of a theater troupe. In hindsight, I wish I had been, in a way, but at that time, my work was free flowing. I did my own thing and I did it when I wanted to do it. I wasn’t in a group that said, “Oh this season we’re doing this, this, this, and this. And you get to play this, this, this, and this. Oh, and by the way you have to direct this one.” I’m like “Nobody tells me what to do. I just do my own thing. That’s the way I work.” Like I said in hindsight, who knows what it would have done to my career. I have no idea. At least, I would have worked more, maybe. But I worked a lot. I didn’t have any issues.
Capone: Let me just backtrack to your appearance at Comic Con this year: you came out as Yondu. They played a clip from GUARDIANS 2 involving your character, in addition to the trailer. But one thing we now know is that the character is going to look a little bit more like he does in the comic books with the fin at least. So did he hit puberty, is that what it is?
MR: [laughs] How did that happen? I can’t tell you.
Capone: Since “Walking Dead,” you’ve been a fixture on the convention circuit, and you’re interacting with fans now, and you’re realizing you have fans now. What has that experience been like, having that kind of love come at you from complete strangers?
MR: I know, right? And it’s everywhere, and it’s awesome. It’s really wonderful to know that fans watch your work and they know your work, and the younger fans don’t know all my work. Of course they know maybe “The Walking Dead” and GUARDIANS. Most of them have never seen HENRY. They even get shocked when they see me with hair. Mostly from “Walking Dead” on, I’ve been short haired, and for GUARDIANS I shaved my head pretty much all the time keeping it shaved. They always do reshoots and added scenes, so I don’t know when that’s going to happen, but it always happens in all their movies, right?
And when it’s like this [his head is totally shaved], it looks pretty cool. When it gets like that [indicates an inch or two of growth], it looks really stupid until it gets out a little bit more then it looks normal. So there’s probably a half a year or more where nobody should ever see your hair growth. So I never get past that part before I say “This looks stupid” and I shave it off again. So it’s been short-short like this since the beginning of GUARDIAN OF THE GALAXY, VOL. 1. So I’ve had it short like this.
Capone: I don’t think James Gunn would dare to make a film without you at this point. I think you’re his lucky charm. But talk just about that relationship, because I feel like every actor wants to have that guy that just always wants them, that partnership.
MR: I love it, and he loves it, and we are completely—it’s like, we knew each other from day one. We are alike spirits completely, from day one. And even before that, because he was a fan of my work from HENRY. He’s a major, major fan of HENRY and other things that I had done, and yet I didn’t know it when I was going in to audition for SLITHER.
Capone: I just recently showed that to someone who hadn’t seen it.
MR: Isn’t it great?
Capone: I love it.
MR: Great, great movie. Great little movie. Totally miss-pressed. They should have pressed it as an awkward love-triangle comedy, because god knows, it’s not a horror movie. But they pressed it as a horror movie. It’s not a horror movie. It’s not even close to being a horror, not the way that I know horror.
Capone: In addition to GUARDIANS 2, THE BELKO EXPERIMENT, which James wrote, premiered at Toronto. Tell me a little bit about that and what do you do in that?
MR: I play a janitor.
Capone: Back to a janitor.
MR: Yeah. I play a janitor and I’m in a full janitor outfit, but it’s like a pullover. But down in Bogota, the wardrobe lady thought janitors should be in orange outfits.
Capone: Like prisoners?
MR: [laughs] Everyone who saw it when it came back to the United States were like, “Why are they dressed as prisoners?” So they digitally re-colored the whole thing, so now we’re in a grey outfit now. But even we were there, we were like “this looks like we’re in L.A. County Jail.”
Capone: You shot this in Bogota?
MR: Bogota, Colombia, yeah. It’s about this group of mostly American workers in this company that ends up being a big social experiment. If all these windows were to automatically have metal objects completely shutting down all the windows like “Ching, ching, ching,” and then someone comes over a loud speaker and says, “By the way, if you happen to be the lucky ones that are in this restaurant at this time, you have 10 minutes to kill three people. If three people aren’t dead in 10 minutes, then 15 of you will die instantly.” And of course, they’re like “Fuck that shit.” All of a sudden time lapses, and then 15 fucking people’s heads start exploding, and there’s blood everywhere. “Boom. Boom. Boom.” Now of course, people are freaking the fuck out. Anyway, that’s what it’s about. Pretty much. Everybody dies. It’s a spoiler. Everybody dies [laughs].
Capone: Back to HENRY for a second, because obviously you’ve been thinking about it a little more recently. When you think to that experience and the impact it had on everything that happened after that in your career and in your life, what comes to mind?
MR: The end result, yeah. You know what? In your career, in any actor’s career, or anyone’s career, sometimes you get these gigs that push you to a certain limit. Henry was one of those roles that pushed meand stretched me as an actor. Looking at it, you’re like, “Not a lot’s going on there” until you look at it and you realize “Fuck, there was a lot going on there.” It was a lot of fucking internal work and it was a tough role. It was tough to stay in character all day. I’m glad I did it that way, though. There’s spillover in every role that you do, but the spillover in HENRY ended up being me discovering a very private, quiet, introverted Michael Rooker.
Capone: Which was not the norm at the time.
MR: No. It wasn’t the norm at the time, it wasn’t the norm for me growing up, because I was always out there, having fun, and having that facade of happiness. Always. That’s how I dealt with the sadness, by being as happy as I could be, or at least portraying that to the open world. Henry was a reversed of that. It was a beautiful role for me. It was perfect for me. It was perfect for me. It was what I needed for my creativity at that time.
Capone: The whole reason I went to go see the film originally and took that chance to go see it in whatever neighborhood it was, was that I just read a book about Henry Lee Lucas and Otis. I didn’t even read the description in the program of the film. I just assumed it was a biography, which it isn’t. At the same time, did you investigate what he had done?
MR: I did and I watched as many of the interviews I could find with the real guy. I got some body language, vocal quality, vocal tone, but mostly it’s my imagination, working, developing the role. So it’s a really wonderful, creative, challenging piece. It was beautiful, because we got to do whatever we wanted, because there was no studio telling us what to do.
