Take Two, Rolling

Former child star Jackie Earle Haley advances his remarkable return to stardom with this month’s Watchmen.
By J. Rentilly

After making his mark as the iconic, outlaw Little Leaguer, Kelly Leak, in the classic Bad News Bears films, Jackie Earle Haley went on to costar in the 1979 cycling flick Breaking Away, a smash hit that was nominated for five Academy Awards and won the Oscar for best original screenplay. He was 19, a movie star, and a teen heartthrob. The world was his oyster, and he had the Tabasco sauce ready. That’s when a variety of factors—not the least of which were a receding hairline and some dubious choices (Maniac Cop 3?)—converged to gradually submarine his career. He did some scattershot TV work throughout the eighties, but by 1993 Haley had vanished from the acting world entirely.

Cut to 13 years later, when Haley made what one magazine dubbed “the most brilliant comeback of the decade,” delivering powerful performances as a political henchman in All the King’s Men and a pedophile in Little Children. For Little Children, Haley drew rave reviews and an Oscar nomination. In this month’s hotly anticipated Watchmen, an adaptation of DC Comics’ influential, limited-series comic book, Haley delivers a savage, wounded performance as the masked vigilante Rorschach. He spoke to Penthouse about his unique career path, playing dark characters, and his teen-idol days.

I look at the characters you’ve portrayed in recent years and can’t imagine anyone else playing them. Do you believe there are roles an actor is born to play?
Well, I’m hesitant to say that I was born to play a sex offender [laughs]. But all of the characters have been fascinating and really challenging. I don’t know if I was born to play these guys, but I have had the sense that all of this was supposed to happen.

Tell me about your career renaissance.
I had been gone from acting for such a long time, so the fact that people even remembered me at all was kind of a surprise. [All the King’s Men writer/director] Steve Zaillian had been looking for me for months and couldn’t find me. When he did find me, I was on my honeymoon in France. He asked me to tape an audition, which I did. He loved the tape, so we had lunch. He said that I’d completely “gotten” the character, even though I’d been given only a couple pages of script. I asked him, “What the hell made you think of me?” He said, “I just remembered you from way back when.” He had put my name on a short list. He’d asked [the film’s lead] Sean Penn to make a short list of guys for this role, too. When they put their lists together, they both had my name written down! These two guys thought of me independently. So Steve says, “I want to give you this part, but I can’t because I’ve already cast it.” But he somehow worked it out. That’s a string of coincidences that make it look like I was really supposed to have all of this.

Watchmen is about a group of down-and-out superheroes on the verge of a major comeback. Did that resonate for you?
Man, the whole piece resonates—not just for me, personally, but for the entire world. I’m not a huge comic-book guy. I never fully got it. The comic-book pacing messed me up as a kid—do you read it first or look at the pictures first? It always hung me up. But when you’re reading [Watchmen writer] Alan Moore, there’s no question: You read the book first. Alan Moore is the best. The first read on Watchmen is fun, entertaining, thought provoking. Every subsequent read gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

Besides being dark, what do your recent roles have in common?
Obsession. The guy in Little Children was obsessed and couldn’t help but act on the obsession. Rorschach, on the other hand, is obsessed with stopping the obsession. One guy is the pedophile. The other guy will kill the pedophile. Don’t get me wrong: Rorschach is a fucking nutcase, but hopefully he uses his craziness to help the world. This is a guy who, in order to survive, had to see the world in extremes: It’s black or it’s white. Nothing gray. Gray is too painful for this guy.

Tell me about some of the perks of being a movie star as a teenager. Do you have a good groupie story?
I was pretty young, you know. But I remember one time when me and my cousin were traipsing through Magic Mountain—we were 14 or 15, maybe—and a group of girls, maybe eight of them, recognized me. If I knew then what I know now, I doubt we would’ve run away from them. But, as I recall, uh, I think I ran away from the girls. At least that’s my story.

How did you make it through 13 years of not acting?
Life is a series of incredible ups and downs. It’s really easy to say this now, but my life’s path has probably better equipped me as an actor and a storyteller. Success at a super young age was incredibly fortunate. If you’d asked me then, “What will you do when you grow up?” I would’ve said, “I’m gonna be a movie star, what are you talking about?” I didn’t really have a clear sense that I wasn’t going to be Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt. I see that now. As for the time out of the game, I delivered pizzas. I drove limos. I drove around guys I used to do movies with. I got months late on my rent. I struggled just like normal people do. When you’re a celebrity, you don’t always have to work very hard to know who you are and what you need. When you’re struggling, you have to answer those questions every day. That’s made me a better actor, and maybe a better man. The pitfalls are still there. But sometimes I see them before I step on them. Sometimes.