Nov 5, 1968

Daly City, California, USA

Sam Rockwell is an American actor who has received consistently strong critical acclaim for his work in 40-plus films, including Box of Moon Light, Galaxy Quest, The Green Mile, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After his first film role in 1989's Clownhouse (produced by Francis Ford Coppola's production company) he moved to New York at age 18 and trained at the William Esper Studios.
His career continued on an upward momentum and the turning point in Ro... ... (read more...) ckwell's career was Tom DiCillo's 1996 film Box of Moon Light.
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He also won strong reviews for the 1997 film Lawn Dogs, where he played a working-class lawn mower who befriends a wealthy 10-year-old girl (played by Mischa Barton) in an upper-class gated community in Kentucky; Rockwell's impressive performance won him Best Actor honors at both the Montreal World Film Festival and the Catalonian International Film Festival. A year later, he co-starred with Steve Zahn in Safe Men, whose director, John Hamburg, said, "Sam is a free spirit. He's the only person I know who, when he goes out to do a major studio movie in Los Angeles, rents a bike instead of a car."

In 1999, Rockwell played a psychotic killer opposite Tom Hanks in the Stephen King prison drama The Green Mile. At the time of the film's shooting, Rockwell explained why he was attracted to playing such unlikable characters. He said, "I like that dark stuff. I think heroes should be flawed. There's a bit of self-loathing in there, and a bit of anger....But after this, I've really got to play some lawyers, or a British aristocrat, or they'll put a label on me."
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After strong appearances as a bumbling actor in 1999's sci-fi satire Galaxy Quest and as gregarious villain Eric Knox in Charlie's Angels (2000), Rockwell won the biggest leading role of his career to date: the troubled and controversial The Gong Show host Chuck Barris in actor George Clooney's 2002 directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Starring alongside established Hollywood stars like Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts, Rockwell earned the lion's share of critics' praise.