![]() Since Red Rocket premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this past summer, the film has proven slightly divisive. “It really is sometimes better than overthinking.” I used my imagination and went with my instinct,” he says. I respect those types of actors, but I didn’t have time to do any deep character study. I’m not a method actor who is staying in character. “It doesn’t, because I’m just pretending, man. But when asked whether he was concerned that Mikey’s toxicity might bleed into his own head space, Rex doesn’t even feign preciousness. A conniving and delusional anti-hero whose scheme involves seducing 17-year-old doughnut clerk Strawberry (Suzanna Son) to join him in the adult-film industry, the character is atrocious and reprehensible, yet at the same time demanding the screen’s full attention. If Red Rocket is energizing chaos, then Mikey is its central charge. And this movie transfers that energy across.” But I was able to be calm and collective in the face of the storm, all this chaos around me. “I don’t think I’d be able to handle that 10 or five years ago. It was hot, sweaty, memorizing so many lines and having to deliver them on film, because it wasn’t shot digitally and film is expensive,” Rex says. ![]() “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Three days after receiving Baker’s script, Rex was in Texas City, with all of Mikey’s long, profane, rapid-fire monologues already committed to memory. Roles were not easy to come by – Rex’s last onscreen credit before Red Rocket was playing a character named DJ Womp Womp on the 2020 Facebook Watch series The Real Bros of Simi Valley – and the pandemic wasn’t helping. By the time that Baker reached out to him in the summer of 2020, he was living alone near California’s Joshua Tree National Park, having exhausted himself with the “human zoo” of Los Angeles. Rex simply had no desire to play hard-to-get. Rex hopes that his performance as former porn star Mikey Saber leads to more opportunities for roles. “It was a little red flag, like, are you taking this seriously? But then I watched the clip and he was 90 per cent there with the character already. I phoned him up and asked for a self-tape audition and he sent one back in 20 minutes,” recalls Baker, who wrote the part of Mikey with Rex in mind. “He understood the character really fast. So, Red Rocket is not exactly a long-awaited return to form for Rex – there was, strictly speaking, no real form to return to – but instead a startling debut of qualities and talents hitherto unknown. ![]() Following a former porn star named Mikey Saber (Rex) as he tries to stage a comeback from his dusty and depressed hometown of Texas City, the film is exhilarating, provocative and filthy in both spirit and content, with Baker daring audiences to attach themselves to a man who is at best a narcissist, at worst a predator.īut more than representing the latest gutter-cinema triumph for Baker, the movie sells the startling comeback story of Simon Rex, the man who dominated MTV for a heady few years in the mid-90s before falling into a loop of Hollywood detritus: forgotten sitcoms, Scary Movie sequels (the later, really bad ones) and jokey hip-hop acts whose humour went over, or under, most everyone’s heads (Rex’s rap name was Dirt Nasty around this point). The dark comedy, which was shot guerrilla-style in the thick of the pandemic last year, is the latest movie from Baker ( Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project) to explore those living on the margins of the American dream. Welcome to the production of Red Rocket, a film that works in spite of the many obstacles its creators faced, or placed in their own way.
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