If you don’t know Sam Rockwell yet, don’t worry – you will soon. You’ve seen Sam Rockwell before. He was the techno-geek villain in Charlie’s Angels, the creepy pedophile in The Green Mile, the sad-sack loser in Galaxy Quest, and that actor you sort of recognized in more than 30 other films. But this fall, you’re going to remember his name. In the ensemble heist comedy Welcome to Collinwood, produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, Rockwell steals the show as an inept boxer named Pero. And in December, he plays the lead in Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the bizarro Chuck Barris biopic that Mike Myers, Sean Penn, and Johnny Depp had all considered doing. As it turns out, nobody told Rockwell that his Collinwood performance was also his audition for Dangerous Mind: “Luckily, I didn’t know that,” says Rockwell, “or I would have botched the whole thing.”
Welcome to Collinwood
(Warner Bros.; September 13)
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
(Miramax; December 27).