A bunch of you have been dropping your panties on demand for Joseph Gordon-Levitt this week, with the release of 50/50. I’m not all that invested in the movie, nor him, nor covering either. But I know you guys like him and he’s talented and he doesn’t offend my senses the way your other crushes do (I’m looking at you, Bradley Cooper fans). So, here he is. He’s pulling that face because you went with a landing strip and not a full Hollywood. Because you people don’t listen. More photos, his outtakes, and his interview are below.
- On the tabloids: ‘When I go to the grocery store, I’ll look at the covers of tabloid magazines—they fascinate me—but I don’t bring that s**t into my house because I think it’s evil and poisonous. It’s easy to dismiss it as harmless entertainment, but I don’t think it is. We’re very influenced by the stories we choose to fill our days with.’
- On women’s sexuality: ‘There’s a difference between a girl who’s sexy, like, ‘I’m a slave,’ and an assuredly sexy girl like Beyoncé… But I have to admit, man, I fall for the slave thing, too.’
- On 50/50 being dubbed a ‘cancer comedy’: ‘It’s not like Seth and Evan [Goldberg, Rogen’s childhood friend and the film’s co-producer] sat down and said, ‘How can we make something quirky? I know! Let’s do a comedy about cancer,’’ Gordon-Levitt says. ‘We had a very upbeat, positive, collaborative set. It was never depressing to come to work.’
- On how the film affected him: ‘That entire time, I never stopped thinking about what it would be like if I was about to die, and that’s rough. After we finished shooting the movie, I went through this phase where I had to say to myself, I don’t have cancer. I do not have cancer. It was like I needed convincing.’
- On how he selects his scripts: ‘I usually don’t finish them. I get into them until I have my ‘eureka’ moment, and then it’s done.’
- On why he likes acting, even after all these years: ‘What turns me on about acting is being somebody else,’ says Gordon-Levitt. ‘My favorite actors are those who really disappear into their characters.’
- On being a child actor: He began acting on stage and in commercials, hawking everything from Pop-Tarts to Cocoa Puffs, from the age of 6. ‘My parents have VHS tapes of pretty much everything I’ve ever done, even an old episode of Murder, She Wrote,’ he said.
- On moving on from being a child actor: ‘I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to be an actor anymore because the only jobs anybody wanted to give me were more TV parts,’ he says. ‘It’s not that I was averse to TV; it’s just that the work didn’t inspire me. Saying ‘hit record’ was, for me, an imperative sentence. I no longer wanted anyone to tell me how I was allowed to express myself.’
