Joseph Gordon-Levitt Comes of Age

An extraordinarily bright kid, true: Get Joe rolling and it's only a matter of minutes before the conversation is ping-ponging between Buddhism and Fellini, French poets and Russian clowns. But his brightness is so shiny and childlike, as he swivels around in an ergonomic chair at his house in the Los Angeles hipster playground of Silver Lake, that even his eyelids seem to grin. Start him talking about his new movie, Inception, the mystery-shrouded summer thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, the auteur behind The Dark Knight and Memento, and the 29-year-old actor appears to hover in a Tasmanian Devil funnel of static electricity. "He never loses his sense of enthusiasm—truly boyish enthusiasm for the fun thing we're doing," Nolan says. "When you work on big movies, everybody gets jaded, myself included, and you have to remind yourself: If we were 10 years old, this would be pretty damn exciting. Joe never seems to forget that." So, yes: Joe.

Anyway, in spite of that Space Mountain smile, something bad happened yesterday. "I don't even want to talk about it," Joe says. Well, maybe a little. See, he just finished shooting "the cancer movie"—an as-yet-unnamed oncology comedy in which he plays a chemo patient alongside Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick. He shaved his head for it. His hair still hasn't grown back, which means that Joe, with that Tibetan-monkish pate and those sapling arms of his protruding out of a maroon T-shirt that has a gaping hole in the back ("That's embarrassing," he says. "I shouldn't have worn this—I think a lamp burned a hole in it"), sort of resembles a handsome version of a hairless cat. He had come home after shooting scenes in Vancouver, switched on his computer, and...well, something went wrong. "A lot of shit got erased," he says. "It's okay." The overgrown kid consoled himself with a bowl of chocolate Cheerios. He laughs, grimaces, sighs, says it again: "It's okay. You have to let go of some things. I've lost so much."

Years ago, when his teenage apprenticeship as a boy alien on the sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun was winding down and he had enrolled in Columbia University to study French, Joe walked into his Manhattan apartment one day to find that a beloved laptop had been stolen. "And I stupidly had not backed up the files," he says.

Wasn't he anxious about identity theft?

"That was the least of my concerns. I was much more worried about the hundreds of pages of shit I had written."

Was any of it meaningful?

"Yeah," he says. "Deeply meaningful. I was writing almost every day. I mean, there was a lot of bullshit. I would spend, like, a page writing about some girl's body. But that's good stuff to have too."

Joe revisits the wincing angst of the stolen-laptop episode and grins some more. This is telling, because the being known as Joseph Gordon-Levitt wouldn't be where he is right now—appearing in a massive Christopher Nolan film and on the brink, it seems, of movie-stardom—if he didn't have a spirited approach to the timeless American art of identity erasure. Starting anew is what keeps him moving forward.

Back when that undergraduate laptop was burgled, in fact, Joe was going through a crisis. He had plenty of money, sure. Six years on a hit sitcom, as well as roles in movies like 10 Things I Hate About You and Angels in the Outfield, had fattened his bank account far beyond what you'd expect from a kid who'd been offed in the first reel of Halloween H20. At the same time, his allure as an actor was in need of overdraft protection. "I was going to a lot of auditions and getting a lot of nos," he says. The standard reflex when Joe's name came up was something along the lines of "Huh? You mean that long-haired kid from 3rd Rock?"

Here he was, a bright guy, experienced, ambitious, not little anymore, making short films on his own dime and immersing himself in the poems of Jacques Prévert at an expensive and prestigious university, and yet he was in peril of morphing into one of those dreaded Hollywood archetypes: the former child star. Danny Bonaduce with an Ivy League pedigree. Was there frustration? "Um, yeah," Joe says. "I would answer that question with a resounding yes. I was scared and depressed for a while. Not that I had any reason to fucking be depressed—I mean, I was going to college and everything. It was not like I was hungry. But absolutely. I was like, 'Shit, I don't know if anybody's gonna let me act. They'll let me be in another sitcom, but I don't want to do that. This is terrible.' Yeah."

And so that's when it began—or, more precisely, when it ended. That's when Joe clicked delete. "He's got a pinpointed focus about 'What do I really want, and how do I go about creating it?' " says his friend and fellow actor Carla Gugino. Joe came up with a plan. He stopped acting for a couple of years and finally emerged to launch what looks now, in retrospect, like a slow, smart, sustained campaign of reinvention. He gravitated toward Sundance films with the grit to scrape off layers of sitcom gloss. He started by playing a beaten-up gay hustler in 2004's Mysterious Skin, paying his own way to Kansas to visit the places where the characters lived. Then he played a Chandlerean teen gumshoe in Rian Johnson's Brick, an accident-haunted and brain-damaged bank janitor in Scott Frank's The Lookout, and a tormented Iraq War veteran in Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss. Last year he radiated dork charm as Tom, Zooey Deschanel's delusionally romantic officemate, in (500) Days of Summer, a role that landed him a Golden Globe nomination. Whenever the camera caught Joe in the crowd at the ceremony, he looked as though he'd geared up for the red carpet by chugging a quart of bliss juice.

By now you can watch Joe's movies back-to-back and not only will you fail to pick up remnants of that long-haired kid from 3rd Rock, you will see an actor whose identity seems to shift so fluidly from role to role that it's hard to pin down what an essential Joe-ness might be. (In an upcoming indie film called Hesher, he is nearly unrecognizable as a Dionysian death-metal sage with a shaggy mane, tattoos, and a fondness for blowing things up.) The essence of Joe is that he has no discernible essence. He occupies a state of perpetual flux. "Thank you!" Joe says when you point this out. "I take that as the highest compliment."

When Christopher Nolan and his stunt director approached Joe about the role in Inception, they told him it would hurt. "I wanted to paint a grim picture of it," Nolan says. "The worse I made it sound, the more Joe would grin." There would be pain. There would be wire work—jumping and fighting in a Fred Astaire-ishly spinning room. Joe would need to wear elbow pads, knee pads, torso pads. Avoiding injury would require relentless training. "They were basically saying, 'This will be really hard,' " Joe recalls. "And I said, 'I will do anything at all, and I will never complain once.' Chris just sort of smiled and said, 'Get it in writing.'"

Nolan wasn't lying. Joe went to England to shoot levitational hand-to-hand combat in a whirling tube set up in an old zeppelin factory, and "it was six-day weeks of just, like, coming home at night fuckin' battered. Like you are after you play a hard game of football," Joe says. "The light fixtures on the ceiling are coming around on the floor, and you have to choose the right time to cross through them, and if you don't, you're going to fall." Nevertheless, there is no record of Joe bitching on the set. "The adrenaline," he says, "was so nuts that I was like, 'This normally would have hurt a lot, but let's go again, let's go, let's go, let's go.'"

If there is some enzyme produced by the Gordon-Levitt DNA coil that tends to make a person preternaturally ebullient and focused, pharmaceutical companies might want to look into marketing it. Joe's parents, Jane Gordon and Dennis Levitt, who met when they were working at the Southern California lefty-radical radio station KPFK-FM, appear to have imparted in their two sons an instinct for self-monitoring and an unusually healthy disregard for convention. (Daniel Gordon-Levitt, Joe's older brother, is a photographer and a fire spinner—yes, he dances with flaming torches.) Even in his sitcom days, Joe had a filter that kept any potential child-star self-sabotage in check. "When I was in high school, I loved smoking weed," he says. "I loved it. But I cut myself to once a month. That was my rule. And so as the first of the month came closer, my friends would be like, 'All right, what's the plan this weekend?' And actually it's really cool—when you do it that infrequently, you can really trip. In hindsight, could I have smoked weed on the weekends? Yeah. But it was cool to do it once a month. I still do that sometimes—I go on little weedfests. I'm a pothead. That's my drug of choice."

Really, though, it's more accurate to say that his drug of choice is the Internet—in particular a website called hitRECord.org. Joe launched the site about five years ago, and it has expanded into a hive of creativity, with more than 7,000 participants collaborating to make songs, images, stories, and short films. He oversees the site from a bank of computers in his home studio, a crepuscular room with black curtains over the windows, black walls made of foamlike sound-deadening material, a closet full of eerily beeping servers, and a drum kit that he uses to pound out any postmidnight frustrations.

This is what gets Joe fired up. "The most valiant thing you can do as an artist," he says, "is inspire someone else to be creative." He has instigated a spate of short films—some starring friends like Gugino and Channing Tatum—and he does a lot of the shooting and recording and mixing right here in his black-curtained cavern. Through hitRECord he wants to attract ideas from people all over the world and make original movies without a whit of Hollywood interference. A psychoanalyst might observe that the kid who kept hearing no from Hollywood has sublimated his annoyance by conjuring up an alternative salon where everyone always hears yes. "If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job," he says. "And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks. What's coming is going to be a lot better, whether it's music or movies or journalism. The media's about to become a lot more effective." Whether Joe is an altruist or a wired Louis B. Mayer in embryonic form, he's so convinced that idea-swapping indie media is the wave of the future that he nearly floats when he talks about it. "There's a lot of stuff that gets created for the love of it, and there's a lot that really does get created with almost no love involved," he says. "Just to make money. I think of Chris Nolan as a shining example of somebody who can do something for the love and still succeed at the money game. A lot of people make excuses and say, 'Ah, well, there's no room for love here. We have to make money.' And I love to point to Chris Nolan and say, 'Fuck you guys. This guy's making more money than you are, and he's making beautiful, genuine movies.'"

Besides, if the essence of Joe is that he has no discernible essence, well, that applies even to the idea that he is merely an actor. "To be honest," he says, "I sort of feel like 'movie actor' isn't of this time. I love it. But it's a 20th-century art form." The creative pioneer of the new era, he posits, is "the DJ, the curator, the remix artist, the person who confronts the superabundance, plucks out the gems, and puts them together in such a way that it means something." And if Joe is reluctant to be hemmed in as a silver-screen persona, he's more aggressively allergic to the notion of becoming a celebrity. He sees American tabloid culture as downright toxic. "It's a bunch of bullshit, a waste of time," he says. "It depresses me. And I'm not easily depressed. When I'm at the grocery store, those magazines—they always suck me in. I go, 'I can't fuckin' believe that this is what we're looking at.' It's really sad. Why shouldn't there be beautiful works of art on the grocery stands? Like Bob Dylan said, you know, art doesn't belong in museums, it belongs in gas stations." Joe goes on. "Even in a purely selfish way, I would absolutely argue that you are bringing bad shit your way by consuming and enjoying that kind of hostility." Naturally Joe continues to grin as he says this.

The tabloid apparatus might be determined to convert a star's identity into a tragicomic series of hookups, breakups, and baby bumps, but Joe is determined to elude it, to elide it—even to flip it on its head. A few years back he made a short YouTube documentary called Pictures of Assholes. In it, two paparazzi approach Joe as he's walking past a hotel with a friend, Jared Geller, who is Joe's producing partner on hitRECord. Joe, in jovial retaliation, turns his video camera on the two paparazzi, who then winkingly imply that they're tracking Joe because his dinner with Geller suggests that, you know, the two might be on a date. To his credit, Joe never edited that exchange out of the film. "That's how those sorts of rumors start," he says. "I think it's revealing to show it. There's nothing more than this: I was walking down the street with my friend."

In the future, of course, there could be a point at which the Joseph Gordon-Levitt Identity Reclamation Project goes head-to-head with the darker, celebrity-devouring forces of American media. Joe is the first to admit that he's not yet famous enough to be hunted down by roaming packs, but what if it were to happen? "Look, I've met some nice guys who take pictures like that," he says. "I don't want to demonize anybody. But I do think that this notion that certain people are in a higher class than other people is unhealthy. We would be healthier as a people if we quit paying attention to that kind of bullshit and paid more attention to more pertinent things and more beautiful things." It's an honorable notion, and as with all honorable notions in Hollywood, the challenge, in years to come, will be sticking to it.