Joining the immortals: Stephen Dorff interview
Stephen Dorff, star of the Greek-legends action film Immortals, says his bad-boy reputation is a bit of a myth.
Stephen Dorff in Immortals
Sparking up the first of a fistful of Camel Blues that this unfashionably enthusiastic nicotine fan will work his way through during our interview, Dorff says that his personal style is less high-roller than the immaculately suited-and-booted Vanity Fair honorés. Judging by his outfit today, given the option, he's a work-boots'n'jeans'n'white T-shirt kinda guy. 'But we did a bunch of fancy, stylish shoots for Somewhere when I was working with Sofia, because she's pretty stylish. We were talking about doing some jeans campaign together.'
Sofia is Sofia Coppola, the director, photographer and one-time fashion designer. Somewhere is her award-winning 2010 film, which rebooted the career of Dorff, 17 years after he had shot to fame in Backbeat, the Hamburg-era Beatles biopic. 'When we did the world [promotional] tour for Somewhere I had a bunch of cool suits given to me,' Dorff continues. 'Tom Ford was doing all my tuxes. It was pretty pimpy,' he grins through a cloud of cigarette smoke. At last September's Venice Film Festival, where Somewhere won the Golden Lion, 'I felt like James Bond. Tom made me this bad-ass tux – classic, bow-tie, vest [waistcoat]. It was pretty dope. And I got a bunch of cool Burberry suits, and some Dolce & Gabbana stuff. I'm doing another shoot this week that's all Gucci. I don't have one specific fave label. I like Band of Outsiders,' he says of the preppy-with-a-twist American label that recently signed the Harry Potter graduates Rupert Grint and Tom Felton to model its latest collection.
The success of Somewhere means that Dorff's career is back on track after more than a decade of under-performing films. Relaxed and studiously cool, he wants me to know that his 'funny haircut' is nothing to do with his normal 'look'. It's a hangover from Boot Tracks, a recently completed film starring Willem Dafoe in which he plays an ex-convict and which he describes as 'kinda like Badlands'.
In the forthcoming Immortals, a Greek myth-inspired, sword'n'sandals action movie, there were further style concerns. Dorff plays Stavros, a slave whose master, Theseus, is out to avenge the death of his mother. The big-budget film is directed by Tarsem Singh and also stars Mickey Rourke and, in the role of Theseus, the young English actor Henry Cavill, recently cast as Superman in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. Singh is a former pop-video maker (REM's Losing My Religion) and advertising creative (the Levi's Mad about the Boy swimming-pool commercial) who, as a film director (The Cell, The Fall), is renowned for his visual flair. On the 3D Immortals, this means extravagant special effects and fight scenes, and what we might call directional men's fashion. Freida Pinto, the Slumdog Millionaire star, has what is effectively the only female role. She says that, for once, it was the men who had to wear the short skirts – 'and sometimes no skirts at all!'
'Yeah, I left the skirts up to the Brits on that one,' chuckles Dorff, referring to Cavill and Luke Evans, who plays Zeus. 'I dodged the skirt.' He also managed to avoid chest-waxing. 'Tarsem wanted no body hair… Some of the kids were waxed, but they got this chest acne. I just did it with an electric razor.' This seasoned 38-year-old was firm with his director. 'I told Tarsem, I ain't waxing!'
It's all a far cry from Somewhere. In Sofia Coppola's follow-up to her 2006 historical romp, Marie Antoinette, Dorff played Johnny Marco, a high-profile actor holed up in Chateau Marmont, the LA hotel beloved of the profession. Marco was either mired in an existential crisis, or just really, really bored. The low-key, low-drama, slow-burning film showed slovenly Marco drifting from in-room pole-dancing session to pointless party to soul-sapping promotional junket, via helicopter rides and stints tooling around LA in his Ferrari F430. When his ex asks him to look after their 11-year-old daughter, her arrival brings sudden, if fleeting, responsibility and sobriety into Marco's self-indulgent life.
Despite its triumph at Venice, Somewhere received mixed reviews. 'Detail-oriented subtlety' is how Dorff describes the script, which is minimal even by the standards of Coppola's famously spare writing style. Compared with the 80-day, 15-camera, cast-of-thousands Immortals shoot, it was 'intimacy to the extreme', Dorff reflects. Somewhere was a Hollywood insider's movie, made by an insider (Sofia's father is the director Francis Ford Coppola; her cousins are the actors Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman) and starring an insider, who is also one of her oldest friends – both being the children of Hollywood professionals, Stephen and Sofia moved in the same circles in their youth. 'I just love it,' Dorff concludes. 'I love what she does. I love the experience and the partnership she creates with her lead actor. It was like nothing I'd experienced.'
Friendship aside, Dorff has good reason to sing the praises of Somewhere, which restarted his life in myriad ways (not least romantically – he has been dating an Italian girl who works for Sky, whom he met on promotional duties in Paris: 'That's been interesting,' he says with a smile). In his early twenties he was seen as one of the biggest young film stars in the world. In Iain Softley's Backbeat, the teenage Californian impressed in the role of Stuart Sutcliffe, the founding member of the Beatles who gave up music for love in the band's early days in Hamburg, before dying of a brain haemorrhage aged 21. 'Stephen had incredible enthusiasm,' Softley recalls. 'He had just done a South African film called The Power of One and he asked if he could do the audition with that South African accent to show us that he was able to master another accent.
'He had this androgyny that Stuart Sutcliffe had,' Softley adds, 'but he's also very masculine. That's often something rock stars have, and Stephen had it, too.'
Ian Hart, who played John Lennon in the film, says that the friendship he and Dorff formed onset remains firm to this day. 'Stephen seemed so right for the part. He had that self-assured cool, tempered with the vulnerability the character needed.'
Back in Hollywood Dorff received a reported seven-figure sum to play the villain in the 1998 vampire action film Blade. He appeared on the cover of style and entertainment magazines and cultivated a moody, hard-partying, bad-boy image. He also gained an ill-deserved (he says) reputation as a womaniser. For the record, he says, Juliette Lewis was always just a friend and never a girlfriend. 'Half the people they said I dated, I never dated,' Dorff frowns. 'Milla Jovovich – she's always been my friend, too. I've never really dated actresses except when I was really young.' What about Pamela Anderson? Yes, he confesses, they dated. 'Pam I went out with six years ago for a few months. That was interesting. Scared the shit out of my mom.' Girls Aloud's Sarah Harding? 'We dated for a minute!' he says laughing. They met when Dorff was in Britain promoting the 2006 Sky mini-series The Hades Factor. 'We had, like, two dates. We're still text buddies.'
But his early promise didn't build into leading-man status. He was considered for Titanic but lost out to Leonardo DiCaprio. He auditioned for Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, but Matt Damon beat him to the part. None of his other early, supposedly promising films – the generation-X film SFW, which satirised the cult of celebrity, or the apartheid drama The Power of One – was a critical or commercial hit. He worked solidly throughout his twenties and thirties, yet without much fanfare, in films such as Blood and Wine, City of Industry, I Shot Andy Warhol and World Trade Center.
Dorff concedes that he has been given a 'second wind' by Coppola. 'Sofia gave me such a great part and turned everything around,' he says. 'And I just haven't really stopped since that movie.' Aside from working constantly in the past year, 'I've done all the fashion magazines again – I've been photographed for the V Mens and the L'Huomo Vogues, and all these ones I didn't even know about.'
Stephen Dorff grew up in Los Angeles, where his father, Steve Dorff, worked as a composer in the film industry. One of the actor's earliest experiences of movie-making was visiting the set of Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way But Loose, on which Steve Dorff was working. (Stephen's younger brother, Andrew, a songwriter in Nashville, followed their father's career more closely.) He was a child actor in sitcoms (including Diff'rent Strokes), and made his big-screen debut aged 11 in a horror movie, The Gate. Dorff's parents separated when he was 21, a traumatic episode that coincided with his first flush of fame. Behind all the club-hopping good times lay personal anguish, and Ian Hart remembers that Dorff lived for a while in the Chateau Marmont, 'and saw first hand the "goings on" '.
Little wonder, then, that Somewhere's narrative was familiar to Dorff. Yet the film and its success have deeper resonance still for him. Dorff received news that the part was his on the first anniversary of the death of mother, Nancy, from a brain tumour at the age of 59. She had been keen for her elder son to find an acting job that would show his more 'emotional, sensitive' side. Somewhere demanded that of him, and he's self-aware enough to admit that he was in a position to deliver, still reeling as he was from her death. 'Johnny Marco was a character that was very vulnerable and trying to figure his life out at the same time,' he says, adding that he's still 'working through' his grief. 'When you lose a parent…' He stops. 'It added a lot to my life, my career, my focus, to what's important, to what's not important. And I'm still getting through it. I haven't totally cured myself. It was only three and a half years ago.' He stretches on the bench and reaches for another Camel Blue. 'I've been working so much I haven't had a chance.'
Has that been his way of processing the loss – forging ahead with professional commitments?
'Yeah, well, in a weird way that's what happened when I was losing my mom.' Michael Mann offered him a part in Public Enemies, a Prohibition-era gangster film starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger. 'And I told him I didn't think I could do it. I said, "I don't have three months right now, I'm losing my mom." And he was a real mensch [a Yiddish word meaning 'person of integrity or honour']. He was like, "Stephen, I can have anybody I want but I want to wait for you. This is a great character part for you." And I asked my mom: "I don't want to leave you, what do I do?" And she said, "I think you should go do your movie. I think it'll make you happier, and you can always come home and see me." '
Dorff took the part, 'and the guys on that film were really sweet to me, took care of me'. Depp, as much of a music buff as Dorff – who is a keen guitarist and hopes to start writing film scores 'under another name' – was an attentive co-star and friend. 'And it was actually, in retrospect, good that I went to Chicago for those five months. Because if I was just sitting in LA that would not have been good for me…'
His mother, it seems, had led by work-focused example. 'When my parents got divorced, she used that midlife crisis and went back to school for 11 years,' he says of Nancy Dorff's retraining as a psychologist. 'That blew my mind. And that's why life is sometimes not fair – my mom could have helped so many people with her degree and being a doctor. Then she got sick…'
Dorff wears his heart on his sleeve, and his feelings on his skin: his mother's name and the dates of her birth and death are two of a dozen or so tattoos on his arms and back. Another, inscribed over his right biceps, is a saying dear to his mother: yesterday is history, tomorrow's a mystery, today is a gift, that's why they call it the present.
Dorff fingers the tattoo. 'It's also a saying that's in the Kung Fu Panda movie, as I later found out,' he says ruefully. 'Which I don't mind, I can take it for what it means to me.'
When his parents divorced he sided with his mother and was 'really pissed off' with his father, who 'went off with the young woman'. Now his relationship with his father is fine, and he's a doting big brother to his half-sisters, 11-year-old Kaitlyn and 10-year-old Callie. Kaitlyn, like many American adolescents, is a keen customer of Kitson, and Dorff recently took her and a friend shopping at the chain's Malibu outlet. Dorff, like many a man before him, spent the time mooching around outside the shop, smoking fretfully. 'Kaitlyn picked up a ton of stuff, $100, $200 items,' he says, 'then she said I had to get her friend stuff, too.' He capitulated and emptied his wallet. 'So anyway, that's become my life. I love it, though – it's nice to have these little girls in my life.'
It's a long way from his mean-and-moody early twenties, when he criticised his own films in the press and wore sunglasses 24/7. 'I was… outspoken,' he admits. 'I used a lot of my anger and things in my personal life in the press that I shouldn't have done. I learnt my lesson from that.'
But, really, he wonders, in the Hollywood bad-boy scheme of things, was he that off-the-rails? 'I've never been arrested!' he exclaims. 'I said this to my agency a while back. After I got Somewhere, they said, "This is our new Robert Downey Jr!" And I was like, "Come on, guys. Downey's a genius, but I've really never done anything that bad. Smoked some pot along the way but what the f***, guys?" That was funny.
'But God bless,' Dorff says, sparking up a final cigarette. 'I love it when guys that have had issues come back. And luckily I haven't had' – he knocks on the wooden picnic bench – 'those kinds of issues. I've just had some things to deal with like family stuff, you know, lost my mom. Which is the most difficult stuff I've gone through. But it's just normal human stuff.'
'Immortals' is released on November 11
It's all a far cry from Somewhere. In Sofia Coppola's follow-up to her 2006 historical romp, Marie Antoinette, Dorff played Johnny Marco, a high-profile actor holed up in Chateau Marmont, the LA hotel beloved of the profession. Marco was either mired in an existential crisis, or just really, really bored. The low-key, low-drama, slow-burning film showed slovenly Marco drifting from in-room pole-dancing session to pointless party to soul-sapping promotional junket, via helicopter rides and stints tooling around LA in his Ferrari F430. When his ex asks him to look after their 11-year-old daughter, her arrival brings sudden, if fleeting, responsibility and sobriety into Marco's self-indulgent life.
Despite its triumph at Venice, Somewhere received mixed reviews. 'Detail-oriented subtlety' is how Dorff describes the script, which is minimal even by the standards of Coppola's famously spare writing style. Compared with the 80-day, 15-camera, cast-of-thousands Immortals shoot, it was 'intimacy to the extreme', Dorff reflects. Somewhere was a Hollywood insider's movie, made by an insider (Sofia's father is the director Francis Ford Coppola; her cousins are the actors Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman) and starring an insider, who is also one of her oldest friends – both being the children of Hollywood professionals, Stephen and Sofia moved in the same circles in their youth. 'I just love it,' Dorff concludes. 'I love what she does. I love the experience and the partnership she creates with her lead actor. It was like nothing I'd experienced.'
Friendship aside, Dorff has good reason to sing the praises of Somewhere, which restarted his life in myriad ways (not least romantically – he has been dating an Italian girl who works for Sky, whom he met on promotional duties in Paris: 'That's been interesting,' he says with a smile). In his early twenties he was seen as one of the biggest young film stars in the world. In Iain Softley's Backbeat, the teenage Californian impressed in the role of Stuart Sutcliffe, the founding member of the Beatles who gave up music for love in the band's early days in Hamburg, before dying of a brain haemorrhage aged 21. 'Stephen had incredible enthusiasm,' Softley recalls. 'He had just done a South African film called The Power of One and he asked if he could do the audition with that South African accent to show us that he was able to master another accent.
'He had this androgyny that Stuart Sutcliffe had,' Softley adds, 'but he's also very masculine. That's often something rock stars have, and Stephen had it, too.'
Ian Hart, who played John Lennon in the film, says that the friendship he and Dorff formed onset remains firm to this day. 'Stephen seemed so right for the part. He had that self-assured cool, tempered with the vulnerability the character needed.'
Back in Hollywood Dorff received a reported seven-figure sum to play the villain in the 1998 vampire action film Blade. He appeared on the cover of style and entertainment magazines and cultivated a moody, hard-partying, bad-boy image. He also gained an ill-deserved (he says) reputation as a womaniser. For the record, he says, Juliette Lewis was always just a friend and never a girlfriend. 'Half the people they said I dated, I never dated,' Dorff frowns. 'Milla Jovovich – she's always been my friend, too. I've never really dated actresses except when I was really young.' What about Pamela Anderson? Yes, he confesses, they dated. 'Pam I went out with six years ago for a few months. That was interesting. Scared the shit out of my mom.' Girls Aloud's Sarah Harding? 'We dated for a minute!' he says laughing. They met when Dorff was in Britain promoting the 2006 Sky mini-series The Hades Factor. 'We had, like, two dates. We're still text buddies.'
But his early promise didn't build into leading-man status. He was considered for Titanic but lost out to Leonardo DiCaprio. He auditioned for Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, but Matt Damon beat him to the part. None of his other early, supposedly promising films – the generation-X film SFW, which satirised the cult of celebrity, or the apartheid drama The Power of One – was a critical or commercial hit. He worked solidly throughout his twenties and thirties, yet without much fanfare, in films such as Blood and Wine, City of Industry, I Shot Andy Warhol and World Trade Center.
Dorff concedes that he has been given a 'second wind' by Coppola. 'Sofia gave me such a great part and turned everything around,' he says. 'And I just haven't really stopped since that movie.' Aside from working constantly in the past year, 'I've done all the fashion magazines again – I've been photographed for the V Mens and the L'Huomo Vogues, and all these ones I didn't even know about.'
Stephen Dorff grew up in Los Angeles, where his father, Steve Dorff, worked as a composer in the film industry. One of the actor's earliest experiences of movie-making was visiting the set of Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way But Loose, on which Steve Dorff was working. (Stephen's younger brother, Andrew, a songwriter in Nashville, followed their father's career more closely.) He was a child actor in sitcoms (including Diff'rent Strokes), and made his big-screen debut aged 11 in a horror movie, The Gate. Dorff's parents separated when he was 21, a traumatic episode that coincided with his first flush of fame. Behind all the club-hopping good times lay personal anguish, and Ian Hart remembers that Dorff lived for a while in the Chateau Marmont, 'and saw first hand the "goings on" '.
Little wonder, then, that Somewhere's narrative was familiar to Dorff. Yet the film and its success have deeper resonance still for him. Dorff received news that the part was his on the first anniversary of the death of mother, Nancy, from a brain tumour at the age of 59. She had been keen for her elder son to find an acting job that would show his more 'emotional, sensitive' side. Somewhere demanded that of him, and he's self-aware enough to admit that he was in a position to deliver, still reeling as he was from her death. 'Johnny Marco was a character that was very vulnerable and trying to figure his life out at the same time,' he says, adding that he's still 'working through' his grief. 'When you lose a parent…' He stops. 'It added a lot to my life, my career, my focus, to what's important, to what's not important. And I'm still getting through it. I haven't totally cured myself. It was only three and a half years ago.' He stretches on the bench and reaches for another Camel Blue. 'I've been working so much I haven't had a chance.'
Has that been his way of processing the loss – forging ahead with professional commitments?
'Yeah, well, in a weird way that's what happened when I was losing my mom.' Michael Mann offered him a part in Public Enemies, a Prohibition-era gangster film starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger. 'And I told him I didn't think I could do it. I said, "I don't have three months right now, I'm losing my mom." And he was a real mensch [a Yiddish word meaning 'person of integrity or honour']. He was like, "Stephen, I can have anybody I want but I want to wait for you. This is a great character part for you." And I asked my mom: "I don't want to leave you, what do I do?" And she said, "I think you should go do your movie. I think it'll make you happier, and you can always come home and see me." '
Dorff took the part, 'and the guys on that film were really sweet to me, took care of me'. Depp, as much of a music buff as Dorff – who is a keen guitarist and hopes to start writing film scores 'under another name' – was an attentive co-star and friend. 'And it was actually, in retrospect, good that I went to Chicago for those five months. Because if I was just sitting in LA that would not have been good for me…'
His mother, it seems, had led by work-focused example. 'When my parents got divorced, she used that midlife crisis and went back to school for 11 years,' he says of Nancy Dorff's retraining as a psychologist. 'That blew my mind. And that's why life is sometimes not fair – my mom could have helped so many people with her degree and being a doctor. Then she got sick…'
Dorff wears his heart on his sleeve, and his feelings on his skin: his mother's name and the dates of her birth and death are two of a dozen or so tattoos on his arms and back. Another, inscribed over his right biceps, is a saying dear to his mother: yesterday is history, tomorrow's a mystery, today is a gift, that's why they call it the present.
Dorff fingers the tattoo. 'It's also a saying that's in the Kung Fu Panda movie, as I later found out,' he says ruefully. 'Which I don't mind, I can take it for what it means to me.'
When his parents divorced he sided with his mother and was 'really pissed off' with his father, who 'went off with the young woman'. Now his relationship with his father is fine, and he's a doting big brother to his half-sisters, 11-year-old Kaitlyn and 10-year-old Callie. Kaitlyn, like many American adolescents, is a keen customer of Kitson, and Dorff recently took her and a friend shopping at the chain's Malibu outlet. Dorff, like many a man before him, spent the time mooching around outside the shop, smoking fretfully. 'Kaitlyn picked up a ton of stuff, $100, $200 items,' he says, 'then she said I had to get her friend stuff, too.' He capitulated and emptied his wallet. 'So anyway, that's become my life. I love it, though – it's nice to have these little girls in my life.'
It's a long way from his mean-and-moody early twenties, when he criticised his own films in the press and wore sunglasses 24/7. 'I was… outspoken,' he admits. 'I used a lot of my anger and things in my personal life in the press that I shouldn't have done. I learnt my lesson from that.'
But, really, he wonders, in the Hollywood bad-boy scheme of things, was he that off-the-rails? 'I've never been arrested!' he exclaims. 'I said this to my agency a while back. After I got Somewhere, they said, "This is our new Robert Downey Jr!" And I was like, "Come on, guys. Downey's a genius, but I've really never done anything that bad. Smoked some pot along the way but what the f***, guys?" That was funny.
'But God bless,' Dorff says, sparking up a final cigarette. 'I love it when guys that have had issues come back. And luckily I haven't had' – he knocks on the wooden picnic bench – 'those kinds of issues. I've just had some things to deal with like family stuff, you know, lost my mom. Which is the most difficult stuff I've gone through. But it's just normal human stuff.'
'Immortals' is released on November 11