In my posting on Batman vs. the Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, I touched on the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has an important role in the film:
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Now more about the actor, who at the age of 34 has already had a long and impressive career, in a wide range of roles, many challenging.
From Wikipedia:
Joseph Leonard Gordon-Levitt (… born February 17, 1981) is an American actor and filmmaker. As a child star, he appeared in the films A River Runs Through It, Angels in the Outfield and 10 Things I Hate About You, and as Tommy Solomon in the TV series 3rd Rock from the Sun. He took a break from acting to study at Columbia University, but dropped out in 2004 to pursue acting again. He has since starred in 500 Days of Summer, Inception, Hesher, 50/50, Premium Rush, The Dark Knight Rises, Brick, Looper, The Lookout, Manic, Lincoln, Mysterious Skin and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
… The San Francisco Chronicle noted that [in 3rd Rock] Gordon-Levitt was a “Jewish kid playing an extraterrestrial pretending to be a Jewish kid”
… His [more recent] films include 2001’s drama Manic, which was set in a mental institution, Mysterious Skin (2004), in which he played a gay prostitute and child sexual abuse victim, and Brick (2005), a modern-day film noir set at a high school
On 3rd Rock, from Wikipedia:
3rd Rock from the Sun (sometimes referred to as simply 3rd Rock) is an American sitcom that aired from 1996 to 2001 on NBC. The show is about four extraterrestrials who are on an expedition to Earth, which they consider to be a very insignificant planet. The extraterrestrials pose as a human family to observe the behavior of human beings.
… Dick Solomon (John Lithgow), the High Commander and leader of the expedition, is the family provider as a physics professor at Pendelton (with Ian Lithgow, John Lithgow’s oldest son, playing one of his less successful students). Information officer and oldest member of the crew Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has been given the body of a teenager and is forced to enroll in high school (later college), leaving security officer Sally (Kristen Johnston) and “the one with the transmitter in his head,” Harry (French Stewart) to spend their lives as twenty-somethings hanging out at home and bouncing through short-term jobs.
… Dr. Mary Albright (Jane Curtin) is a professor of anthropology at (fictional) Pendelton State University, and many of the issues with which the four aliens struggle appear in her conversation and work.
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Left to right: Johnston, Curtin, Lithgow, Stewart (in back), Gordon-Levitt
Then in 2003, Gordon-Levitt had a major role in the gay-themed drama Latter Days (which I posted about here). Though his character was a straight Mormon (and he is himself straight), the film was intensely sympathetic to gay men, and it was courageous of the 22-year-old Gordon-Levitt to take a role in the film.
The next year, he took one of the two starring roles in another gay-themed drama, Mysterious Skin, but now playing a male prostitute. From Wikipedia:
Mysterious Skin is a 2004 Dutch-American drama film directed by American filmmaker Gregg Araki, who also wrote the screenplay based on Scott Heim’s 1995 novel of the same name.
… Mysterious Skin tells the story of two pre-adolescent boys who are sexually abused by their baseball coach, and how it affects their lives in different ways into their young adulthood. One boy becomes a reckless, sexually adventurous male prostitute, while the other retreats into a reclusive fantasy of alien abduction.
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An impressive performance in an impressive movie.
And now his playful side, as a guest host of Saturday Night Live on 9/22/12, where he led a sketch “Magic Joe”, taking off on the movie Magic Mike about male strippers, with Gordon-Levitt doing Channing Tatum. A still showing off his body, which is well-developed, but lean rather than extraordinarily muscular (and so pleasing to me):
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A video of the performance:
