Woody Harrelson, who plays opposite Rockwell for the third time in the upcoming film The Cackling of the Dodos, describes his co-star as “very moderate. It’s always two beers, not three.” More than one person mentions Rockwell’s dedication to fitness, something he readily admits he’s “a little masochistic about,” doing just about everything except Pilates.

Rockwell is an actor’s actor; his preparations have been well documented. For Three Billboards, he went on ride-alongs with a Missouri cop. To play a high-school girls’ basketball coach in The Winning Season — one of the more under-the-radar roles he’s proud of — he trained with an ex-WNBA player. “Sam is a real student of the movies from the ’70s,” Goggins says. “I’ve seen those movies 10 times. Sam’s seen them a hundred times.” Rockwell doesn’t use social media but has considered TikTok, if only to keep up on interviews with fellow actors.

Playing opposite Malkovich had a satisfying symmetry. For years, he has been Rockwell’s stock answer when asked which actor he most admired. Press him on the moment he decided he wanted to do this for a living, and he lands on two performances: Malkovich as Biff in the televised Death of a Salesman, and, a few years later, seeing him onstage in Burn This after arriving in New York City at 18. The atmosphere on Wild Horse Nine’s Easter Island set was loose and goofy, punctuated by Malkovich’s stories about the Steppenwolf years. But when McDonagh asked him to “turn up the heat,” Rockwell says, “it was like we had front-row tickets to the John Malkovich show.” 

Watching his hero summon that raw emotional power was thrilling enough, but being on the receiving end was something else entirely. “It was like Michael Jordan passing you the ball,” he says. “Every time he yelled at me, I was secretly so excited.” 

Rockwell recounts all this with the measured tone of one actor discussing another — right up until he pulls out his phone to show me True West, the Sam Shepard play that made Malkovich a star, scrolling through YouTube with the fiendishness of a devoted fan. 

Like nearly everything he does, Rockwell approached Frank’s “Asian girl monologue” as a “delicious acting problem” to be solved by doing some homework. “What’s coming out of his mouth is already idiosyncratic and eccentric,” Rockwell says, “so he should be the opposite of that.” For the speech, he studied Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now and an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about a rugby player coming out, fascinated by the collision of hypermasculinity and vulnerability. 

For Wild Horse Nine, the watch list ran in two directions. There were the obvious entries: the films about military coups, South American movies set under dictatorship. Then there were the ones that tell you more about how his mind works: buddy pictures like Midnight Run and Thelma & Louise, and stranger, looser comedies like Identity Thief and Due Date (“underrated,” he insists). It’s in those detours that you begin to recognize the Rockwell touch: the instinct to find the absurd nestled inside the serious, the joke that somehow deepens rather than diffuses the drama. 

This might be Rockwell’s defining gift. He can play monsters because he never plays them as monsters. Instead, he finds the soft, slightly ridiculous human buried inside them and lets you fall for that person before the floor drops. 

As McDonagh puts it, “There’s a joyfulness to Sam’s performances that can turn on a dime to something much darker and dangerous. And there aren’t many actors who can make that turn without signaling it from two miles away.” 

Rockwell’s draw has never been rooted in menace alone. The frisson comes from watching warmth and volatility occupy the same body, and it only works because of Rockwell’s real, fundamental kindness. “He’s a very huggable human being,” says Harrelson. This is why his turn as George W. Bush in Vice works as more than just an elite impression. Plenty of actors can master the drawl, but Rockwell manages to telegraph W.’s puppyish need to be liked.

Aimee Lou Wood, who met Rockwell on the set of The White Lotus, reaches for similar vocabulary when describing the actor. “He feels so safe to be around because he’s got endless amounts of compassion,” she says. Rockwell onscreen isn’t convincing you that he might snap. He’s convincing you that, if he did, you’d still want to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

On set for his photoshoot, Rockwell’s methodology is on full display. He’s been caught up in The Cackling of the Dodos, with intense stretches of filming that last for days. And so, to pump himself up for the camera, Rockwell has taken control of the Bluetooth speaker, carefully selecting such bangers as Selena Gomez’s “Hands to Myself” and Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” played at heroic volume. Rockwell bops gently to the music while standing in front of a giant blue surfboard in the corner of an old Upper East Side brownstone. When Minogue’s song ends, he asks his assistant to play Michael Jackson next. 

There’s an endearingness to this: Rockwell’s determination to get the job done. “People who know Sam would categorically agree with this statement, but people who don’t know Sam may not believe it: He is one of the kindest, most accessible people that I’ve ever encountered in the world,” Goggins says. It’s of a piece with the man at lunch who inquires about my childhood with genuine interest and interrupts himself to check whether my cortado has come out right — too much milk? — as if my coffee was somehow his responsibility. 

When Rockwell travels for a job “anywhere in the world, even New Jersey, if he’s there for a long time,” he brings a stack of photographs and tapes them on the walls where he’s staying — pictures of his dog, his friends, and his longtime partner, Leslie Bibb. “It’s the things that are most important to him,” Goggins explains. “He’s not a materialistic person. He is not someone striving for anything other than excellence in between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’” 

There’s a quality in Rockwell that seems to provoke the same instinct in almost everyone who gets close to him: not just fondness but an urge to preserve something rare. Goggins feels it; so does Wood, who has become good friends with Rockwell and Bibb. “He’s so pure,” Wood says. “Growing up and watching Sam Rockwell, and then meeting him, I have complete respect and admiration and reverence, of course, but I have this protectiveness of him, as well. Because he gives so much to the world, and he contributes so much with his storytelling, that you just want to keep him safe.”

I feel it again when, for the second time that day, I find myself interpreting internet lingo for the actor. I mention the phrase that’s been circulating Letterboxd reviews to describe him — bicon — and he asks what it means. When I explain, he doesn’t blush or brush it off but starts working back through his own filmography out loud to test the read: the gardener in Lawn Dogs, the closeted Nazi in Jojo Rabbit (“I wonder if they clocked that one”), and his new role in The Cackling of the Dodos. “There’s a little bit of that,” he says of his character in the Jason Bateman–directed feature. “Or a lot of that, actually.” 

There’s something disarming about watching an actor learn in real time that audiences have been reading him in a particular way for decades and responding with genuine fascination. “I’ll take whatever I can get at 57!” he says, dissolving into laughter.

Fifty-seven is, in fact, on his mind, though not as a punchline. It’s the age at which he feels he’s finally being trusted with a certain kind of role. Lee in Wild Horse Nine is one; this November brings another, when he returns to the stage as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at La MaMa. “I’m really just starting to play grown men,” he tells me. “Even [Dixon in] Three Billboards was essentially a man-child.” 

Ask him what’s next, and he doesn’t have a grand theory, no plan to capitalize on the moment, no sense that the moment is even his on which to capitalize. He’s spent years vanishing into screwups and addicts and hustlers and fools, and somehow his lore has only grown. And so, he will continue to do what he’s always done: focus on the work and what he needs to do to keep making it. As he puts it, “Everything’s an apprenticeship to the next part.”