Meeting Sam Rockwell: he likes his chewing gum

I just got back from an interview with the great Sam Rockwell which I'm going to be writing up in the next week. He's a lot sweeter than I imagined — a soft fugitive sweetness, like that of a boy. He makes only intermittent eye contact and stuffs his mouth compulsively with too many piece of chewing gum. His features are a lot finer than you'd think, and he's skinny in the way that probably makes all Jewish mothers within a ten mile radius line up to feed him soup. The sense you get from his film roles — of a kid who has spent a lot of time alone finally getting to play with others — is basically right. He's a gregarious daydreamer, with that fuzzy free-spirit boundarylessness which makes for wonderfully liquid performances on screen and — I would guess — slightly shambolic relationships in real life, although he says he's been dating the same girl for two years now. They get on with one another, his ex-girlfriends, I'd imagine. He's not a compartmentaliser: everything flows into everything else. His apartment must be a mess. I liked him a lot.