Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has recently revealed that his favorite character he’s ever gotten the opportunity to play was the hitman Joe in Rian Johnson’sLooper. Gordon-Levitt and Johnson have a long-standing partnership in Hollywood, one that spans beyond 15 years. The two first collaborated back on Johnson’s feature directorial debut,Brick.
From there, Levitt would go on to feature inThe Brother’s Bloom,Star Wars: The Last Jedi, andKnives Out. Rounding out the cast ofLooper, Levitt starredalongside Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Noah Segan, Jeff Daniels, Piper Perabo, Paul Dano, Pierce Gagnon, and Garret Dillahunt. The world ofLooperis set in a strange time loop, one in which time travel has yet to be invented yet. However, in the future, time travel has been discovered and is being used by the Kansas City crime syndicate as a means to send targets back to be executed in a time zone in which they cease to exist. The popular sci-fi thriller follows the character of Joe (Gordon-Levitt), a designated contract killer who becomes forced to confront his past self. It all goes terribly wrong when Joe loses sight of the older version of himself, who escapes out into the world. Joe finds himself in a race against time, where he must be able to locate his future self before it’s too late.
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Due toLooperinvolving heavy elements of time travel, Levitt shared the role of Joe with Willis through a series of well-executed prosthetics and routine time jumps. Now, in a recent interview withVanity Fair, Levitt detailed his experience while filmingLooperand broke down why this is his favorite role he has played yet. He stated, “I wore hours and hours of prosthetic makeup every day to look a little bit like Bruce Willis. Kazuhiro Tsuji, the phenomenal makeup designer, told Rian and me that it was impossible to make me look like Bruce Willis. He brought out charts, he brought out photos of Bruce and of me and pointed out, ‘Look, the distance between the bottom of his nose and the top of his lip, it’s just not the same, I can’t fix that, you will not get him to look like him.'"
“Rian said to Kazu, ‘It doesn’t have to look exactly like him, it just has to suggest it, it’s okay, it’s a movie.’ One of my marks of success as an actor, for myself, is do I seem different on screen from myself? It’s probably whyLooperis my favorite performance of mine because it’s the most different,” Gordon-Levitt continued. “Now granted, I sort of cheated with the prosthetics, I kind of look different.” In concluding his comments, Gordon-Levitt noted that playing a younger version of Willis contributes to his fondness for the role of Joe. “But I get that thrill the most of, ‘Wow, it’s really somebody else, it’s not me.’ I did a lot of work to try and do my version that wasn’t an imitation of Bruce Willis, but had sort ofthe spirit of Bruce Willis- If I had to pick a favourite, acting-wise, this is up there for me,” he said.
Looperwas indefinitely a unique experience for Levitt, who at this point has been on several famous film sets over the years. It makes sense though that this role was his favourite because it stands out from the rest of his many roles, which seem to blur together after a while - and he had the chance to somewhat embody the legendary Willis, which definitely contributed.
Looperis available to stream on both Hulu and Netflix.
