The movie Sean Astin could watch forever: “It has overwhelmed my life”
Sean Astin has seemingly been around forever, which is probably what happens when you star in not one but two absolutely enormous movies in two very different decades, which in Astin’s case are 1985’s The Goonies and the Lord of the Rings trilogy of the early 2000s.
Even those Peter Jackson movies are more than 20 years old now, which also adds to Astin’s longevity, but for the past while, he has been more active in his other role as head of the major actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, which made it all the more exciting when he popped up as Joyce’s love interest in season two of Stranger Things.
Sadly of course (spoiler alert) he didn’t quite make it to season three (unless you count flashbacks) after getting soundly munched by a demogorgon and so we were denied the idea of him somehow reprising his role from The Goonies or as a hobbit right at the end of the final series in some kind of ’80s retro mash-up, which would have been super cool, rather than what we actually got which was an hour of overly-emotive, overly-American, “this way they can still scroll on their phones while watching Netflix” bollocks.
Anyway, to get back on track, Astin’s heydays were undoubtedly post-Goonies in the 1980s and early ‘90s, when he appeared in a string of films that really couldn’t have been made in any other time – movies like The War of the Roses, Toy Soldiers, Encino Man and Memphis Belle. OK, maybe that last one could have been made in other eras.
Even still, he didn’t do much for ten years or so before he was cast as Samwise Gamgee in Jackson’s sprawling fantasy trilogy, but he was still certainly a big fan of one of the most notable films of the late 1990s, the Curtis Hanson-directed noir LA Confidential starring Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe.
In choosing it as one of his favourite ever films, he told Rotten Tomatoes: “I love LA Confidential. If it’s on for even a second, I just watch it to the end. I almost want to call my cable service provider and ask them not to show it any more, because it has overwhelmed my life.”
Adding, “And the performances! I mean, David Strathairn and Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger and Kevin Spacey and James Cromwell… Police corruption, and justice, vigilante justice, and it’s just got everything. It’s just a perfect movie.”
Based on a 1990 novel by James Ellroy, LA Confidential tells the story of corrupt LAPD detectives in 1950s Hollywood and was a huge success when it was released, securing nine Academy Award nominations and winning two, launching Russell Crowe’s career, who would go on to be Oscar-nominated for his next two movies as well, winning one for Gladiator, and it would surely have been even more successful had it not been up against James Cameron’s epic Titanic the same year.
As for Astin, he has completed filming on two new projects, A Social Contract, which is a low-budget thriller and more interestingly, Chili Finger opposite Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. That is the tale of a woman who finds a human finger in her food at a restaurant and tries to blackmail them in order to get her hands on a payout.
