Sam Rockwell on the “quintessential” Jack Nicholson performance
The acting talents of Sam Rockwell often seem limitless. Over the years, the Californian actor has delivered several important performances in both comic and dramatic roles, and Rockwell has made audiences all over the world laugh and cry and think throughout his three-decade-long career.
Amongst Rockwell’s most impressive appearances are Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for which he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’; Adam McKay’s Vice, for which he was nominated for the same award after playing George W. Bush; The Green Mile, Galaxy Quest and Seven Psychopaths.
So Rockwell has undoubtedly inspired some of his younger fellow actors, but of all the actors that Rockwell seems to be indebted to in terms of giving him inspiration, it looks as though he genuinely admires the work of Jack Nicholson, who has dominated the screen for decade upon decade, delivering some of the finest performances the cinema world has ever seen.
In a feature with Rotten Tomatoes, Rockwell once named his five favourite movies and discussed a few of his favourite Nicholson performances in the process, although he clearly has one clear winner when it comes to putting forth his idea for the actor’s best-ever on-screen effort.
Rockwell noted Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Piece, all of which arrived in the 1970s, the undoubtedly most prolific time for Nicholson. “That’s another great one,” Rockwell said of Forman’s film, adding, “That and Chinatown and maybe Five Easy Pieces.”
“I mean, those were the big Nicholson performances,” he added. Five Easy Pieces arrived in 1970 and saw Nicholson star alongside Karen Black and Susan Anspatch as a former piano prodigy turned oil rig worker Bobby Dupea, who travels home to Washington to visit his dying father with his lacking-in-manners girlfriend.
Chinatown, meanwhile, is Polanski’s neo-noir mystery film written by Robert Towne, starring Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, inspired by the Californian water wars of the early 20th Century. Towne won ‘Best Original Screenplay’ at the Academy Awards for his writing, and the film remains Polanski’s last film made in the United States.
But for Rockwell, Nicholson’s big performance really came in Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he called his portrayal of Randall McMurphy “kind of the quintessential Nicholson performance. It’s kind of everything about Nicholson that’s great.”
The film is an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel of the same name and saw Nicholson play McMurphy, a new patient at a psychiatric ward who is only admitted because he pretends to be insane to get out of serving time in prison after raping a 15-year-old girl. He liberates many of his fellow patients, much to the chagrin of the head nurse Miss Ratched.
Check out the trailer for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest below.
