Joseph Gordon-Levitt Covers BlackBook October 2011 – The Remix Issue
October 3, 2011 by Hollywoodite
Joseph Gordon-Levitt covers BlackBook Magazine’s Remix Issue as part of the post-premiere promotion for 50/50, his new comedy about being diagnosed with cancer. It’s more of a drama/comedy, than just a comedy, but it’s written in a light tone and co-stars comic Seth Rogen.
Gordon-Levitt’s just trying to keep his film out there, about two weekends after its release, so it doesn’t get buried further under Moneyball and The Lion King 3D. The film’s been sidelined a little, but the promotion’s solid and JGL fangirls are lapping up the interviews on MovieFone, Ellen, Fallon etc. And he just did a fairly-lengthy profile in BlackBook, who also offer a very long pictorial and several outtakes.
On the tabloids: “When I go to the grocery store, I’ll look at the covers of tabloid magazines—they fascinate me—but I don’t bring that s**t into my house because I think it’s evil and poisonous. It’s easy to dismiss it as harmless entertainment, but I don’t think it is. We’re very influenced by the stories we choose to fill our days with.”
On women’s sexuality: “There’s a difference between a girl who’s sexy, like, ‘I’m a slave,’ and an assuredly sexy girl like Beyoncé… But I have to admit, man, I fall for the slave thing, too.”
On 50/50 being dubbed a “cancer comedy”: “It’s not like Seth and Evan [Goldberg, Rogen’s childhood friend and the film’s co-producer] sat down and said, ‘How can we make something quirky? I know! Let’s do a comedy about cancer,’” Gordon-Levitt says. “We had a very upbeat, positive, collaborative set. It was never depressing to come to work.”
On how the film affected him: “That entire time, I never stopped thinking about what it would be like if I was about to die, and that’s rough. After we finished shooting the movie, I went through this phase where I had to say to myself, I don’t have cancer. I do not have cancer. It was like I needed convincing.”
On how he selects his scripts: “I usually don’t finish them. I get into them until I have my ‘eureka’ moment, and then it’s done.”
On why he likes acting, even after all these years: “What turns me on about acting is being somebody else,’ says Gordon-Levitt. ‘My favorite actors are those who really disappear into their characters.”
On being a child actor: He began acting on stage and in commercials, hawking everything from Pop-Tarts to Cocoa Puffs, from the age of 6. “My parents have VHS tapes of pretty much everything I’ve ever done, even an old episode of Murder, She Wrote,” he said.
On moving on from being a child actor: “I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to be an actor anymore because the only jobs anybody wanted to give me were more TV parts,” he says. “It’s not that I was averse to TV; it’s just that the work didn’t inspire me. Saying ‘hit record’ was, for me, an imperative sentence. I no longer wanted anyone to tell me how I was allowed to express myself.” – via BlackBook.
PHOTO CREDIT – BLACKBOOK MAGAZINE
