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The Cool One
Actor Stephen Dorff finds himself up to his neck in danger in the supernatural thriller FearDotCom.
By Marc Shapiro

Stephen Dorff is the kind of actor who puts agents and managers in an early grave.

The 30 year-old actively campaigned for and nearly landed a role in the cross-dressing comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything , Julie Newmar. He brushed aside the chance to top line Speed, and while he was down to the wire with Leonardo Dicaprio for the role of Jack on Titanic, he was not too broken up about not getting the movie because it allowed him to hang with Jack Nicholson in the bleak thriller Blood & Wine. Sure, he did Blade, made an attempt at something commercial in the mediocre Space Truckers and cut his 12 year-old teeth on The Gate, but that hardly balances the quirky scales that have provided memorable turns in such indie fare as I shot Andy Warhol, S.F.W., and Cecil B. Demented.

"I'm not a celebrity," says Dorff in his raspy, too many cigarettes/Tom Waits kind of voice, "I'm just an actor who has the luxury of doing what he wants to do. I get to work with interesting people and do things that interest me. I've purposefully gone out of my way to avoid being one of those actors who makes 10 movies a year just for the sake of making them. I live to feel something cool when I make a movie. If I see cool in the script then I go for it."

Cool does not slip into Stephen Dorff's conversation for effect. It is part of his laid-back, easygoing hipster stance; one that stands out most glaringly when he has taken the occasional commercial assignment such as Blade or his most recent venture, playing a slightly confused bordering on squirrelly detective in the thriller FearDotCom. Dorff, who has in recent years made the rounds of the gossip rags for his partying with Nicholson and his friendship with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, is uncomfortable talking about anything approaching the personal, and he sighs grudgingly whenever his rebel nature is explored in an interview promoting FearDotCom.

"I just go with my instincts,"he offers. "I don't know any other way. I'm pretty easy to work with if I'm into what I'm doing. If I'm not a true believer in what's going on, I tend to be more difficult."

That's why Dorff recently acted in a short fantasy-flavored film called Quantum Project more for the cutting-edge camera technology involved than anything intrinsic to the story. And when it came to his participation in FearDotCom, Dorff relates that there was a lot that was "way cool" in the project. First off there was director Bill Malone, whom the actor found to be simpatico. Dorff also liked the idea of playing the fairly straight role of a detective who gets in way over his head when users of a spooky Web site start turning up dead. Plus, it was that creative time of the month and the actor was looking for something commercial.

"I thought it could be scary," he explains, " I thought it could be cool. I jumped out of my chair when I first read the script. It was pretty dark. I thought, 'This movie will actually deliver some moments that will scare the s--t out of people,' So I went for it."

But not without some reservations. While the script for FearDotCom had requisite elements of cop action and this whole "gnarly Web site killer thing going on," he felt that on some levels there was still something missing. "Then it got deeper and more complex and then all of this hallucination stuff started coming into it and the whole concept grew." The actor was grateful for the script changes and even happier that his character stayed pretty much the same.

"To me, this guy's a pretty straightforward young detective," Dorff says, "I think he's probably pretty determined and passionate about his job, but he's overwhelmed by what's going on and is having a hard time making sense of it all. At first he doesn't know what the hell is going on. There's been seven deaths in two days and he's being grossed out by the germs and the weird symptoms being displayed by the dead people. The added cool thing is that my character has been infected by the Web site, and so the closer he gets to the killer, the weaker and sicker he gets and the more vulnerable he becomes. It was fun to play a character who is in that kind of deep trouble."

Dorff recalls that shooting in Luxembourg (which doubles for New York in the movie) was an interesting time in which chemistry between director Malone and himself overcame the reality of not having top-flight Hollywood crews and technical people on hand. When the company relocated to Montreal, it was a matter of endurance for the actor who, coincidentally, had been finishing up an action film called $teal in America and, for a period of about six days, would literally jump back and forth between the two films with little rest. But throughout the process, the actor's initial good feeling about FearDotCom continued to be realized.

"I love all the hallucination scenes in the movie," he says, "It looks really great and visually the whole movie is very effective. The scene at the end with Stephen Rea is pretty cool. We finally come together and it's pretty tripped out. I guess the more dark and twisted the movie became, the more appealing it became for me. But to me it was always about the story. To me, it was a movie about a gnarly Web site. It was kind of a dark thriller that had this kind of science fiction element and this kind of energy that was just kind of floating out there. Bill kind of went there with it and the result was that the movie delivers on what it's supposed to."

Which has not always been the case with Dorff's other genre adventures. His memories of appearing in The Gate are so fleeting as to be inconsequential. Ditto a very early appearance in the 1988 TV remake of The Absent-Minded Professor. He loved taking on the role of a yuppie vampire in Blade and bemoans the fact that a change in director and direction ultimately led to his passing on the sequel. And then there was Space Truckers and, stretching the bounds of what constitutes fantasy, his teeth-rattling performance in the critically acclaimed, but largely overlooked, Cecil B. Demented.

"Space Truckers was a long time ago and the only reason I did it was because I wanted to work with Dennis Hopper," Dorff says, "I became real tight with Dennis. I just wish we had been making a different movie. I wasn't too happy with the movie. In fact, it's the only movie I've never been happy with it. A lot of people tell me that it's pretty good, but I just don't get it. In Cecil B. Demented, John Waters, who is a good friend of mine, wrote the part for me. That movie was a little bit off the radar, but it was something I did right after coming off Blade and, after doing such a big movie, I wanted to be involved in something smaller."

Dorff was born in Atlanta, GA., in 1973. His father was motion picture music composer, Steve Dorff, who would always bring home stories from movie sets and occasionally take his son along. It was inevitable that Dorff would gravitate toward acting.

"One day my dad took me onto the set of a Clint Eastwood movie and I saw this kid my age on the set, and I liked the idea that this kid did not have to spend every day in school," he recalls. "So that was part of the attraction. But I think it was just a matter of this young kid really wanting to be in the movies."

As it turned out, Dorff was a naturally gifted actor even as a young child, and it was during a part in a school play that he was discovered by a casting agent and made his professional acting debut at age 11 in a He-Man toy commercial. Shortly after that, he was picked for a role in the horror fantasy The Gate.

"After I did The Gate, I went back to school," he remembers, "But by the time I was 15, I was wanting to act again and so I made a deal with my parents that if I did well in school I could go to acting class. Pretty soon I started going out on auditions."

Although he had his heart set on the movies, Dorff found his early entry into acting via the tried-and-true television sit-com route in such shows as Roseanne, Different Strokes and Family Ties.

"TV wasn't a bad thing for me and obviously I learned a lot," he says, "But I just always loved the movies, the idea of going to the movies and their not being any commercials."

His big movie break came at age 17 when he captured the coveted role of PK in the South Africa-set period drama The Power of One. From that point on, it was a slow and steady climb, alternating occasional high profile, commercial movies like Earthly Possessions and, most recently, Deuces Wild, with a string of strong performances in small, often independent productions such as City of Industry, BackBeat, and I shot Andy Warhol. That many of these roles were a bit on the, shall we say, quirky side is not lost on the actor.

"It's always been that I respond to different things and to things I find interesting," sighs Dorff in yet another attempt to lay this albatross to rest. "These things happen for a reason. It was like it was with Titanic. It had come down to the wire between Leonardo and me for the role of Jack. One day it was his; the next mine. It was a long process, but it didn't involve me turning it down like a lot of stories have indicated. James Cameron is a cool guy and, if things had worked out, I would have loved to work with him on Titanic. But these things happen for a reason. If I had gotten the part, I would not have been able to go off and work with Jack Nicholson on Blood and Wine."

That's not to say Dorff doesn't admit there have been some mistakes he's made with his career on occasion.

"I've turned down movies that were big successes and I've done things that did not turn out so well," he admits, "But you don't look back. You just keep going."

However, it was during the making of Blood and Wine, while he was acting, interacting and partying with Jack Nicholson, that Dorff finally came to grips with the principle of compromise. He could still do the kinds of films he likes and play the kinds of characters that interested him, but if these elements occasionally were part and parcel of a blatantly commercial film, so much the better.

"I have no idea if casting people are looking for something specific when they decide on me for a role," comments Dorff as he warms slightly to the philosophical probing, "For me, it's simply a matter of my agent sending me a script and I just decide if what is being offered is interesting. How this stuff happens to me is all kind of a mystery. To me acting is about doing different things with different stories and different actors and directors. There are all kinds of movies to me. I have no problem doing a commercial film if it's interesting."

Recently returned from Budapest where he completed the thriller Den of Lions, Dorff is about to add producing to his credits, fronting a modern-day Easy Rider-style drug trafficking story and a modern-day Butch and Sundance-type heist film. Dorff looks at being a logical extension if a low-key career that is beginning to bring about high-profile results.

"It's cool. I knew I wanted to do other things, but I didn't know when it was going to happen," he says, "But now it's just happening and it's cool. I'm doing pretty much what I want and I'm working with my friends. It doesn't get any better than that."

The End

Correction: Stephen is 29 not 30. He won't be 30 until July 2003 :)