’I didn’t become an actor for the fame’
IF I’D met Matt Dillon 30 years ago, my teenage self would have expired with excitement. In the mid-eighties, Dillon was the hottest heart-throb in the world, who, at 19, took top billing in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film The Outsiders, above co-stars Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze and a newcomer called Tom Cruise.
But while these actors made a smooth transition to the Hollywood A-list, Dillon went down a choppier career path.
An Irish Catholic boy from outside New York, Dillon was “discovered” by a casting director while playing truant, aged 14, and for the next 10 years cornered the market in hunk-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks roles in films such as Rumble Fish and The Flamingo Kid.
Desperate to break free of this typecasting, he finally achieved the goal with his heartbreaking performance as a junkie in Gus Van Sant’s 1988 Drugstore Cowboy.
But a series of straight-to-video film roles followed, and the world almost forgot about Dillon until he resurfaced another decade later as a slimy private investigator in There’s Something About Mary, showing an unexpected flair for comedy.
Yet Dillon again went under the radar, disappearing to Cambodia to direct his own film, City of Ghosts. He popped up again in 2004, winning a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for his racist LA cop in Crash. But as before, rather than capitalise on this buzz, he turned to a series of low-budget Indie movies.
Now Dillon is back again, sitting in a London hotel room to promote Fox’s fiercely hyped TV series, Wayward Pines, directed by the notoriously inconsistent M Night Shyamalan ( The Sixth Sense).
Dillon, still handsome at 51, plays the lead, as FBI agent Ethan Burke, sent to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents in the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, where – he discovers – nothing is quite what it seems.
Co-starring Toby Jones and Melissa Leo ( The Fighter), the show has definite echoes of David Lynch’s classic Twin Peaks.
At 51, the former pin-up now clutches a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses.
There’s a hint of grey in his thick black hair and beard; his skin has toughened, there are wrinkles on the heavy brow.
Despite his earnest answers, Dillon still radiates blue-collar machismo. Such prettiness is almost certainly what hampered the actor’s path to superstardom – too many people refused to see him as anything other than a sexy thug. It’s clear some of his more eclectic career choices derived from frustration at not being able to explore his range.
“I don’t feel my versatility has really been explored,” says Dillon in his dogbark, New-Yawk drawl.
Yet he’s excited at the opportunities his first TV starring role offers.
“Television’s in a really good and smart place right now,” he growls. “I love going to the movies, but I do think there’s this new way of telling stories in a long form on television.”
From the outset, he made it clear he had serious dramatic ambitions – while his Brat Pack (he’s always distanced himself from the label) contemporaries migrated to Los Angeles, he settled in New York, to study drama at the Lee Strasberg Institute.
While the private lives of his colleagues were often reported by the press, Dillon has never discussed his, even managing to keep a three-year romance with his Something About Mary co-star Cameron Diaz away from the paparazzi.
“Sometimes you think it has a good chance of succeeding artistically and it just doesn’t work out like you hoped. And sometimes you just need to work and you go with the best thing that’s available to you at the time. As an actor, I don’t like to do stuff I don’t feel passionately about, but sometimes it’s all there is.”
There have been some unlucky misses, too: Quentin Tarantino offered him the role of Butch the boxer in Pulp Fiction, but then took offence when Dillon said he loved the part but would sleep on it, and gave the role to Bruce Willis.
“I didn’t become an actor to become famous,” he says, “and I’ve never felt comfortable as a leading man or a teen idol.”
He has consistently prioritised his life over his career. “I used to joke that every time I was hanging out in an East Village bar with my friends or traipsing across Italy, I lost a job. But you can’t sit by the phone, man. Life’s not a dress rehearsal.” — The Daily Telegraph
● Wayward Pines airs on South African television screens on DStv Channel 125 and StarSat Channel 131 on May 14 at 9pm