Actor Michael Rooker stood in his hotel suite’s bathroom staring at a coffee cup with the concentration of a jeweler inspecting a diamond.
“You want to know how I act?” he asked in his trademark deep growl before holding the cup under a running faucet.
As he fluctuated the water’s force between gushing and a spitlike drip, Rooker’s facial expressions told a silent story, moving from a bright smile to a grimace to a cheeky smirk.
“There!” Rooker said, as a bit of water finally crested over the cup’s lip. “That was my line.”
Aquatic theatrics aside, his point was simple: His performances are spontaneous, often driven by his character’s motivations from minute to minute, he said.
Think of it this way. Instead of a tennis match where scene partners rhythmically toss dialogue back and forth, Rooker’s performances are like a game of boccie ball with a sugared-up 6-year-old — you can’t be sure when the ball will come or whether it will even be on the ground.
“A true force of nature, you never (know) which direction (Michael’s) headed,” recalled actor Norman Reedus, one of Rooker’s castmates on “The Walking Dead.” “Once you think you know, he switches it up and turns everything upside down. … He’s a lot like that in real life.”
Whatever acting alchemy Rooker uses, it seems to be working.
At almost 60, Rooker has a resume that features at least one project a year since his first film in 1986 and an impressive list of co-stars, including Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner, Al Pacino and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Recently, Rooker has been enjoying a moment in the pop culture sun (as evidenced by the hourslong line to get his autograph at this year’s Wizard World). In “Guardians of the Galaxy,” the year’s No. 1 grossing movie domestically, he played intimidating alien Yondu, and for three seasons he portrayed infamous fan favorite Merle on “The Walking Dead,” which averaged 13.3 million viewers per episode last season, according to AMC.
And Rooker, who moved to Chicago with his mom and eight siblings at age 13, doesn’t look to be slowing down soon. He’s prepping for his next film, “Bolden!” — the Dan Pritzker-helmed biopic of jazz icon Buddy Bolden — and promoting “The Driving Dead” — a Web series for the Illinois Department of Transportation.
“It’s nuts. It’s exhausting. But it’s fun,” Rooker, a graduate of the Goodman School of Drama, said of this moment. “You got to have fun. If you don’t enjoy the stuff you’re doing, just don’t do it.”
Rooker, whose Southern twang is a remnant of his early childhood in Jasper, Ala., credits a mystical internal force for bringing him this far.
“I was meant to be this actor that I am,” he said. “Even growing up as a little hillbilly kid in Chicago in my neighborhood, Division and Ashland, which was not the nicest neighborhood when I was growing up, I always knew inside my heart that I was meant for something else. I was not meant to be on the streets of Chicago. I was not meant to be in a gang. I was not meant to do drugs. I had that belief all through my life.”
When Rooker showed up in longtime Goodman and DePaul professor Joseph Slowik’s class, he had no theatrical training save for a couple of junior college courses and a Wells High School production of “Annie Get Your Gun.”
“But he had something that could be trained and could be very effective,” Slowik said. “He was a hardworking person, constantly trying to improve. What I remember most about him besides his talent was that he was never negative about anything.”
Ironically, Rooker has made a career of being negative. Like the baddies he played in “Guardians” and “Dead,” Rooker is known for being a villain. He was a murderous Ku Klux Klan member in “Mississippi Burning” and an ex-husband with a vendetta in “Sea of Love.” In “Eight Men Out,” he was a strongman player embroiled in the Black Sox Scandal, and in “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” his first movie, he was the titular Henry, a psychopathic murderer loosely based on Henry Lee Lucas. (The racism, misogyny and violent tendencies end with his characters, to be sure.)
As a teenager, Rooker moved multiple times and passed his days “duking it out,” he said, and he infuses those real-life experiences into his reel life.
“I was always the kind of kid that when my big cousins would put me in a headlock and want me to say, ‘Uncle,’ I would never,” he said. “I would stay there until they squeezed so tight their arms became numb and they would let go and kick me instead.”
Rooker’s hardscrabble ways are part of what appealed to John McNaughton, director of “Henry.”
“Instinctually, I knew Michael was the right guy (for ‘Henry’),” he said. “I just knew he had what it took. … I could tell he had the kind of intensity and focus to take him far.”
Critics agreed, giving “Henry” glowing reviews when it finally was released in 1989, including a spot on the year’s 10-best list from Tribune critic Dave Kehr and 3 1/2 stars from Roger Ebert (who reviewed it in 1990). In interviews, many of Rooker’s former castmates have pointed to this performance as being influential on their acting lives.
“I like playing people on the edge,” Rooker told the Tribune in 1990. “Characters who are on this line where they can do great damage or great heroic deeds. I like that. Am I really dangerous? Are you? I think we all can be at certain times.”
Rooker’s Merle Dixon certainly could be.
A schoolyard bully who never emotionally grew up, Merle was a murderer 16 times over, a bigot, an addict and, most dangerously, a strong, agile fighter. He had a blatant disrespect for life, which in the bleak post-apocalyptic world of “The Walking Dead” is all that’s worth fighting for.
But as with so many other bullies, the vicious, seemingly bulletproof exterior masks a core beaten soft by trauma.
In casting Merle, Sharon Bialy, the casting director behind “Dead” and “Breaking Bad,” was looking for someone who could play that spectrum, and she remembered Rooker, an actor she’d had her eye on since “Henry.”
“I could close my eyes and hear him doing the role,” Bialy recalled.
“He had the type of commitment needed … for people to buy into the character of Merle,” she said. “I thought Michael was fearless in terms of Merle’s negative characteristics. He wasn’t afraid to embrace them. There are a lot of actors who are afraid of how people are going to receive a character like this. However, Michael was committed to making Merle human, even though he was a very flawed human.”
For Rooker, “The Walking Dead” offered the chance to play with subtext and create a multifaceted character, he said.
The show’s sharp writing was also a draw: It was some of “the best material that I had ever had the opportunity to do in film or TV.”
In Season 3, the relationship between Merle and his brother Daryl quickly became a fan-favorite storyline. Viewers fell in love with these brothers, no matter how flawed they were, Rooker said.
The fans’ voraciousness, however, soon led Rooker to believe his days were numbered.
“It became very apparent to me that you can’t have Merle and Daryl on the same show unless it is the Merle and Daryl show,” Rooker said. “Every time we did a scene together that would be all the fans wanted to hear about. It would take away from the entire episode.”
Toward the end of that season, after redeeming himself slightly for the heartbreak he inflicted, Merle is killed, reanimates as a zombie and is killed again by his brother in one of the show’s more emotional scenes.
As a viewer, Bialy was sad to see Rooker go, but as a casting director, she saw an upside: “Being killed on ‘The Walking Dead’ just means you’re going to go do something else.”
Rooker had a significant role in James Gunn’s previous films (an alien-possessed monster in “Slither” and a nefarious henchman in “Super”), and the director wasn’t going to allow “Guardians of the Galaxy” to be any different — he just had to write a part for him first.
“Originally, the script had no Yondu,” Gunn said. “I was having a lot of problems with the third act, and I thought about adding this character, Yondu, and one of the inspirations was writing a role for Rooker.”
Yondu, an alien, is a scavenger who steals from the rich and the poor to give to himself. After kidnapping Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Yondu becomes his surrogate father, though one who’s less about tossing the ball around and more about threatening to eat him. Still, Yondu has a soft side: He helps save innocents in the last moments of the movie, and Rooker’s performance is just plain funny.
“I think that in another actor, the role would have been much more evil and less nuanced, but I knew Rooker would bring these small moments to the character where you see something in him that is a little better than what you think it might be,” Gunn said.
Rooker “has this outward appearance of a tough guy, but he also has this real perceivable humanity,” Gunn said. “He’s a guy who’s approaching 60 years old who’s becoming the most successful he’s ever been, and I think that’s because the world has become more complex and more open to characters who are not only black and white, but who are shades of gray.”
Pratt agreed with Gunn regarding Rooker’s complexity: “Rooker has a very unique voice. Not only the way he talks, but what he has to say. There’s not many gun-loving, country-boy ninjas in Hollywood. He’s one of the good ones.”
Gunn remained tight-lipped about the next “Guardians” film but confirmed that Rooker will be in it.
He will “be a continuing part of Marvel’s cosmic universe,” Gunn said.
For Rooker, that’s enough.
“I am a worker. I don’t sit around waiting for the perfect role,” he said. “If you don’t get (stuff) handed to you every single day, you grow up fighting for it; you grow up working for it. That’s part of who I am.”
You see, Rooker was meant to be this kind of actor, and he’s known that for a long time.
