“I’d rather just talk about this movie as that was 30 years ago,” Rex said. He basically shut me down as soon as I brought up porn. I envisioned telling Rex this story, asking him what it was like to basically live it every day of his life. In some extremely small way, I felt like I’d gotten a taste of what it was to be judged for something I hadn’t wanted to reveal in the first place. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life!” she managed to huff before driving off, bangs a-jouncing. When I tried to pay her, she refused my (presumably dirty?) money. The driver, with her permed bangs and Mickey Mouse sweater, went silent, and didn’t speak a word to me until the end of the ride. “What kind of videos?!”Īnnoyed, both with her for digging and with myself for not being able to conjure an effective lie, I gave up. “Oh, really?!” she immediately fired back. “Video editor,” I told her, attempting to elide through omission and deter follow-ups through my groggy voice. She peppered me with questions, about what I did for a living and so on. One too-early hungover morning around the time, I was in a cab with an overcaffeinated driver who had probably just begun her shift and was feeling extra chatty. Back in the mid-aughts, in my last job before my first writing gig, I’d accepted a position mastering DVDs for a porn company. Neither Rex nor Saber can quite help being defined by their pasts, and in some infinitesimal way I felt like I could relate. Why wouldn’t he? Of course, that didn’t stop rags from referring to him as “ex-gay porn star Simon Rex” for years to come. At the time, he was a handsome guy with a big dick who needed money, and porn videos were things you found in the backrooms of video stores, not images anyone could pull up on a device in their pocket with a few key strokes. Later distributed as “Young, Hard, and Solo” among other titles (they were solo masturbation scenes, if you want to get technical), they all stemmed from just “two video sessions for gay-porn impresario Brad Posey” Rex had made. Thus there was a cosmic synergy to the idea of Rex playing “Mikey Saber,” a squirrely ex-porn star trapped in an outdated shtick of his own making.Īnd oh yeah, there was also the matter that, near the height of his fame as a VJ, a few mainstream columnists, including the Village Voice’s Michael Musto, discovered some porn videos Rex had made for easy cash as an 18-year-old living with his girlfriend and her child. Rex had reportedly bankrolled a vacation in Asia by making personalized videos for money on Cameo, and before getting the call to do Red Rocket, had been living in a fancy trailer home in Joshua Tree that he originally envisioned as a rental property. Later on, he was pretty successful on Vine, but more recently he’d been in a kind of showbiz purgatory. He used to party with Paris Hilton and Joe Francis (the scummy dude from Girls Gone Wild, ‘member that?), and later became a reasonably successful novelty rapper, performing under the name Dirt Nasty†. Rex seemed to define novelty fame in the aughts, having gone from model to MTV VJ to a recurring role in the Scary Movie franchise. Can you imagine? Awards voters are probably way too lame for that to ever happen but I want to bask in the glow of the possibility for as long as I can. There’s so much more to Red Rocket than just what’s on-screen, even if what’s on-screen is legitimately great. ![]() The former MTV VJ’s breakout turn in Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, about an aging ex-porn star returning to his Texas hometown, isn’t just one of my favorite performances of the year, it’s one of my favorite stories. It’s fair to say that I was excited to speak to Simon Rex.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |