Simon Rex plays a down-on-his-luck, washed-up porn actor in A24’s Red Rocket, who returns to his Texas birthplace in the hopes of reinvention — or, at the very least, a path back to L.A. He hustles his way back into his estranged wife’s life with the promise of a fresh start, showing up on her doorstep. He turns to peddling drugs and hanging out at a doughnut shop, where he flirts with the girl behind the register, Strawberry (newcomer Suzanna Son), whom he wants to break into the porn business as her manager, because he can’t obtain a day job due to the obvious gap on his résumé.
Mikey, played by a fascinating Rex, is the antihero par excellence: a seductive thief entirely concerned with himself, oblivious to how his actions affect others around him. He’s the latest in a series of characters living on the outskirts of civilization created by filmmaker Sean Baker and his long-time partner Chris Bergoch (co-writer of Baker’s previous films The Florida Project, Tangerine, and Starlet).
It came about as a result of research for Starlet, one of my earlier projects. We were filming in these model homes and on adult film sets. We met a few Mikey Sabers and discovered that they fit into an industry paradigm [and even have a slang word for them]: the suitcase pimp. We were attempting to figure out what to do after The Florida Project when we came upon Red Rocket. We cracked it in 2017, which meant we quickly found out the beginning, middle, and end. However, we travelled to Canada to make another project that was halted [because to COVID-19], and we returned to Red Rocket since it was a film [with a very small staff].
There were a number of these really well-developed antiheroes who, by not changing, I believe, imparted lessons. I’m talking about films like Jack Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces, where the creators were probing moral murky zones. Vincent Gallo in Buffalo ’66, David Thewlis in Naked All of them are films that, if offered to a small studio today, would almost certainly be rejected.
