Michael Rooker

Overview

Born
April 6, 1955 · Jasper, Alabama, USA
Birth name
Michael Allen Rooker
Height
5′ 10″ (1.78 m)

Biography

Family

Spouse
Children

Trademarks

Raspy gravelly voice
Frequently plays law enforcement or military characters
Collaborations with James Gunn

Trivia

Studied Japanese martial art of Aikido with Fumio Toyoda Shihan prior to establishing himself in Chicago theatre.
Holds a black belt in Kyokushin style of karate.
Said in an interview, that when he was 13 years old, he saw a Volvo commercial that compared Volvos to other cars by hanging them upside down from a crane and dropping them on their roof. He was so impressed with how well the Volvo fared in the comparison that he's wanted one ever since. In 2014, he finally purchased an s60 Volvo Sedan.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) was his first movie, which was filmed in 1986 but was not released until 1990.
The Walking Dead (2010) is not the first series on which he played a character with a prosthetic arm. He played a one-armed, drug smuggling, boat captain with a hook for a hand in the CSI: Miami (2002) episode "Dead Zone".

Quotes

[on his Henry character] I can bring that role back in a second. I just rip into the little idiosyncrasies and it's interesting, I've never said good-bye to Henry. That character, the introverted-ness, the soft-spoken quality is always there.
I don't approach a role by saying I'll be unsavory or unlikable. I think all the roles I've done have been very passionate people who go to absolute extremes to make their points.
(On filming Super (2010)) It was mayhem. No, not really. James Gunn tried to keep everything really organized. He had a good AD department. Everyone was professional, by which I mean all the actors of course had a lot of good experience, and the crew did as well. So even though the budget was small, everybody was dead-on and worked real hard. You have to when you do a little one like this, because you don't have time to waste. And there is no time. There's no money. In these kinds of productions, time is definitely money, so if you screw up a day or a shot, you may not get a chance to go back and get that shot and redo that day.
(On filming Pilot (1986)) That's one of the roles that I cut class at school to go do, and I never told them. They didn't know how else to work outside of school, but I did anyway. I think I ended up getting my SAG card with that. And I had to cut my hair. I was in a play, and I had to have my long hair for it. Then [the Crime Story producers] wanted me to cut my hair because I was a cop or something like that. So what we ended up doing was cutting just the edges and stuffing my hair up under my hat, my cop hat, and I did the role that way.
(On landing Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)) I was doing a play called "Sea Marks", an Irish play, a two-person play. The director was doing the prosthetic work for Henry, and he turned me on to what was going on. "They're casting this guy. You should go and audition". I did, and I ended up getting the job. That's how it came about. That was my first real film role that had any sort of beginning, middle, and end. I was there throughout the whole piece. I started reading some books and material. Nothing really helped. I saw a couple of interviews with [Lucas] with a state trooper or something like that. So I got a little handle on it from that. He's very soft-spoken, and very shy and introverted. So I hooked into that, and that was my handle for the role. Everything else was just our imaginations, and my imagination. That was a really kind of crazy piece for me, because I was scared shitless. It was my first real role in film. I had done plays, but I wasn't sure if I was going to be good at this film stuff, so I really worked hard to make sure that I was there, I was bringing it that day and that minute. I stayed in character all day. Once I went in to work, I stayed in character all day long. So after the cut, I would leave the set and go to my room, close the door, and not talk to anybody. I wouldn't talk to anyone all day long during the filming of it. I would just do my work and go away. Come in, action, do my job, do what I needed to do, and then go away. And that's what helped me through the entire piece. It was way too difficult to go in and out of character, especially then, because I was young as an actor. I didn't know how this film stuff worked. In a play, you stay in character pretty much almost all the way through until the evening's over. So that's what I did here. I used that technique. I stayed in character as much as I possibly could all day long, or all night long, whatever the times were on the day we worked. People thought that was a little weird, that I'd just go away, that I wouldn't talk to them and stuff. Then they saw my room, and I had all my mirrors covered up, taped up. I didn't want to see images of myself, and I kept the room dark or black. And I just stayed in the room and just prepared for the next scene. So yeah, it was kind of weird and crazy, but that was a technique that seemed like it worked.