Dorff as Johnny Marco in Somewhere. 3,1Stephen Dorff, who stars in Sofia Coppola's Somewhere as Johnny Marco, a Hollywood actor whose 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) seems more mature than he is, admits to having had his own bad-boy moments.
“I remember when I was 18 or 19 I was plastered over magazines for Backbeat and other movies I did," he says. "I thought I was the coolest thing.
"There were girls; it was like a dream for a young person. But it can be such a fantasy you forget what real life is, so in that way I can understand Johnny.
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“I think he would rather have been in a Sofia Coppola movie but somehow he's got a lot of attention and I think he's self-medicating, going from one day to the next, missing the family he had before he became this star.”Dorff, 37, says he feels old by comparison but is not immune to such feelings.
“I don't know about everybody but for me acting is a very lonely profession," he says. "I can sit here with reporters all day and feel like I'm busy; tomorrow there's more and then, in a week, it will all end. The same for a movie: for three months, I'm with all these incredible people Sofia assembles and get close to them, then it ends.
“You go back to your house; I don't have a job because my job is to make movies so until they offer me a movie I want to do, I'm really just sitting round. I visit my grandma; I play the piano; what do I do now? You go do another story; maybe you have to interview Catherine Deneuve next. But an actor's life is strange.”
Coppola says she started seeing Dorff in the role when she was writing the script. “He's a sweet guy and has a lot of heart," she says. "The character is so flawed he could be really unlikeable so you have to have someone who can make him likeable.”
Dorff saw the role as destiny. He was at a crisis point in his life – his mother Nancy had died after suffering with cancer for two years – and he was keen for more satisfying roles than his recent string of villains.
Coppola offered him the part, he says, the day his mother died. Her timing was so perfect that he still believes his mother had a hand in it. “She could have anybody playing this part," he says. "Literally anyone she wanted. I don't believe in coincidence. Things happen the way they are supposed to happen.
“The fact that Sofia gave me this film on the day of my mum's passing meant I felt I had to now pick myself up and make her proud. The last thing I'd want my mum to think is that I'm going to fall into a Johnny Marco tailspin and end up in the tabloids arrested for something stupid.”
Somewhere opens on Boxing Day
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