When actor Aaron Eckhart hitched a ride on an 18-wheeler from New York to Indiana, he had no idea he was stepping into the other side of the looking glass.
Eckhart had been a struggling actor in New York for 41 1/42 years.
“I went on thousands of auditions, and I couldn’t get a job–not in soap operas, not in television, not films. … Commercials and my girlfriend supported me, and I worked as a bartender and as a waiter. I was going to school and doing theater at the same time,” he says.
“But they were the happiest days of my life, the most rewarding. New York was a fantasyland. It was magical. It had the cold nights and the Christmases and the hot summers. It was magic. We were young in New York pre-9/11.”
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A phone call from fledgling director Neil LaBute, a classmate Eckhart had known at Brigham Young University, urged him to come to Indiana.
“I remember him calling me up and saying, ‘I’ve got $25,000. Let’s make this movie.’ I was like, ‘All right, let’s go do it. I don’t have anything else to do,’ ” he laughs.
“I did the whole cross-country journey with this crazy trucker who lied to me the entire time, which is weird. I slept in the bunk, the whole deal,” Eckhart says. “And we made that movie, and it was just crazy after that.”
The movie was “The Company of Men,” which became the highest grossing independent film of the year. Eckhart played a vicious misogynist so adroitly that it changed his life.
“That was unreal,” he says as he rolls his blue eyes. “It was going from nobody calling me to people that I admired calling me and directors calling me at home and all of a sudden, I have more work than I can ever do. And all of a sudden, I wasn’t getting movies-of-the-week, but leads in features and going to Cannes and going to Sundance. It was magical.
“And then we did ‘Your Friends and Neighbors,’ which put another spin on me. I feel the last eight years have been an apprenticeship for me working with really great people, like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn–guys I admire.”
While Eckhart, 36, is probably best known as the hunky biker who tumbles for Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich,” he’s also starred in “The Missing,” “Paycheck” and “The Core.”
But it’s in his latest movie, “Suspect Zero,” that Eckhart really shines. He plays a haunted FBI agent who is tracking a serial killer and ends up being tracked himself. It’s a multilayered movie, in which the obvious is never stated with Eckhart plumbing emotional depths beyond the standard cat-and-mouse thriller.
The blond former surfer says he knew he wanted to act when he was 13 and played the frustrated Charlie Brown in “Charlie Brown, the Doctor is In.”
Eckhart, who is a Mormon, landed his first commercial on the very first audition. It was for Miller beer, and he was part of the convivial crowd.
That lucky streak didn’t last.
“But it made me, like, 30 grand over the years. So every time I was about to leave my apartment or start eating dog food or something, a check would come in the mail.”