A Former Child Star's Grown-Up Reward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page N01
LOS ANGELES
Most of your Oscar-nominated movie stars don't pick up the phone and holler, "Hey, man, it's Jackie Earle, call me back!" and leave a message with their home number. When they do lunch? It's usually not in the blandlands of the San Fernando Valley, a few miles from where they grew up in Canoga Park. Cate Blanchett? Eddie Murphy? We don't make them for Cheesecake Factory people, but that's exactly where Jackie Earle Haley wants to eat. He's going to have that Hawaiian pizza, the one with pineapples and bacon. He's a regular.
  Jackie Earle Haley returns to the limelight with an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for "Little Children." (By Jonathan Alcorn For The Washington Post) |
When Haley shows up, alone, on time, nobody recognizes him. Haley is a little guy, not more than 5-5, with jug ears and a shaved head that looks like the last peanut in the bowl. He wears a bristly goatee, gone to salt and pepper, and glasses tinted hippie blue. He is 45 years old. You can see he still bites his nails. He wonders why. The hostess tells Haley it'll be 10 minutes for a table. But at the bar? Seat yourself.
Could there be a more improbable contender for an Academy Award this season? Haley's last feature film role was 13 years ago, in "Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence," a zombie movie so lame that when asked about it, Haley just waves his hands, like "Please, no, stop."
Haley was so out of the loop it took the director who eventually brought him back to Hollywood two months just to find him. He had no agent, no manager, no publicist. He was (and still is) living in San Antonio, directing TV commercials for gas stations and grocery chains. "I would go to the movie theaters and watch a movie like all of us do," he says, "and every time, dude, there was always this little wince. I wish I could be doing that. I wish I could be up there. I wish I could come back."
And then he did.
His portrayal of convicted flasher Ronnie McGorvey in "Little Children," Todd Field's drama of suburban moral malaise, won him a Best Supporting Actor nod. "A pedophilic pervert . . . played to perfection," Slate.com declared; "a creepy, ferrety-looking man" (Variety) "whose very skull conveys depravity" (Entertainment Weekly); "brilliantly and chillingly played" (New York Observer). He cracked most critics' top 10 lists.
His story: Haley was blessed with the curse of success as a child actor. His auspicious beginning came to dominate all the good and all the bad that followed. Haley confesses that he has spent his whole life, really, trying to understand what happened to him as a kid -- and to deal with what happened later, when he changed from teen dream to lost adult, and Hollywood no longer wanted him, no longer loved him.
Beginning with turns on "The Partridge Family" and "The Waltons," Haley was that strange and rare hybrid, the professional 10-year-old. He broke out as the tough kid Kelly Leak in the hit "Bad News Bears" in 1976. A few years later, he was Moocher in the wonderful coming-of-age film "Breaking Away," starring alongside Dennis Quaid.
When he was 14, Haley rode limos, not bikes. He traveled with Tatum O'Neal doing press for the "Bears" premiere. Girls would chase him through amusement parks. It was nuts. "Oh, yeah, it was cool," Haley says. "I guess. . . .It's tough at that age. It's confusing to a developing mind. You walk into a restaurant like this and all eyes are on you. It can do things to you, especially a kid."
He remembers buying his family a swimming pool.
Ten years later, Haley was back home living with Mom, broke, delivering pizzas, saying he hoped the person who answered the door wouldn't recognize him, but mostly hoping for a decent tip.
