Jackie Earle Haley’s comeback is still the stuff of Hollywood legend. A former child actor, Haley left acting in the early ‘90s. Todd Field cast him in the 2006 film Little Children, Haley was nominated for an Oscar and now he’s back. Eight years later, Haley is a Hollywood staple again with memorable roles in Watchmen, Lincoln, Shutter Island, playing Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and the short-lived TV series “Human Target.” You can’t even remake Robocop without Jackie Earle Haley, who plays the new character Rick Mattox. We got a personal phone call from Haley himself, who dialed direct, to chat about his latest film, a re-imagining of the sci-fi classic.
CraveOnline: Was the 1987 Robocop something you were ever up for?
Jackie Earle Haley: You know, here’s a funny story. I remember reading the script and there was no real part for me, but I did get a meeting with Paul Verhoeven and tried to convince him, “Hey, what if this character…” I created some character and he kind of passed on it, but it was fun getting to go in there and talk to Paul. I sure did love the work that he did on Robocop and I thought my friend Miguel Ferrer did great in it.
Is Rick Mattox an all new character in this Robocop? Is he akin to anyone from the Verhoeven movie?
I don’t think so. I think it’s a new character altogether.
Do you by any chance buy anything for a dollar?
[Laughs] No, I didn’t buy anything for a dollar.
You know that if you tweet anything about Robocop, there’s a bot that replies, “I’d buy that for a dollar.” [Note: since cancelled after December 2013.]
That’s funny.
So tell us about this new character Rick Mattox.
Rick kind of oversees missions in various cities around the world. OmniCorp deploys hundreds of 208s and 209s and drones to police a city where they scan buildings and people and eliminate threats. Mattox is charged with overseeing that and here in the States, robots aren’t allowed. Congress is keeping that from happening and that’s why OmniCorp decides to go around that and put a man into the machine. Mattox at that point is tasked with preparing and training Robocop for the streets of Detroit.
In this training, was there anything you could do to help Joel Kinnaman get used to the costume?
There’s nothing I could do except say, “I feel bad for you, bro.”
When you did Rorschach, was it only your face that was covered?
Right.
So was it any comparison to a full Robocop suit?
A little bit. You get to see Joel’s mouth but it is true, what you’re saying. With half of his face blocked out, he’s got to deal with it. I’m not sure how he dealt with it. I do remember as Rorschach, I would do a scene and I kind of decided that I should approach it like you could see my face and just play everything as honest as I can. Then I would go back and look at takes on the monitor. Most of the time it would just work. Everything somehow was coming through, but every now and then I’d see a take where it’s like, “Uh-oh, I’d better animate the suit a little bit more to make the point.” That was my experience with it.
Is this take on robots and drones very new and relevant, something that they weren’t even thinking about in 1987?
Well, I think there’s a lot of aspects to this film that are very topical and intellectual and pretty prevalent today and to the future for that matter.
Is it as much of a cautionary tale to get us thinking about the consequences if someone like Rick Mattox achieved his goal of getting robots in all the cities?
Yeah, I think is somewhat of a cautionary tale. I think there’s a lot of aspects you see, especially in cities around the world, in this movie. Where OmniCorp is going in, it’s an incredible police state that they’ve turned it into and they’ve got robots doing it. I think it’s kind of a scary possible future.
How does Robocop compare to any of the other visual effects movies you’ve done?
I don’t know how to answer that. Watchmen was pretty huge. Even Dark Shadows was pretty huge, had a lot of effects in it. There’s definitely a lot of moving parts in this in terms of the robots and all of the CGI.
You’ve had a unique experience to be in a few different takes on remakes with Nightmare on Elm Street, Dark Shadows and Robocop. Have they all been very different approaches to their respective source materials?
Yeah, I think so. They all have their differences in how they decided to approach them. Dark Shadows had an interesting approach, was a very Tim Burton-y approach which I thought was really intelligent because I think if they tried to make it too much like the TV show it would have been incredibly cheesy.
Robocop I think was a really good film to remake at this point because I think the first one was great, but I think it’s a little bit dated looking now. I think with the evolution of filmmaking itself, from CGI to equipment to production to crews getting better, that I think it’ll be really interesting to see such a good script that’s been re-envisioned a bit, to see it in 2014.
