“It was actually Joseph Kahn’s “Bodied” (in which Rex played a rap battle promoter) where I was finally was like, ‘All right, enough already. And he’s proven even in those six-second Vine videos that he has dramatic capability,” Baker says. “This guy can improvise, he’s funny, he’s really great with delivery. He had always envisioned Rex - who was then churning out outlandish Vine videos - in the role. Baker turned to a script he had from several years ago - a character study that emerged from research into the pornography industry. One of his producers called him up and said he could get enough money together for something small. Director Sean Baker, coming off the celebrated, Oscar-nominated “The Florida Project,” had spent years prepping another film that he had to abandon when the pandemic arrived. “And I just laugh.”Įverything about “Red Rocket” (in theaters Friday) is unlikely. “So much is happening that I’ll just sit in a hotel room to gather myself for a minute and I’m like, ‘Wait,’” Rex said in a recent interview. It’s not just acclaim that’s new to Rex - it’s being taken seriously, at all. The 47-year-old sometimes actor, sometimes rapper, regular social-media prankster and Los Angeles nightlife fixture is drawing not just the best reviews of his life for his performance as Mikey Saber, a down-and-out adult film star - “a suitcase pimp” one character calls him - who returns home broke to East Texas.
However much New York has changed in the last 25 years, it's got nothing on the fluctuations of fortune for Rex. Now it feels kind of sketchy again and I kind of like it,” Rex says, smiling. “Times Square was like pimps and sex booths and then it became Disneyland. NEW YORK - Simon Rex, in town for the recent Gotham Awards, where he was nominated for outstanding lead performance in “Red Rocket,” was comparing today’s pandemic-scarred New York with the city he knew in the 1990s as a VJ on MTV.