There is a scene in Red Rocket in which Simon Rex is naked and running down the street. It was filmed at 2 a.m. without a permit, so someone would occasionally yell that there was a car incoming, and Rex would stop and put on a robe and wait. At one point, the cops showed up and left. It was like they, too, knew that the world needed to witness the majesty of Simon Rex running down the street in the flesh.
The film is the latest from The Florida Project director Sean Baker, shot with a $1.2 million budget and a crew of 10 around Galveston and Port Arthur, Texas, during the pandemic. Baker has become an auteur-mouthpiece for Americans at the margins, whether it’s sex workers or those living in poverty, and is beloved by film snobs and frat boys alike. Red Rocket received a standing ovation at Cannes this summer and, if this hot streak continues, is poised to be a contender next year for the Oscars.
The intimacy and smallness were to the film’s benefit, as it turns out Simon Rex is a good actor. The guy has lived a lot of lives—he’s been an MTV VJ who interviewed Tupac, a model for Tommy Hilfiger, a rapper called Dirt Nasty, and the star of three segments of the Scary Movie franchise—and none of them has really screamed A24 leading man. But as the center of one of the most celebrated films of the year, one that’s racking up more awards and accolades each day, he suddenly finds himself in unfamiliar territory, on the precipice of real prestige.
It also turns out he has a huge penis. Or maybe a prosthetic? “Can I say, ‘No comment?’” Rex asks. “Because we want to keep it a mystery. We don’t want to spill the beans yet.” I tell Rex that seems like an answer of its own. He sips at a pilsner, adjusts the denim sherpa jacket he has on, and smiles.
We are at Clandestino, a bar on the Lower East Side–Chinatown border in Manhattan known as Dimes Square, which has arguably the highest concentration of beautiful and cool people in the world at the moment. Rex lived in New York during his MTV days, from 1993 to 1998, and now always stays nearby at a hotel on Bowery. A couple blocks away is a synagogue with a photo of his great-great-grandfather, a celebrated turn-of-the-century rabbi, on the wall. At Clandestino, no one seems to recognize Rex—maybe because he’s 47 and could be a parent, or at least a cool uncle, of a number of people in the room.
The maybe-prosthetic penis is featured quite prominently in Red Rocket, which is about a fairly washed-up porn star named Mikey Saber, played by Rex, who returns to small-town Texas. He’s staying with his estranged wife and her mother and is dealing a little weed to get by. He tries to groom an almost 18-year-old redhead doughnut store employee, to manage her career. All of this is set during the run-up to the 2016 election, with MAGA signs and the Republican Convention very much in the background.
As for that naked running scene, Rex says he came to really like running in the nude. “It’s a very interesting feeling. It’s very liberating, actually,” he says. Are you a naked person, I ask. Like when you’re home, are you naked? “I am, lately. I don’t know if you know this—I was born naked. So I feel comfortable going back to the element. I’m in a naked phase. I think more people need to be naked.”
Rex is the only child of San Francisco hippies. He has a New Jersey Jewish mom (“She’s always in my ear”) who is an environmental planner. His father is a photographer and a breathwork coach who lives in Asheville, North Carolina. They split when he was two. It was a bohemian but also rough childhood. “I grew up with an alcoholic stepdad who was a coke addict, and I used to have to go to Al-Anon meetings in Oakland when I was 11, 12,” says Rex. He’s been in therapy for a long time.
At 18, after living in SF and the East Bay, he was aimless and dating an aspiring model. One day, he was sitting in a room, waiting for her to come out of a casting, and the casting director pointed to him and asked who he was. She said, “Oh, it’s my boyfriend. He’s not a model.” But Rex was who they wanted: He was tall and lean, with a Roman nose and in possession of abs that made him look like he was at war with carbs. He looked at once babyish and menacing.
He had agents in Milan, Paris, and New York. “I would just go to these male modeling auditions, and it was so boring. I remember thinking, I don’t want to do this, this is lame. I just stand here?” When Zoolander came out, “I thought, Nobody’s going to get this movie at all. No one understands what modeling jokes are. And it was a huge hit, and I remember thinking it’s so funny, because I know this life. I lived this life. Everything they’re making fun of was relatable to me.” Rex can still do his male model runway walk, as he demonstrates with a comic flair and a note of pride along the bar at Clandestino. “It was at the end, when you get to the end of the runway, then you hold it, and I had it down,” he says, and stares piercingly into where a gauntlet of photographers might be waiting. “Boom.”
Soon he was a guest on MTV, to fill in for the model Marcus Schenkenberg. Someone at MTV was charmed, despite his admitted total lack of experience. Rex swears a bus driver probably made more money than he did, but he also swears he worked one hour a day, live on TV, announcing videos and interviewing people from 3 to 4 p.m., the prime after-school hour. “And now I’m hanging out with Howard Stern, and Jackie Chan, and Jon Stewart, and rock bands, because everybody would come to MTV to promote their book, their movie, whatever,” he says.
And then there was his nightlife. “I was a kid living in New York, on MTV. I was out every night.” He and Mark Ronson became friends doing a Calvin Klein show. “The joke was that Mark would always be DJing at the coolest spots back then, in New York in the ’90s. So me and all my friends would always argue over who gets to carry Mark’s records into the club.” He and Ronson are still close enough that Ronson was Rex’s guest at the Red Rocket premiere this fall at the New York Film Festival. “It almost feels like the last era before smartphones and bottle service. The nightlife was still really fun and exciting,” Rex says. “I was in this crazy world of beautiful people. I was probably caught up in it and thought I was the shit. I don’t think I was cocky; I was just enjoying it. I hadn’t eaten the humble pie at that point; I was just kind of cruising.”
It isn’t like Simon Rex’s life started to crumble by any means, but “cruising” stopped being the most apt description. He took acting classes and was the one all the serious students hated, because he was the guy on MTV. A friend committed suicide in Rex’s New York apartment, and in 1997, he was fired from MTV. He moved to Los Angeles.
The WB channel paid him well, and he’d show up on Felicity and on a sitcom with Amanda Bynes. And he was in Scary Movie. “Of all people, Adrien Brody taught me how to make beats on a little keyboard, because he’s like, ‘Look, dude, in this acting game, there’s a lot of downtime. So it’s a fun hobby,’” says Rex. He met two rappers, Mickey Avalon and Andre Legacy, and they started making music together, signed with Interscope Records, and opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers on a European stadium tour. “We were having a blast, and we kind of had a moment. And we’re doing songs with LMFAO, and Ke$ha, and Katy Perry, and Kid Rock, and Too $hort. And we’re working with all of these big stars.”
Diplo met Rex in the mid-aughts through fellow white rapper Riff Raff. “He represents the time in L.A. when I first moved here. Steve Aoki at Banana Split, parties downtown—it was the opposite of pretentious L.A. We were all losers, too, but we were funny and clever,” says Diplo. “Simon is the kind of guy you just want to hang out with. He’s got that silver tongue, makes you feel comfortable; you can’t get enough of him. All the women I work with, in their late 30s and 40s, Simon was their crush. Girls love him. He left his mark on the city.” Diplo paused. He started to wonder aloud if he and Rex had ever dated the same woman at different points, before ultimately concluding, “Yeah, we have.”
Rex had left modeling for MTV, left New York for Hollywood, and left Hollywood for music. “Then, a few years into it, I realized, Uh-oh. Maybe I should have stuck with acting, because I don’t want to be rapping when I’m 48 years old.”
Los Angeles also started to feel depressing, and he took his life savings and, in February 2020, bought a house on four acres of land in Joshua Tree. “I somehow was able to evade cubicle office spaces this whole time and be sort of my own boss and do what I want,” he says. “I look back on my Hollywood life and all the things I’ve done. Maybe it’s over. And if it is, I’m okay with that. I’m going to move out to Joshua Tree and see what happens.”
He breaks out photos on his phone, and it looks like the Airbnb of your wildest dreams, with a main house built from a shipping container and a fire pit made out of a Cadillac rim, and an outdoor shower and an old trailer for a guesthouse. Rex is very much in a kind of seeker mode, getting in touch with his masculinity and spirituality. He not only goes to Burning Man alone and stays for over a week, but he also met his last girlfriend on the playa. He does prison-style workouts at home and goes to the farmers market and buys a bunch of meat and produce he will cook in a cast iron pan. He reads a lot of self-help books.
During the pandemic, his home in the middle of the California desert became a kind of safe haven. He was cruising again. One time, Diplo came to visit (“I was really into the vibe,” he says) and shoot a video, and they killed a rattlesnake together with a shovel.
Maybe Simon Rex is a truly modern man, and the world has finally caught up to him. Consider his porn scandal, which, in the age of OnlyFans, feels almost quaint. He was 18 and dating the girl he had been waiting on in the casting room where he was discovered; she was aspiring to legit modeling but doing nude shoots for the likes of Penthouse and Hustler to get by. Rex lived with her and her child. “So we were broke, basically, and the little kid’s starting to call me daddy, and he’s two years old. I’m like, Oh, shit. I’m in way over my head with this girl. So basically, she was like, ‘Hey, would you do a video also to pay the rent?’” All in, he did two solo jerk-off videos. He did not and does not think of himself as a porn star. “This was more like, ‘Oh, this is something I made the mistake of doing when I was 18 years old.’ It’s not like I had a career. They sent me to Milan, and then we broke up, and I just went off to live my life.”
Many years later, the videos surfaced while he was at MTV. The press was neither particularly kind nor sensitive about it. The Village Voice‘s Michael Musto called the scandal “delicious,” and wrote that Rex “is apparently just as adept at j/o-ing as v/j-ing,” and included a photo from the video.
“Someone was like, ‘Oh, I recognize that guy. He’s the guy in that video,’” says Rex. “And I thought MTV was going to fire me, but they didn’t. Matter of fact, MTV said, ‘You know, Jenny McCarthy is one of our VJs, and there’s pictures we have of her in Playboy, and it’s really no different.’”
Very OnlyFans, I remark.
“I have an OnlyFans?”
Do you have an OnlyFans?
“No, I was asking, Do I have a fake one I don’t know about? I know I have a fake TikTok.”
Oh, you do?
“Yeah. With like 500,000 followers, and I could be making something crazy, people tell me.”
It’s funny, because it’s the kind of thing that now would be totally normal for you, to be like an 18-year-old influencer VJ who does some sexy OnlyFans videos.
“This guy’s a survivor—he keeps going and going,” says Baker. “I remember Michael Musto making a big deal of these nude photos and publishing them in The Village Voice, and I thought, Why is this guy being thrown under the bus?”
Baker had sketched out the idea for Red Rocket a few years ago and was pursuing other projects, but with the pandemic, filming was actually feasible. He didn’t want an A-lister, although famous actors are rumored to have wanted the role of Mikey. “There were other people considered, names being thrown around. I have short-term memory loss, and I smoke a lot of weed, so it was my wife, Samantha, who was like, ‘Simon, hello?’”
Rex taped himself for the audition, and Baker called him up asking if he could drive to Texas in three days so he wouldn’t have to quarantine. Rex deleted social media off his phone and showed up with all his long monologues memorized. “I showed him some videos of men who are like Mikey—I had done research in the adult film world. I said, ‘Don’t impersonate, but you get it.’” (Baker thinks Rex has the range: “He could bring the funny like Ryan Reynolds, the physicality of Mark Wahlberg, do Bradley Cooper.”)
The character of Mikey wasn’t one that Rex had to dig particularly deep to find. “I’m around L.A. actors all the time, and there’s nothing but people who think they’re going to be a huge star one day, and they’re just delusional. And they’re exhausting,” says Rex. The secret was to get the audience to root for Mikey by playing him a little likable, a little boyish, a little charming, a little goofy. “It was important to make the audience feel conflicted about why they’re kind of rooting for this horrible guy, who’s basically a low-level pimp, drug dealer, user.”
I ask if he thought Mikey voted for Trump. “I don’t think he voted,” Rex says. Do you think he gets vaccinated? “I think so, because if you think about it, I imagine in the porn industry, they’re vaxxed. They’ve got to be vaxxed. And if not, he’d get a fake vaccination record.”
That’s who he tried to embody. But that’s the thing: He is always embodying these characters, perhaps so well that people think they’re just him. “I couldn’t be more opposite in real life than someone like Mikey. I’m the guy who, I’m really self-aware of being loud on my phone, or hogging up the aisle on an airplane. I’m a neurotic,” he says. When he was Dirt Nasty, he had a song called “1980,” with a hook that goes, “I’m on cocaine,” and people would throw bags of coke at his feet onstage, like he was a ballerina getting showered with roses.
“They believed that this persona of Dirt Nasty was real, and they couldn’t separate the fact that I’m doing a character. And they really thought that I would love coke. I hate coke.” He had attended all those Al-Anon meetings growing up, and had it ingrained in him that alcohol and cocaine didn’t lead anywhere good.
“I guess I did it to myself. I created these personas, and I asked for it,” says Rex. Maybe he’s just too convincing at it all. “But people don’t really know who I am. I’ve put out so many silly characters and things over the years that I just always want to reinvent myself.” So now what is his persona, serious actor? Rex smiles. “Indie darling.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Evan Angelastro
Styled by Dolly Pratt
Grooming by Melissa DeZarate