Simon Rex Can't Believe His Luck

“So do I interview you or do you interview me?” jokes Simon Rex when I reach him over the phone. I’ve caught the fifty-year-old actor in Los Angeles during a busy week of promotion for his latest role in Blink Twice, the psychological thriller by Zoë Kravitz in her directorial debut, starring and produced by Channing Tatum.

Rex has had an eventful schedule lately—Blink Twice is one of many releases he has been involved with since his 2021 comeback in the lead role as Mikey in Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Rex’s portrayal earned wide praise (including an Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead) and Hollywood began considering him seriously again after an almost decade-long lull in his career. “Red Rocket just showed a different side that made directors and producers and studios notice me in a different light and get me all these cool jobs,” says Rex. “And so I've been getting to do a lot of more serious stuff, which is fun because I never got to do that before.” It was after seeing Red Rocket, for example, that writer and director Nic Pizzolatto of True Detective fame reached out to Rex to play Vince Vaughn’s brother in his forthcoming directorial debut, Easy’s Waltz. Rex describes the film as a “slow, dramatic, beautiful, dark movie,” in Pizzolatto’s signature style. “It’s crazy because I get to do this movie with Vince Vaughn. But we don't do comedy at all. It's fully dramatic,” says Rex. “I never would have got that job before, you know? It’s cool to get to work with Al Pacino. It's kind of like, pinch me, is this really happening? It's fucking crazy.”

Despite his recent string of more dramatic casting, for much of his career, Rex was best known for his sense of humor. After a stint as a model and an MTV VJ in the mid-nineties, he quickly transitioned to acting on commercial hits like the Scary Movie franchise and Amanda Bynes’s sitcom What I Like About You. By the mid-aughts, Rex has risen to prominence as his rapper alter ego Dirt Nasty, working with close collaborator Mickey Avalon of “My Dick” fame to create rap music with a comedic edge. “It was fun for a while. My buddies and I would make comedy rap music in my spare bedroom as a joke for fun. We weren’t trying to make it in the music industry,” explains Rex. “I would hand out CDs I’d burn of me and my friends rapping, and we were just doing comedic Hollywood raps. I handed the CDs out all the time. It somehow circulated and got into someone's hands and we got signed to Interscope Records. Next thing you know, we’re on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Europe, opening up in front of soccer stadiums and sixty thousand people.”

But with the success of his music career came the detriment of his momentum in acting. The longer Rex was out touring, the less available he was for auditions and, eventually, they stopped. “A few years into the music thing, I go, ‘Oh shit, I think I blew it.' I sabotaged my acting career. This is fun, but I can’t do this music thing until I'm seventy. I could have done acting until I'm seventy; I fucking blew it,” he recalls. “So, I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll keep doing the music thing, I guess.’ It was a means to an end and I didn’t even want to do it. I was in my early forties, doing this rap bullshit. But if I had not disappeared as an actor for over ten years, Sean Baker would never have put me in Red Rocket. So it all happened fortuitously, I’m very fortunate.”

Since he’s hung up the Dirt Nasty persona, Rex has turned to a different lifestyle, co-founding a skincare brand, MOX, that invites men to take care of themselves and moving away from the larger cities to Joshua Tree, where he lives completely off-grid in a shipping container home with no neighbors in sight. “You know when you hard reset your phone, like when your phone's acting weird and you hold the two buttons down together and your phone resets and then it operates better? That’s kind of what happens to me out there. It’s like a hard reset,” he explains. “I noticed that when I’m out there, it rewires my nervous system and my brain, and I find myself being a lot more calm and slower. And I notice when I’m in the city, I’m walking faster, I’m talking faster, I’m reacting faster, I’m more stressed. When you’re out in nature, after a couple of days, you kind of wind down, I think. And I think that it’s good for you. At least I know it’s good for me.”

Even with his recent shift to more dramatic roles, comedy isn’t something Rex has any intention of shying away from. “I think the world needs comedy more than ever. I feel like it’s such a weird Twilight Zone world we’re all living in these days and things are so uncertain, dark, ominous, and weird that I think we need good comedies now more than ever,” he says. “I want to go full circle, bring some of that back and flex that muscle again.”

And for the first time, Rex is stepping into the role of executive producer to ensure he brings his comedic vision to life. He recently wrapped production on a film called Operation Taco Gary’s, which he describes as “very silly” and a throwback to early aughts comedies such as Harold and Kumar or Dude, Where's My Car? with a joke on every page. Not only is Rex the lead, but as executive producer, he also had a hand in casting, writing, and even weighed in on wardrobe. “I actually learned it from Channing when I was doing Blink Twice,” says Rex. “I was watching Channing work and I was like, 'Take notes, watch what Channing does.’ He’s an A-list actor, very successful, smart, and very good at his job, and he was a producer on the movie. He’d go behind the monitors and input his ideas when he wasn’t on camera. He was creative more so than just waiting to film his scene. So I was like, ‘Huh, I want to do that. I think I need to do what Channing’s doing. I think that he is doing it right.’ I learned from doing Blink Twice that I wanted to produce my own stuff, so I did.”

Rex is refreshingly honest when asked if he has any future goals for himself in Hollywood. “You know what’s funny about goals? I never had them,” he reflects. “For whatever reason, I’ve been—and I know this is not a likable thing to say and it sounds so privileged—but I’ve been really lucky and things have kind of fallen in my lap a lot in my life. I’m extremely aware of and grateful for how fortuitous my life is. I give myself credit for showing up and delivering when the opportunity presents itself, but I’ve been really lucky. This business is a lottery in many ways, but I’ve never really set goals and my life has been pretty rad.”

Blink Twice is now streaming on demand.