Actor Jackie Earl Haley had a great career with memorable roles in Breaking Away*, and The Bad News Bears, in the ’70s. Recently, some of his roles have been as Rorschach in Watchmen, Ronnie in Little Children, and Freddy in Nightmare On Elm Street.

The characters you’ve played in recent years are complex, and their arcs through their respective films don’t take a very easy route. They’re risky roles, and I’m wondering if that was a factor in your choosing them.

It’s kind of a nothing ventured, nothing gained [situation]. These characters are complex, and there are some similarities, some darkness in the fact that they’re unhinged, but to me I’ve found a diversity in these guys. Ronnie [in "Little Children"] was the most real of the group. He’s a bit more grounded in the real world. And as I was doing the research and looking into pedophiles and such, trying to understand that thought process can be really tough, especially when it’s so different from who you are. But what I was able to do was to look inside myself and search for parallels that were similar, but in a different area. I can be an obsessive type of person, and I’ve had troubles with alcohol in my life, so I was able to find these parallels within myself that I could then relate to Ronnie.

With Rorschach, it was completely different, and I found that this character affected me more than I affected him. The psychological filter of Rorschach, of who he is and how he looks at this world, his filters made me more cynical. I don’t share in his right-wing sensibility, but it was really to the point that during the making of this film, there was something about Ronnie that I could leave on the set, but with Rorschach, I’d go home and kind of isolate. And I’d be looking at the campaign for the presidency through the prism of Rorschach as I was filming, and it made me more independent. At the time, I was quite isolated — my wife wasn’t with me, I was spending too much time alone and really examining the complexity in his world, and it would drive me nuts if I looked at it for too long. I was trying to examine the human condition, and when you’re watching the world fall down around you, you start to wonder: What is the human condition? And the answer to that is clear: It’s corruption and greed. It takes a minute to find the other human conditions around that, but I’ll tell you, those sure seem to be the driving forces right about now.

Do you feel that, as you get some distance from the role, you might be able to see a wider range of conditions?

I think that life is an ever-changing kind of thing, and it’s easy to become disillusioned and stoic when you’re trying to look at all this complexity. But at the same time, you can also find that place where there’s a lot of love and beauty and care, in and around all of these horrible things.

You’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of critical praise and nominations and awards in the last few years. What’s your response to that?

I’m an actor, so I have to shift between complete insecurity and total elation, with frequent freakouts in between.

There’s your emotional weather report, as Tom Waits used to say.

Exactly. I’ll tell you, when you work on a character like Rorschach, who everyone has their own preconceived notions about, they’ll either love it or hate it. And when they love it, it’s just this huge warm fuzzy. As an actor, you really put it on the line. You have to let go, let it hang out and hope that people respond to it. And I don’t mean like write something good about it; I mean when they watch it, they go on this ride with you. That’s a wonderful feeling. But I think that when you’re doing the work, it can be a daunting notion when you take a look at it, so you have to just take a quick look at it and push it aside. It’s not something that you can consider every day when you’re on set. It has to be about the work, and you can’t be second-guessing it: “I hope they like it, but what are they going to think about it?” You just have to go for it.

Acting is never a competition sport. So it’s a wonderful feeling when people and the critics respond to it, and winning an award is an incredible feeling. Getting nominated for the Oscar and winning the New York Film Critics Circle and some others — I can’t tell you how amazing that was. You want to talk about elation. To this day, it’s still surreal. You know, way back in the middle of my huge, dark hiatus, which people didn’t think was a hiatus, people would ask me, “Are you bitter towards Hollywood?” And I’d say, “You know, you can’t be bitter. It’s not like they all got together and voted me out. It was just this thing where perceptions changed and it went where it went. But you know, it sure feels like they all did get together and actually vote me back in.”

From The Envelope, LA Times, Paul Gaita

[**Dana's True Confession: I had kind of a crush on this actor, when he played a teenager, in Breaking Away. Second guy from left, in photo above.]