Matt Dillon

New York actor Matthew Raymond Dillon was born on February 18, 1964. The second of six children born to a stockbroker and a housewife, both of Irish origin, Matt Dillon has another actor brother, Kevin Dillon , and is a great-nephew. by Alex Raymond, creator of the Flash Gordon comics . In his school days he was more interested in baseball than in studies. In the corridors of the institute, a talent scout noticed him and recommended that he attend an audition for Over the Abyss , by Jonathan Kaplan .. “I never thought they would pick me. Actually I went to the casting because that way I would get out of going to class one day”, declared the actor, who dazzled the director and ended up playing an important role as a problematic young man, facing his parents and the police. He was then offered the lead role in El lago azul , but he had the courage to turn it down due to the film’s strong doses of eroticism. Instead, he settled on Troubling Skirts and My Bodyguard , forgotten by-products for teens.

As they kept offering him roles, Matt Dillon began to take his acting career seriously and enrolled at the Actor’s Studio, the prestigious acting school. He established himself as an idol for adolescents when he was hired by Francis Ford Coppola for Rebels , his famous adaptation of the Susan E. Hinton novel that made known the so-called Brat Pack (a bunch of brats), made up of the most important young promises of the moment: Tom Cruise , Ralph Maccio, Rob Lowe , Patrick Swayze , and Emilio Estevez. The Godfather directorHe assures that he noticed him because it reminded him of “the young nonconformists of the 50s”, and he once again resorted to his services for his next work, The law of the street , also based on another novel by Hinton, and whose filming followed with the previous movie. Turned into a youth symbol that monopolized the folders of adolescent girls around the world, he ended the 80s starring in mediocre films, such as The Flamingo Kid , Double Agent in Berlin , Rebel , The Outcast and Kansas, Two Men Two Roads . Mano de oro stands out from this period , where he became Jack, a dice player from the 50s, reminiscent of Paul Newman ‘s character, in El hustler , and with which he began to demonstrate his versatility. Dillon was a young man with a head who knew how to choose big roles, like the drug addict in the hard-hitting drama Drugstore Cowboy . Indie director Gus Van Sant cast him in the role, over the likes of Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper , because he seemed more spontaneous on camera.

From that moment on, Matt Dillon opted for roles rich in nuances, such as the ambitious and calculating murderer in Kiss Me Before I Die , a thriller that adapted a novel by Ira Levin , in which he played a character previously played by Robert Wagner . . Another of Dillon’s great successes was the character in Singles , Cameron Crowe ‘s second work and one of the great successes of independent American cinema of the 90s. He played a bachelor as recalcitrant as himself, because despite having had multiple romances with women as ideal as Cameron Diaz , the actor has resisted settling down. After a brief role as a DJ inMalcolm X , by Spike Lee , and to repeat with Van Sant in Everything for a dream , where he shared the limelight with Nicole Kidman , Matt Dillon endorsed with his presence one of the best titles in recent American cinema, Beautiful Girls , where he was one of the thirty-somethings disoriented from the protagonist’s environment, specifically the flirt who put his happy marriage with Mira Sorvino at risk for an inconsequential affair with a neurotic woman. He missed out on the role of boxer Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction , as Tarantino had already cast him when he unexpectedly met Bruce Willis and changed his mind.

Although John MacNaughton’s bawdy thriller Wild Games was successful, Matt Dillon’s biggest recent bombshell was There’s Something About Mary , the flagship comedy from the Farrelly brothers, the quintessential specialists in crude humor. Certainly, Dillon did not start the new millennium well, reaping resounding flops like Divine but Dangerous and Young Wild Ones . Of course, he took advantage of the drought of interesting offers to debut as a director with The City of Ghosts, as tried as failed. A tireless traveler, Matt Dillon ended up in Cambodia, where he came up with the idea for this film, in which he played Jimmy Cremming, a con man who is fleeing from justice, taking refuge in that country. Just when it looked like his career was going to take a nosedive, he got the role of a lifetime, police officer Ryan, from Crash .. A good actor can play a hero or a villain, but only an exceptional one can bring humanity to a character that is realistic as life itself, full of racial and sexist prejudices, but capable of giving the best of himself as a human being in a situation. risky. “It’s a low-budget film, but with a great script that deals with racism, fear, prejudice,” says the actor, who admits that it took him a lot of work to shoot the sequence in which he abuses Christine. “When the editing was finished, I could hardly even look at that moment,” he explained. The exceptional reception against expectations of this mosaic of stories caught him off guard, working on other projects. As Paul Haggis shot the film in 2004, he has had time to participate in Factotum, based on a novel by her admired Charles Bukowski , Loverboy , the feature film debut of her colleague Kevin Bacon , and the family comedy Herbie: Full Throttle . He just finished filming You, Me and Dupree , the new comedy from brothers Anthony and Joe Russo , authors of Welcome to Collinwood .