Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brick

Most kids who grow up on TV in a sitcom, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt did with Third Rock from the Sun, fade into a perpetual rerun afterlife, never to transition to adult careers. That's not going to happen with Gordon-Levitt, who stars in the California-set murder mystery, Brick. Interviewed at the Excelsior Hotel during the Venice Film Festival, this well-mannered actor scored his breakthrough in 2004 at this festival with Mysterious Skin playing a sexually self-destructive gay teen. Suddenly, there was a Gordon-Levitt on the big screen no one had imagined: a sexy, lustily sexual predator. In Brick he is Brendan Frye, a high school senior intent on tracking down the killer of his ex-girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin from TV's Lost). Since Mysterious Skin, he tells us, "People come up to me and look me in the eye and speak genuinely about a movie they care about. I know how important movies, TV, books are. So to be a part of that dialogue where people find what they need to find in the world through important works of art, well, it does seem now that after 18 years of working I'm finally doing what I want to do."

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