He’s played a teen tearaway, a racist cop, a conman and a serial killer. But can he play a cellist? The star talks about his role in Yorgos Lanthimos’s first film since The Favourite – and making a jazz documentary
In his time, Matt Dillon has been about as quintessentially American a screen presence as you can imagine. From his early blazing-youth roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders and Rumble Fish; through more mature parts like the leader of an addict “family”in Gus van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy; to a whole later catalogue of cops and lowlifes, Dillon has exemplified a hard-bitten homegrown working-class cool that you wouldn’t immediately picture outside the boundaries of American film.
But of late, he has explored some challenging byways of international art cinema. He played an astronaut in French director Alice Winocour’s Proxima; he was austerely chilling as a serial killer in Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built; and he is currently working with the celebrated Iranian photographer and film-maker Shirin Neshat.