Monday Morning Man: Stephen Dorff!

Posting will return to its regular pace tomorrow as I’m enjoying some time off with family and friends. But I did want to post a Morning Man and a few other items for you before my dad and I hit the multiplex to see Knight and Day. Tom Cruise needs the box office bucks!

Anyway, saw these new photos of Stephen Dorff at the beach and realized I had not featured this gorgeous creature as a Morning Man.

So here he is!

I still remember the first movie I ever saw Stephen in: the 1990 TV movie Always Remember I Love You. He played the biological son of Patty Duke who is kidnapped then adopted by an unsuspecting couple (Joan Van Ark played the adoptive mother). The adoptive parents find out about the kidnapping when he’s 16, tell him, and he sets out to find his real family.

By the end of the movie, I kind of did a little sob and am glad I was watching it alone. I never forgot the movie or the young actor. Next I noticed him in the terrific 1994 feature film Backbeat which cast him as John Lennon’s best friend Stuart Sutcliff who chose love and the life as an artist in Germany over what turned out to be great fame and fortune.

If Dorff had done nothing else, I would have never forgotten him based on those two movies alone and all that he brought to them.

But that was only the beginning for this gifted 36-year-old actor who has since starred in such films as S.F.W., I Shot Andy Warhol, Deuces Wild, Cold Creek Manner, Blade, World Trade Center, Felon, and last year’s Public Enemies.

A few years ago, I interviewed Stephen at the time Felon was released. In it, he played a good guy who gets sent to prison for killing an intruder who was robbing his house. He then has to navigate brutal inmates and deadly guards in a movie based on actual events and the atrocities that had taken place at California’s Corcoran State Prison.

Stephen told me that he feels like he is doing some of the best work of a career that dates back to 1985 when as a child actor, he appeared in various television movies and in such sitcoms as Roseanne and Different Strokes.

“In the last few years, there’s all these movies coming out and working with so many of these greart directors. In the beginning, I did all these great movies then did a few I shouldn’t have done. The ‘Fear.com‘ and other genre movies that were big pay days but not at the same level of quality.”

“I don’t know how it works. There’s been times when I’ve wondered, ‘Why the (expletive) am I not getting that movie? There’s so much to this game like who’s hot and all that. If you stay true and work with great directors, that’s all I can hope for. Right now, I feel the most solid and my work is the best it’s ever been. I feel fortunate.”