You’d be hard pressed to call Schwartzman handsome — his features are too awkward to be GQ material — but, since his breakthrough appearance in Rushmore (1998), he has single-handedly ratcheted up the sexual-attractiveness quotient of the American nerd. As Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, and the environmentalist poet Albert Markovski in David O Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, he has patented “geek chic”. Girls don’t know if they want to cuddle him because he’s so adorable and unthreatening, or slap him because he’s so annoyingly idiosyncratic. The unlikely sexual edge has carried over into his personal life: his girlfriends have included hottie actresses Selma Blair and Zooey Deschanel.
These endearing characteristics have been distilled into his character in his latest film, Shopgirl. Schwartzman plays the initially hapless, lovestruck Jeremy, an unsuccessful young font (typeface) maker with designs on Mirabelle (Claire Danes), a sweet but lonely woman who works in the glove department of Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. Without ever meeting, Jeremy and Ray Porter, a rich older man played by Steve Martin, are both wooing Mirabelle. Directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie), Shopgirl is based on the bestselling novella of the same title by Martin, who also adapted the script.
Although some critics have had trouble with the 40-year age difference between Martin and Danes���s characters, her moving performance won her a Golden Globe nomination; and Schwartzman’s role may be his most complex and most realised to date. Many of Danes’s best moments come when she is reacting to his off-key quirkiness. He says he couldn’t have found the heart of his character without his co-star.
“The first day I walked out on set with Claire, she kind of made Jeremy visible to me,” he recalls. “I started acting differently; all those nervous twitches he has. It was almost like the character was invisible ink inside my body, and she was the lemon juice; or like she was an x-ray machine with a skeleton.” (Schwartzman loves talking in metaphors.) “I remember having a slight panic attack the first day I was going to do something without Claire. I didn ’t know if I could do Jeremy without Mirabelle. They kind of defined each other.”
Schwartzman grew up on Steve Martin comedies. “To say I’m a fan is an understatement: in a weird way, he’s tattooed on my genetic fibre. I used to imitate Steve Martin for my parents, do lines from his movies to make them laugh. So for me to be on set with him, actually having a conversation with me, as if we are in some way colleagues, was startling.”
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In its depiction of the difficulty of finding love in LA, Shopgirl is very much a companion piece to Martin’s earlier, much more comedic LA Story. Schwartzman observes: “We have cellphones, computers, pagers, cars, and we still can’t connect. We still can’t find someone. I grew up in LA, and never knew it to be lonely, because I have my family here. Growing up, I didn’t drive anywhere — I would always be driven with my family, so it was never lonely for me. Then, when I got older and got a car and didn’t get a girlfriend, I realised how lonely it is driving, listening to some sad song.”
Schwartzman, now 25, not only grew up in LA, but is part of modern Hollywood royalty. His mother, Talia Shire, is Francis Ford Coppola’s sister and starred in the Godfather movies. More recently, she played Jason’s character’s mother in I Huckabees. His late father, Jack Schwartzman, was a successful producer whose credits include Being There. Nicolas Cage and Sofia Coppola are his cousins. In what seems an astonishing piece of casting, Schwartzman plays the French king Louis XVI in Sofia Coppola’s upcoming Marie-Antoinette.
He disarmingly refers to his showbiz kin as “a circus family — we’re a bunch of trapeze artists”, yet he says he was pretty much impervious to his family’s place in the Hollywood pantheon when he was younger. “As a kid, I was just into baseball and music and pizza and Nintendo games. I didn’t love movies like I loved music.” He was a drummer and, in his early teens, joined a band called Phantom Planet, which released its first album shortly after Rushmore was released, though Schwartzman left the band not long afterwards. He co-wrote the song California, the theme song for the hit TV series The OC. He says he’d never considered acting until a casting agent approached him at a party to suggest he audition for Rushmore. At first he declined, telling her:
“‘I appreciate that, but I’m a drummer. I don’t act, I don’t know how to do that.’ I honestly thought I was going to be a waste of everyone’s time.” But, partly so he could skip school for a day, he decided to do it.
“I thought, ‘Nothing is going to make me feel comfortable, so why don’t I just go for it and dress up totally as the character?’ So I got these khaki pants and a blazer, and my friend and I made a school patch, and I had the whole thing wired. I thought, ‘I don’t have the acting talent to get the part — but I can dress the part, I can be memorable.’ I was so excited for them to see my outfit, and I remember walking into the audition and seeing 10 other kids dressed exactly like me. That was the one thing I had on these guys. I knew I was screwed.”
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It was only when he got the part (his mother immediately gave him Harold and Maude, The Graduate and Dog Day Afternoon to watch) that he became enthralled with film. “Then it was love. Now I’m married to the movies and music has become my mistress.” Schwartzman says he misses playing with his old band in clubs. “I love the yelling and the smell. If I walk by a club and smell beer and cigarettes, it gets me right here, like a vampire walking by a blood bank.”
Perhaps because he came comparatively late to acting, Schwartzman seems to have an almost childlike enthusiasm for film-making. “When I’m on a set, that’s still pretty awesome to me,” he says. “Just checking it out. I want to learn about the camera, about lighting. Some people are starstruck; I’m movie-struck or set-struck or something. Maybe I’m just struck!”