Jackie Earle Haley on Little Children

The Free Press Houston spoke with Jackie Earle Haley by phone last month in anticipation of the larger rollout of Little Children. Although Haley was in Dallas at the time, he lives in San Antonio where he runs JEH Productions, a corporate communications firm. To hear Haley tell it he couldn¹t get arrested much less a film role and his resume has a gap from 1993 until 2006 when he re-entered the scene with striking performances in All the King¹s Men (Haley was Sugar Boy, the governor¹s enforcer) and Little Children. Haley may not be a household name but as a child actor you would immediately recognize him. He was an original slugger for the Bad News Bears and was one of the kids in Breaking Away. There was a bunch of TV guest roles, one that sticks out was his 3-lines on The Partridge Family. Haley¹s chilling portrait of a child molester on parole in Little Children brings his career to a mobius strip of a full circle. In his first feature The Day of the Locust (1975) he was the precocious child. (In Day of the Locust Donald Sutherland plays molester Homer Simpson. Yes Matt Groening got the name for the paterfamilias of the popular cartoon from a Nathanael West novel about decadent 1920s Hollywood.) Haley recalls getting the Little Children script from his agent. ³I made a tape and sent it to Todd Fields even before he began auditioning,² Haley said. Haley was flown to New York to read and his All the King¹s Men co-star Kate Winslet was there to read with him for Fields. ³Todd can be an actor¹s director because of all the roles he¹s had in front of the camera,² states Haley, ³But he¹s also a visionary. There¹s not an aspect of the production that he doesn¹t know about or oversee.² As for the creepy interpretation that Haley gives his sex offender character of Ronnie that was a process that ³evolved from day to day as I would focus on different aspects of his character.² Little Children may be the best of the least seen films of 2006 and if you haven¹t seen Little Children it returns to theaters this weekend along with nominated films like Last King of Scotland or The Departed.