“I was in this crazy world of beautiful people. The nightlife was still really fun and exciting,” Rex says. “It almost feels like the last era before smartphones and bottle service. So me and all my friends would always argue over who gets to carry Mark's records into the club.” He and Ronson are still close enough that Ronson was Rex’s guest at the Red Rocket premiere this fall at the New York Film Festival. “The joke was that Mark would always be DJing at the coolest spots back then, in New York in the '90s. I was out every night.” He and Mark Ronson became friends doing a Calvin Klein show.
“And now I'm hanging out with Howard Stern, and Jackie Chan, and Jon Stewart, and rock bands, because everybody would come to MTV to promote their book, their movie, whatever,” he says.Īnd then there was his nightlife.
Rex swears a bus driver probably made more money than he did, but he also swears he worked one hour a day, live on TV, announcing videos and interviewing people from 3 to 4 p.m., the prime after-school hour. Someone at MTV was charmed, despite his admitted total lack of experience. Soon he was a guest on MTV, to fill in for the model Marcus Schenkenberg. “It was at the end, when you get to the end of the runway, then you hold it, and I had it down,” he says, and stares piercingly into where a gauntlet of photographers might be waiting. Everything they're making fun of was relatable to me.” Rex can still do his male model runway walk, as he demonstrates with a comic flair and a note of pride along the bar at Clandestino. And it was a huge hit, and I remember thinking it's so funny, because I know this life. No one understands what modeling jokes are.
I just stand here?” When Zoolander came out, "I thought, Nobody's going to get this movie at all. I remember thinking, I don't want to do this, this is lame. “I would just go to these male modeling auditions, and it was so boring. He had agents in Milan, Paris, and New York. He's not a model." But Rex was who they wanted: He was tall and lean, with a Roman nose and in possession of abs that made him look like he was at war with carbs.
One day, he was sitting in a room, waiting for her to come out of a casting, and the casting director pointed to him and asked who he was. He’s been in therapy for a long time.Īt 18, after living in SF and the East Bay, he was aimless and dating an aspiring model. “I grew up with an alcoholic stepdad who was a coke addict, and I used to have to go to Al-Anon meetings in Oakland when I was 11, 12,” says Rex. It was a bohemian but also rough childhood. His father is a photographer and a breathwork coach who lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He has a New Jersey Jewish mom (“She’s always in my ear”) who is an environmental planner. Rex is the only child of San Francisco hippies.
So I feel comfortable going back to the element. I don't know if you know this-I was born naked. Like when you're home, are you naked? “I am, lately. It's very liberating, actually,” he says. All of this is set during the run-up to the 2016 election, with MAGA signs and the Republican Convention very much in the background.Īs for that naked running scene, Rex says he came to really like running in the nude.
He tries to groom an almost 18-year-old redhead doughnut store employee, to manage her career. He’s staying with his estranged wife and her mother and is dealing a little weed to get by. The maybe-prosthetic penis is featured quite prominently in Red Rocket, which is about a fairly washed-up porn star named Mikey Saber, played by Rex, who returns to small-town Texas.