Joseph Gordon-Levitt says ‘Looper’ is his favorite role

Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to shine as Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber television series, but if you were to ask the actor himself, he’d nominate his small sci-fi flick from 2012 as his favorite role, despite having one of the most prolific filmographies in Hollywood.

Indeed, it appears that for Gordon-Levitt, headlining Rian Johnson’s highly acclaimed film Looper has been a noteworthy highlight. While going through his portfolio in a recent Vanity Fair appearance, the American star explains what makes this particular project stand out from all the rest.

“I wore hours and hours of prosthetic makeup every day to look a little bit like Bruce Willis,” he said. “Kazuhiro Tsuji, the phenomenal makeup designer, told Rian and me that it was impossible to make me look like Bruce Willis. He brought out charts, he brought out photos of Bruce and of me and pointed out, ‘Look, the distance between the bottom of his nose and the top of his lip, it’s just not the same, I can’t fix that, you will not get him to look like him.”

Johnson, the experimental director that he is, pushed to do it anyway, and the result made the movie Gordon-Levitt’s most memorable acting experience.

“Rian said to Kazu, ‘It doesn’t have to look exactly like him, it just has to suggest it, it’s okay, it’s a movie,'” he continued. “One of my marks of success as an actor, for myself, is do I seem different on screen from myself? It’s probably why Looper is my favorite performance of mine because it’s the most different. Now granted, I sort of cheated with the prosthetics, I kind of look different. But I get that thrill the most of, ‘Wow, it’s really somebody else, it’s not me.’ I did a lot of work to try and do my version that wasn’t an imitation of Bruce Willis but had sort of the spirit of Bruce Willis. If I had to pick a favorite, acting-wise, this is up there for me.”

In Looper, Willis plays an older version of Gordon-Levitt’s character, an assassin named Joe. Looper became so critically acclaimed that it essentially launched The Last Jedi director’s career, which is why it’s definitely worth a watch.