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Collins Jr discusses 'Sunshine Cleaning'

Collins Jr discusses 'Sunshine Cleaning'

Rex Features

With roles in Traffic, Capote and Babel under his belt, Clifton Collins Jr has been quietly building a name for himself as a versatile character actor. This summer he's a regular fixture on the big screen having appeared in Crank: High Voltage, as villain Ayel in Star Trek and in this week's Sunshine Cleaning, in which he stars opposite Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as a one-armed store owner. DS caught up with Clifton to talk about kind-hearted Winston.

Could you give us a flavor for Winston and who he is?
"For me, the intrigue with playing Winston was... it's so easy for us to forget how able we all are and take for granted our limbs and body parts. It was fun to play a guy who's an amputee, he lost his arm in an accident which is a backstory I came up with on a collaboration with [producer] Peter Saraf. Just to see the positives in what you have and not what you don't have and to hopefully share that with others, it's so infectious I think when people have positive attitudes. It's inspiring when you see people, who have some kind of disability, who don't let it slow them down and live life to the fullest."

You've spoken before about preparing for roles thoroughly. Were you practising tying your laces one-handed and taking up Winston's model plane hobby?
"It's funny you said that because I was shooting The Horsemen with Dennis Quaid at the time in Winnipeg and it was 50 below zero. The hotel I was staying in had double-paned windows so you couldn't open them. Dennis Quaid saw that I was ordering paint and saying, 'What are you getting paints for? You're building model planes! For what?' I said I was doing it for this other movie. For me in the movie, I wanted planes in some scenes so I would have vivid memories of what it was like to build them and the painstaking steps I took. Quaid was convinced I was just painting planes so I could get high off the fumes!"

Was your arm digitally removed?
"We did that a couple of different ways. One was a green sleeve where they digitally removed it when we could afford to do that. The other way was to get wardrobe to give me a very strong belt or a rope and tie it around my waist, something that will not move. I would lock my shoulder back and I'd literally put my arm back as far as I could to the side of my waist and lock it. Once it locked the pain would kick in and I'd try to bury the pain. Once the pain was gone they'd wipe the sweat of my forehead, then I'd go ahead and knock out the scene."

Is there an advantage to playing a character who has these mysterious edges?
"It's definitely more fun because it's more complicated and more complex. There's something really great about entering a scene and you see a guy missing an arm and he's got a different look, you don't know what his story is. It's natural to think scary things. You don't know what to think. If he's just entered with a happy smile that's a little more boring. There's something cool about having a little mystique and a mystery about you, then suddenly you get to learn that the guy has a gigantic heart of gold."

There's a romance between Winston and Rose hinted at - what do you think attracts the pair to each other?
"That there was going to be a romance? Winston's a hot motherf**ker, a hot sexy b**tard! It's nice to wonder what would happen, what will happen. Some of the women were like, 'We want to see them get together'. I think that's part of the fun, the wanting, the longing to see two people together who should be together."

Sunshine Cleaning opens in UK cinemas this Friday.

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