Joseph Gordon-Levitt didn’t have much luck with the ladies back in the day.
In the August issue of GQ, the 31-year-old Dark Knight Rises actor reveals he never attended his high school prom. “I was a sort of serious little dude — snobby. I thought girls my age were very frustrating,” he explains. “They were, like, looking in their compact mirrors and sh-t, and I thought that was evil.”
As a teenager in Van Nuys, California, Gordon-Levitt says he was in danger of becoming “a hopeless ivory-tower douchebag. I’m a little more forgiving now. I’ve grown to laugh at myself a little bit more than I did.”
Still, the actor has always been quite serious, according to his 3rd Rock From the Sun costar, John Lithgow, 66. “It’s kind of extraordinary that he was playing an old man in a young boy’s body then, because that’s kind of what he was,” Lithgow says of their time together on the alien sitcom. “He was a very mature boy — I remember him carrying on about the ecological damage that is done when people build new golf courses. What teenager worries about that? And now he’s a very youthful adult. He’s done a flip-flop.”
The pensive actor — whose box office hits include Inception and (500) Days of Summer — admits he still struggles with life in the spotlight.
“I really don’t like this notion that some people are more important than other people. These stories about these elevated people called ‘celebrities’ teaches [ordinary people] that what [they] have to say doesn’t matter,” Gordon-Levitt tells GQ. “It’s degrading.”
