I find that there’s a fascinating relationship, even if it’s one of mere physical resemblance, between a good actor or actress and the string of historically based individuals he or she inevitably portrays. While a role says little about a performer’s true personality, it speaks volumes to his or her screen presence and cultural persona.

Culturally speaking, who is Michael Rooker? It’s a question that even robots that haven’t been built yet will eventually take days to answer. If the rumors are true, and Michael Rooker is the ghost of a Tyrannosaurus Rex trapped in the reanimated corpse of an alien cyborg pulled out of the Rosewell crash, then… I dunno. Case closed, I guess. But if he’s actually as enigmatic, fascinating and cannibalistic as he looks, the case may remain perpetually ajar. Let’s poke around five of his fact-based character roles and see if we can’t reveal some extraterrestrial circuitry or a tiny, ethereal dinosaur arm. So to speak.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

Rooker played: Henry

Who was inspired by: Henry Lee Lucas

Henry Lee Lucas was a bad mutha. And not in the Shaft way (unless you’re talking about late-period Shaft, when he was a homicidal drifter with a glass eye). John McNaughton’s darkly realistic film is partially based on Lucas’ eventual criminal confession, in which he attested to killing more than 600 people during the brief period between 1975 and 1983. Lucas’ admission, which included claims that he was a Satanist who practiced bestiality and cannibalism, was later recanted when authorities called shenanigans on his wild, unlikely tale. A Texas-based Lucas task force later stated that only 350 of the originally confessed murders could be even tangentially connected to Lucas’ supposed whereabouts and activities. Ultimately, Lucas was only conclusively linked to, and convicted for, 11 murders.

It’s interesting to watch McNaughton’s film (and Rooker’s performance) with this factual ambiguity in mind. Henry does commit horrible, brutal homicides, but look at the film’s opening – it features a number of disparate still shots of brutally murdered women, but never conclusively links Rooker’s character to the crimes. In scenes between the gory tableaus, Henry is seen performing banal, everyday activities. It’s as if, even at Henry’s most innocent, a world of horrors is playing out in his imagination – an imagination that begins to closely resemble his grotesque, tail-spinning reality. Even in these opening moments, the film provides a strong visual representation of the confounding uncertainties that remain part of Lucas’ repugnant legacy.

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Rooker played: Frank Bailey

Who was inspired by: Alton Wayne Roberts

On June 21, 1964, in the small town of Meridian, Mississippi, Alton Wayne Roberts, an ex-marine and gun-toting member of the Ku Klux Klan, executed two civil rights workers and helped to kill a third. Roberts went on to serve just ten years in Federal prison before returning to Meridian and opening a dance club. Sure, Rooker has a toned physique and imposing presence that make a buzz cut and starched uniform look right at home. He has a gruff bark and a bite that can be delivered either mouth-wise or with a big, chompy jump kick. But it must have taken every last one of his acting chops to play the kind of bigoted a-hole who would put on a white hood and open a dance club. Hi-yo! Seriously, though, if Ed Norton’s character from “American History X” and Michael Rooker’s character from “Mississippi Burning” had some kind of curb vs. bullets racist off… I’m gonna stop right there. If you’re already feeling uncomfortable, just picture Norton and Rooker in a soapbox derby. Look at Rooker’s big body in that tiny little car!

Days of Thunder (1990)

Rooker played: “Rowdy” Burns

Who was inspired by: Dale Earnhardt

While the film’s producers still deny that Rooker’s aptly named character is meant to represent the famously ‘tude-imbued stock car driver, many critics and fans cite Rowdy’s brash demeanor and trademark black car as tell-tale Earnhardt evocations. Earnhardt, whose reputation as an uncompromisingly aggressive driver earned him nicknames like “Ironhead” and “The Intimidator,” was a successful competitor in the NASCAR circuit, winning 76 races before dying in a crash during the final laps of 1991’s Daytona 500. Rooker’s portrayal, which begins with a series of car-bumping pissing contests between Rowdy and racing neophyte Cole Tickler (Tom Cruise), ends extremely sympathetically, as Rowdy confronts career-ending medical problems and the two head-butting drivers eventually bond and learn how to piss together. Watch Rooker transform Rowdy from a showboating dick-swinger into a loveable grouse and then tell me you don’t want to cover his big, craggy face with butterfly kisses.

JFK (1991)

Rooker played: Bill Broussard

Who was inspired by: William Wood (AKA Bill Boxley)

To accurately attempt to summarize both Boxley’s actual role in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination and Stone’s scapegoat-desperate repositioning of Boxley’s corresponding filmic character would be impossible for two reasons: first, because I don’t f***ing understand any of it; second, because I don’t really care. Jesus, I’m still trying to sort out that thing where you can see a ghost in “3 Men and a Baby.” Basically, Boxley was a disgraced, alcoholic ex-CIA agent hired by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison to investigate a possible government conspiracy surrounding the president’s assassination. Specifically, Boxley (an alias provided by Garrison to discourage any unwanted Federal scrutiny) was hired to draw specific links between traditional CIA operating procedures and the details of Kennedy’s death in order to prove that a CIA agent served as the triggerman. While in real-life, Boxley and Garrison were supposedly good friends and an efficient, if misguided, investigatory team, Stone has Rooker play Boxley as a consummate negative Nellie, doubting Garrison (Stone’s hero) every step of the way and ultimately causing the complete disruption of a conspiracy revelation via determined hard-headedness and general nay-saying. Basically, Rooker plays a meanie. Moving on…

Tombstone (1993)

Rooker played: Sherman McMasters

Who was based on: Sherman McMasters

In 1780, only two years after joining the Texas Rangers, Sherman McMasters was already under suspicion of stealing government mules and robbing a stagecoach. In the ensuing years, however, he drifted back towards the side of the law and joined up with Wyatt Earp, who he assisted in the famous Vendetta Ride, in which Earp and his posse of federal agents (illegally) hunted down outlaws and exacted bloody revenge for the death of Earp’s brother, Morgan. Some people claim that McMasters was an undercover agent working for Wells Fargo, and had only committed his early crimes as a means by which to infiltrate and disrupt a band of cattle rustlers, but experts remain uncertain. In the film, McMasters is portrayed as a badass who doesn’t live long enough to receive much of a back story beyond the outlaw-turned-renegade-lawman stuff. In this vision of McMasters, then, Rooker fills the shoes of a retired outlaw exhausted by the corruptive freedom of the American West and drawn to fight restlessly against the ignoble vestiges of his former self. In other words, “yee-haw!”

More elusive than Bigfoot, cagier than Nessie and capable of eating twice as much human flesh as the average Wendigo – It’s Michael Rooker, and when you aren’t checking him out in his new Web series “Rooker,” or in everyone’s favorite film, “The Bone Collector,” your reading about him all this week, as we celebrate his contribution to genre films, right here at WeirdThings.com

Law and order. Crime and chaos. Rooker has chased down dark, wandering demons, pinned them up against mountains and torn out their still-beating hearts with his teeth. And Rooker has eaten the black hearts of wraiths and become a demon himself, leading fool-headed heroes on perilous, grueling pursuits, with the promise that only one man would live to see another sunrise.

“But, hold on!” you say. “What about love?”

For Rooker in love – and I don’t mean typical Hollywood c-plot stolen glances over a patrol car dashboard culminating in a road-weary third-act kiss interrupted by gunfire – one need look no further than James Gunn’s superlative 2006 horror-comedy, “Slither.” Plot-wise, Rooker’s character Grant Grant is a small-town business mogul who becomes possessed by an alien being that uses Grant’s body to initiate an elaborate reproductive cycle through which the town’s inhabitants are enslaved by the malicious being’s collective consciousness. The brilliance of the film (aside from, like, that entire concept) is that the alien hive mind absorbs Grant’s core emotional memories, which it passes on to the newly zombified townsfolk. At the beginning of the film, Rooker plays a character who’s focused, authoritative, arrogant and, though lustful towards his beautiful, young wife, Starla (played by the always-stellar Elizabeth Banks), hardly romantic. Once his consciousness is consumed and his body is horrifically mutated, aside from his pride and ambition (now directed toward the systematic assimilation of the human race), the only thing that remains of Grant, and his former life with Starla, is his love, which he broadcasts out through the tortured voices of every townsperson, while their deforming bodies – now dehumanized mental appendages of a sinister interstellar despot – lurch and stumble through the ruined town.

You could make the argument that Grant’s urge to rise above his small-town roots had already resulted in the capture of his brain by the hive mind of American capitalism, which seeks to undermine small-town life and private business through corporate homogeneity. In that reading of the film, Starla was already wed to a monster, who only comes to truly appreciate his wife through possession by the alien being and the realization that he has defiled himself and become something foreign and hideous. Still, Grant loves Starla, and that single emotional fact dominates a film that, at its heart, is really about disgusting slugs and the way they try to force themselves down the throats of naked teenagers. That the details of Grant’s life exist on the page is only secondary to the way Rooker inhabits the character, and, even through a twisted cocoon of plastic and make-up, gives the audience something to feel and someone flawed, pathetic and wholly relatable to feel it for.

The subtle, somehow-sympathetic arrogance of Rooker’s performance in “Slither” is present (though, by virtue of the character’s role, not as fully developed) in an earlier film – Kevin Smith’s lovable cinematic debacle, “Mallrats.” Playing Mr. Jared Svenning, who, like Grant, is a physically intimidating, ambitious, money-hungry conniver, Rooker’s performance fills the necessary role of the cartoonishly rotten antagonist. Because the film is more character-driven comical picaresque than plot-based narrative, Svenning’s intentions earn more screen time than his specific motivations – the intention being to ensure that his daughter, Brandy, never marries TS, a consummate (but pure-hearted) slacker. Now, on the surface, Jared Svenning really does come off as just an immense cosmic butthole. And, watching the film at age 15, it’s easy to hate Rooker’s character and root for those lovable mallrats to dick-joke their way to a happy ending. Watching the film now, while I still cheer as Svenning savors those pretzels, I also understand that, for better or worse, he loves is daughter. Sure, he wrongly projects his already over-inflated sense of entitlement upon her, but, ultimately, he doesn’t want his little girl pawed on by a food court-lurking lollygagger – and who can blame him? Leave it to Rooker to sum up a father’s love in screams, puke and a gong-accompanied butt-cheek reveal.

Seriously. Leave it to Rooker. He’s a professional and he’ll do it right now if he has to. In fact, he wants to. He even bought an automated gong that’s programmed to sound every time he shimmies his round ass out of the shower.

More Rooker on Friday.

A chiseled face. Burning, soulful eyes. A lover’s mouth. A maniac’s chin. A taut body carved from the world’s most expensive marble by the world’s most hedonistic sculptor. A quiet soul whispered out of a crack in the Sphinx. He is Michael Rooker, and when you aren’t checking him out in his new Web series “Rooker,” or in everyone’s favorite film, “Skeleton Man,” your reading about him all this week, right here at WeirdThings.com

To understand the basis of Michael Rooker’s lengthy career as a deft character actor known for playing both hard-ass champions of justice and bad-ass bringers of death, it helps to look at his role in John Sayles’ 1988 film, “Eight Men Out,” which chronicles the 1919 scandal that found eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspiring with gamblers to fix the World Series. Rooker was cast as White Sox teammate and eager co-conspirator Chick Gandil, whose Wikipedia entry notes the following: “Described by his contemporaries as a ‘professional malcontent,’ [Gandil] was physically well built at 6’2″ and 195 pounds, and had a mean and callous expression. He used both to display his toughness, and also did not hesitate to use sheer strength to get his point across.” That Michael Rooker was perfect for this part should offer a sense of what makes the actor so compelling to watch on screen, and why he’s ideally suited to kick ass with the shoes of both protagonists and antagonists alike.

Rooker’s first major role, and perhaps the most indelible performance of his entire career, was the titular seething murderer in John McNaughton’s 1986 horror watershed, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (a film that will be addressed in more detail later this week). The character of Henry is so fully realized by McNaughton and so completely embodied by Rooker, the role feels like a classic pop cultural mixed blessing that threatens to drive an actor past success and into the backwoods of type casting. Fortunately, Rather than banishing Rooker into a movie-of-the-week limbo filled with “misunderstood” deviants and mindless slash-and-hack murder junkies, this supremely creepy, nuanced performance somehow led the actor to a profusion of police officer portrayals.

“The Dark Half,” “Rosewood,” and “Replicant,” among many others, pit Rooker’s commanding presence, hard-edged focus and nails-tough attitude against the criminal element. In the same way that a lesser performance of a serial killer often results in a cold-staring, machete-brandishing caricature, so, too, can the aforementioned traits alone create a fairly reductive portrait of a policeman. Rooker understands the emotionality and subtle empathetic turns that are crucial to portraying an effective cop who’s as unforgiving to criminals as he is kind to, and understanding of, victims. Take his turn as Sherriff Pangborn in the 1991 Stephen King adaptation “The Dark Half”– Pangborn is heart-and-soul, scary-eyed dead set on bringing a killer to justice, but, even in his unfaltering determination, employs reason, soft eyes and cold brewskies when dealing with the prime suspect, Thad Beaumont – not because Pangborn fully trusts or believes Beaumont, but because he respects due process and, more importantly, sees Beaumont as a person first, even in light of his alleged misdeeds. In essence, Rooker fills a walking costume with a feeling individual. This relationship between societal role and individual emotional core highlights the sheer, unfaltering power of humanity and the impossibility of either purging it through the violence of a killer or numbing it with the focus and determination of a lawman – a fact that writers and actors alike ought pay heed to in crafting even the most archetypical narrative figures.

Sadly, even this summary understanding of characterization is reductive. To say a character has two sides – feeling and function – is to reduce humanity to a binary, and, further, to suggest that the halves are split – that they aren’t constantly and unforgivingly shaping and re-shaping each other. Just look at Rooker’s roles in “Mallrats” and “Slither” – or let me look at them for you and over explain them in a way that makes you never want to watch a movie again – This Wednesday on WeidThings.com.