“The idea of being a movie star is less appealing than being an actor,” he says. “I think a movie star tends to be representative of a certain type of film that has to be palatable, maybe genre-specific, and is not that high-risk. There is a safe association with it.”
He revels in the fact that reactions to Crash, which won the Oscar for best picture in 2006, were so strong. “It polarized people, and I love that,” he says. “Some people loved it, some people hated it. I love being a part of something that isn’t completely clear to everyone. People get to make up their mind.”
Reactions to Stop-Loss, which essentially takes place inside the minds of Iraq war soldiers wrestling with whether the war is worth fighting, could be just as polarizing. Phillippe plays an Army sergeant on a tour of duty in Iraq who is looking forward to his discharge. But when he and his buddies get back to Texas, he is told that he is being deployed on another tour because of the Pentagon’s “stop-loss” policy, which allows the military to send soldiers back to Iraq even after they’ve served out their enlistment contracts. Some 80,000 enlisted men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are now serving under stop-loss, which some have labeled a “backdoor draft.”
Phillippe with Jesse Bradford in Flags of Our Fathers.
For much of the film, Phillippe’s character is a fugitive on the run, trying to decide whether to return to the war as a matter of duty—to his army buddies, if not to his country—or to follow other stop-loss soldiers and go into hiding in Canada. In recent years, Phillippe has gravitated toward roles in which he plays young, naive men facing a rite of passage—the rookie cop paired with a racist partner in Crash, the idealistic junior FBI agent assigned to gather evidence against a possibly corrupt mentor in Breach. But in Stop-Loss his role requires—and Phillippe delivers—an unmistakable maturity. His soldier may be unsure of what to do next, but he is never unsure of who he is.
“You are defying death every single day over there, and if you do make it to the end of your contract and you fulfilled your commitment to your country, I can’t imagine a feeling worse than being told that you have to go back to that hellhole,” he says. “That is beyond whether or not you believe in this war. That is just something completely unfair and devastating to a person’s human path.”
“When he read the script, he just cut through it,” says Peirce, whose younger brother enlisted after September 11 and was shipped off to Iraq. (He was ultimately discharged after he was wounded in combat.) “It’s about what it means to be a leader. For the part, I needed him to play a real-life soldier. I needed real soldiers to buy into it; I needed him to earn their respect as an actor.”
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