With 125 credits in film and television at just 50 years old, it’s clear that Clifton Collins Jr, who started his career in 1990 as Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez, has been really busy. Even if he has been featured in series such as Westworld, Veronica Mars and Ballers, and studio titles as The Mule, Trascendence, Pacific Rim and Star Trek (plus the upcoming Nightmare Alley, his second time for director Guillermo del Toro), the best roles in his career came from independent cinema, such as the condemned killer in Capote or the prisoner in The Last Castle. That’s why he’s a veteran at the Sundance Film Festival, where many of his films premiered. This year the spotlight will be on Jockey, directed by Clint Bentley, part of the U.S. Dramatic competition. In the film, he plays Jackson Silva, a jockey in the sunset of his successful career who finds at the same time that he can be the father of a young rookie (Moises Arias) and that his days at the racetracks could be numbered. 

This year will be a different Sundance for everybody. What does it mean for you that Jockey has been accepted?

It’s a great honor having one of my true labor of love that I (executive produced), along with two men who I consider brothers, both Clint (Bentley) and Greg (Kwedar), who we did Transpecos with a few years earlier.  So there’s a familiarity there, and to take this film to Sundance with them, on such a profound type collaboration. I feel like it’s not just the yin and yang, if there’s a trilogy of the yin and yang, that would be us, because I feel like you take one-third of the equation, any of us out of it, it’s not the same movie obviously. So, to be part of Sundance, you know getting into this business, Robert Redford and Sundance and all the trailblazers before us, you yearn to get there, you want to get a chance, even a day player role in a film at Sundance, much less a film you (produced) and starred in and got to work with the talent I was privileged to work with, like Moises. And to be welcomed into this, to be humbly welcomed into this incredible world and I still talk to some of these jockeys, I talked to one yesterday, I love these guys.

Jackson has been in the race for years and suddenly he realizes his body is no longer responding as he expects it to.  Also, he realizes he’s very lonely too. What did you add to the character?

Oh my God, so many things, so much of the rewrites. I mean every day Greg and Cliff and I would sit because I would sit with them and we would go through shots of the entire script every single day as I learned more and more hanging out with the jockeys.  It’s a lifestyle with a lot of ups and downs, it happens very quickly.  You could be a champion of the world today and then tomorrow you could be like the biggest loser on the planet.  And it sucks and there’s no lean green pixie dust like I was champ yesterday, that was 24 hours ago, you are nobody today. So, there are so many ups and downs and you have your groupies as well, but as you travel the circuits, it’s a demanding sport. These pound for pound jockeys are probably one of the most fascinating, resilient athletes I think on the planet. They are riding this 1,200-pound horse and there are so many things they have to do.  So there was a lot, I think Greg and Cliff could probably speak better to that, but I was consistently doing rewrites with the boys every day and taking in the culture, understanding the culture and the world, because a dialogue that you and I could share would mean something completely different to a jockey, to be hurt as a jockey is not us falling down or breaking an arm or a dislocated shoulder, being hurt is not having the ability to ever walk again or to ever ride again.  And that’s, in all honesty, culturally speaking, the only true definition of being hurt.  (laughs) 

And you need to have a special kind of body to be a jockey, right? 

You are right, you have got to drop some weight. So if you are on the taller side, you are really thin like Kato, the Asian jockey that he saw in there. There are a couple of guys in there about my height. Because we worked with a skeleton crew it was easier for me to hide and have a large degree of anonymity, which I loved, it allowed me to blend within the community.  And I was always in my jockey uniform, I was always hanging out with the jockeys, helping them out. We had no trailers, no first ADs, no hair, and no makeup, so it was easy to blend with the jockeys.  

IMDB says you have 125 credits, which is not bad for your age.  How difficult is it to find a leading role like this, even if you have done so much at this point in your career?

It’s very difficult, it’s a very different time these days. I think for me the best opportunities are the independent films because they are not as controlled, there’s a lot more freedom. I love the independent world, there is so much creative validation, even the directors and the people you are working with, to make sure that they’re speaking the same language that you are. And when you find out that they are, it becomes this beautiful symbiotic relationship. We all count on one another, and that’s a beautiful thing, you don’t have the producing powers, you don’t have the politics of the big agencies, you don’t have these things, you got people that are organically choosing the actors that they deem fit for the roles. And there’s something really, in my career, I have had producers call me, Clifton we really want you for this role, and I am not right for that role and the director didn’t really respond, yeah, but we want you for this role.  And I am like I understand, but let’s let the director find what they want because I want to find somebody who wants to work with me.  And it doesn’t mean that they don’t like me, it just means that they don’t have that vision for me. And I don’t want to intrude on that, I don’t think that’s being an artist.  I love fighting for roles, don’t get me wrong, but ultimately if you don’t see it, I want to respect that and honor that, that’s part of my job too, is to help you find who is right and who is not right.  You think if I would be on the floor or be in the movie, well part of my job is to help you find out what your film is, where I fit in it.

You have a lot of movies now waiting for release. Do you think it has to do with your part in Westworld, or is it a result of your body of work?

In all honesty, you get little offers that come to you and you try to hold out for the ones that really speak to you unless you have got to pay the bills and especially in these times. Westworld is not very consistent, you have got to wait a year and a half, two years sometimes and by then you have got these new generations of kids that are into something else by then.  I would like to think it’s my body of work.  

At the beginning of your career, you worried that you would be typecast as happened to your grandfather, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez. How hard was it to avoid that?

I think the big break for me personally, the validation was Tigerland because I was specifically told at that time by my manager and agent that you will never play a southern role for Joel Schumacher. I was told that and when I heard never, I was like oh great, I can do it. (laughs) So I think as Latinos or any entertainer of color, we have to work ten times harder.  And my grandfather told me this as well as a youngster, that we have to work extra hard. And in taking his name, I knew that I was going to work extra hard as well because so oftentimes, cast directors will cast starting off based on a name and not so much on the talent content, they will skew it.  And you might not even be Latino at all, if you got a Molina name or this name, they will be like come on in, it doesn’t matter if you are English or whatever, you can pull it off, we got you. But God forbid should you try to play a minor like in Tigerland, which Joel Schumacher said in front of my entire cast, which was both flattering and embarrassing, he said, I can count the top auditions of my entire career on one hand and you are one of them. And I just remember crying, I just remember crying because I thought wow, I know I’m crazy, but I know I’m not that crazy and I know that I am talented enough that I can play other characters like I did in my whole childhood.