Rodney Eastman
Rodney Eastman is an actor, born 1967.
Rodney Eastman's face is fixed in place for a certain generation of horror viewers. He is Joey, one of the Westin Hills teenagers in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, and he came back for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Before that he was an uncredited shoplifter in Chopping Mall and a guest on Charles in Charge, which is roughly the standard 1980s Los Angeles apprenticeship.
No leading-man career came out of it. What followed is character work at the edges of other people's films: a Joey of a different sort in Mobsters, Ty in The Opposite of Sex, Matthew in The Caveman's Valentine, Stork in the 1998 Tourist Trap, Andy in the 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave. The horror world kept the door open and he kept walking back through it, which is a perfectly respectable way to spend thirty years on screen.
He is also a musician. King Straggler is a Los Angeles band he plays in with the actors John Hawkes and Brentley Gore, and it is closer to the centre of his life than the credit list suggests.
Movies (13)
- I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
- A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
- A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
- Chopping Mall (1986)
- Mobsters (1991)
- Janie Jones (2010)
- The Opposite of Sex (1998)
- The Preppie Murder (1989)
- Sand (2000)
- The Caveman's Valentine (2001)
- No One Would Tell (1996)
- Tourist Trap (1998)
- Extracted (2012)
TV (2)
Where to start with Rodney Eastman
Two films carry this filmography, and the earlier one is much the better. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is genuinely the strongest sequel the series produced, a psychiatric ward full of teenagers who work out how to fight back, with Eastman's Joey among them. Watch it on its own terms and then take A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master only if the first one lands, because part four is glossier, sillier and much less interested in its characters.
The rest is a scavenger hunt. The Opposite of Sex is easily the best-written film he appears in, an acid comedy with a narrator who holds the audience in contempt. Chopping Mall is the pure 1986 artifact, worth ninety minutes if you like your horror cheap and unashamed.
Mobsters and The Caveman's Valentine hand him small, sour parts in bigger productions, and I Spit on Your Grave is the one to skip unless you already have a tolerance for that subgenre.