Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the cover boy for the August issue of Details Magazine. Now, I am not one of those JGL addicts who has seen everything he’s ever done. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to name anything of his that I’ve seen (I never got around to watching 500 Days of Summer, but I will). The only reason I really like him is because he’s adorable and he was pretty good on Saturday Night Live, and because of his sweet little accent. And honestly, that’s enough.

Anyway, JGL’s interview is extensive, and it’s a pretty decent read (full piece here). He’s promoting his role in Inception, which LaineyGossip says is getting totally solid-to-awesome reviews. Personally, I don’t generally care for those “It’s all a beautiful, twisted dreamscape world” movies, but I have to admit, the cast of Inception is wonderful (DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard, and JGL, among others), so maybe I will end up seeing it. By the way, JGL has a shaved head because he just played a cancer patient. I like him better with hair, but he still looks adorable this way. Here are some excerpts from JGL’s interview.

On having his laptop stolen years ago: Years ago, when his teenage apprenticeship as a boy alien on the sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun was winding down and he had enrolled in Columbia University to study French, Joe walked into his Manhattan apartment one day to find that a beloved laptop had been stolen. “And I stupidly had not backed up the files,” he says. Wasn’t he anxious about identity theft? “That was the least of my concerns. I was much more worried about the hundreds of pages of sh-t I had written.” Was any of it meaningful? “Yeah,” he says. “Deeply meaningful. I was writing almost every day. I mean, there was a lot of bullshit. I would spend, like, a page writing about some girl’s body. But that’s good stuff to have too.”

On the frustration he felt trying to transition from child star to adult actor: “Um, yeah [there was frustration],” Joe says. “I would answer that question with a resounding yes. I was scared and depressed for a while. Not that I had any reason to f-cking be depressed—I mean, I was going to college and everything. It was not like I was hungry. But absolutely. I was like, ‘Sh-t, I don’t know if anybody’s gonna let me act. They’ll let me be in another sitcom, but I don’t want to do that. This is terrible.’ Yeah.”

On drugs: “When I was in high school, I loved smoking weed. I loved it. But I cut myself to once a month. That was my rule. And so as the first of the month came closer, my friends would be like, ‘All right, what’s the plan this weekend?’ and actually it’s really cool—when you do it that infrequently, you can really trip. In hindsight, could I have smoked weed on the weekends? Yeah. But it was cool to do it once a month. I still do that sometimes—I go on little weedfests. I’m a pothead. That’s my drug of choice.”

On getting cast in Inception: When Christopher Nolan and his stunt director approached Joe about the role in Inception, they told him it would hurt. “I wanted to paint a grim picture of it,” Nolan says. “The worse I made it sound, the more Joe would grin.” There would be pain. There would be wire work—jumping and fighting in a Fred Astaire-ishly spinning room. Joe would need to wear elbow pads, knee pads, torso pads. Avoiding injury would require relentless training. “They were basically saying, ‘This will be really hard,’ ” Joe recalls. “And I said, ‘I will do anything at all, and I will never complain once.’ Chris just sort of smiled and said, ‘Get it in writing.'”

On stunt training: Joe went to England to shoot levitational hand-to-hand combat in a whirling tube set up in an old zeppelin factory, and “it was six-day weeks of just, like, coming home at night f’in battered. Like you are after you play a hard game of football,” Joe says. “The light fixtures on the ceiling are coming around on the floor, and you have to choose the right time to cross through them, and if you don’t, you’re going to fall.” Nevertheless, there is no record of Joe bitching on the set. “The adrenaline,” he says, “was so nuts that I was like, ‘This normally would have hurt a lot, but let’s go again, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.'”

[From Details]

There’s more stuff in there, I was just getting a little annoyed when he talked about his art. But it sounds like he did the hard work of transitioning into a mainstream, critically acclaimed adult actor, and he did it with a lot of grace, humility and humor. Good for him. Will he ever be a leading man? Eh, maybe. But I doubt that’s what he wants – my guess is that he’s aiming for solid character-actor status. But you never know. Perhaps all of that stunt training will come in handy when he’s starring in next summer’s Die Hard-esque action film. Stranger things have happened.

I just put it together! With his shaved head, JGL looks like Ed Norton! Nice.

Photos courtesy of Details.