By the time he was 19, Jackie Earle Haley had starred in two of the biggest movies of the ’70s, “The Bad News Bears” and “Breaking Away,” but just a few years later, he found himself delivering pizza to earn a living.
“It wasn’t easy,” the actor, now 61, tells Page Six in an exclusive new interview. “You just gotta roll with life. Life comes at you.”
Haley remembers one delivery trip that was particularly mortifying.
“I just walked up, and he answered the door, and he was like, ‘Jackie?’ He goes, ‘Hey! How are you doing?’ He was the editor of one of the movies I did,” he shares. “And so that was kind of embarrassing, but you know, life moved on.”
Haley, who started acting as a child, landed the role of tough kid Kelly Leak opposite Tatum O’Neal and Walter Matthau in 1976’s “The Bad News Bears” when he was 14. Three years later, he played high school graduate Moocher in “Breaking Away.”
The Los Angeles native says that the success was “pretty cool” but concedes that “there is something to be said for when you’re that young and you have that kind of success,” explaining, “Your identity kind of gets attached to it a bit.”
Movie offers eventually began to dry up for Haley, who says, “It kind of reached this point where I realized, ‘Man, I really need to do something else.'”
That included a lot of odd jobs, he says, including “driving a limousine and delivering pizza, just a handful of stuff,” in addition to stints behind the camera, like sound work on a reality show about the California Highway Patrol and corporate videos.
All that changed in 2006 when Sean Penn recommended Haley to director Steven Zaillian for the film “All the King’s Men,” which reignited the former child star’s career. He then scored a role as a registered sex offender in Todd Fields’ “Little Children,” opposite Kate Winslet, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Haley went on to play antihero Rorschach in 2009’s “Watchmen” and Freddy Krueger in the 2010 remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
His latest film is a drama called “Devil’s Peak” starring Billy Bob Thorton and — in a sweet, full-circle moment — Penn’s son, Hopper Penn.
“It’s been a wild ride,” he tells us about his work. “And I think it’s incredibly rare to have two shots at an acting career.”
And for Haley, success the second time around is definitely sweeter.
“I think you appreciate it,” he says. “When I look back at the whole career, having played three majorly iconic characters, Kelly Leak, Rorschach and Freddy Krueger, people seem to know who those characters are.”