Hobbit Boy
Sean Astin takes the hood off surprising Secrets

A few days before Christmas, Astin's house in the Topanga Canyon region of Los Angeles is filled with family -- his charming wife, Christine, their daughters Alexandra, 7, and Elizabeth, eighteen
months, his brother Mack and two brothers-in-law. Most of the adults refer to Astin as "the Senator," a childhood nickname that stuck, based on his ambition and his gregariousness. "The genius of Sean is
that he surrounds himself with brilliantly intelligent people," Mack jokes, "and if there's not enough of them, he makes more."

On cue, Alexandra runs into the kitchen, holding three sheets that enumerate her Christmas wish list. She's a precocious girl, who appears at the end of The Return of the King as one of Sam's children; she refers to people seeking her dad's autograph as a "people storm." Her list of desired gifts includes a jewel from Australia, clothes from 21,000 years ago and $8 million (in two bags of $4 million each).  "Do you want something to drink?" Astin asks. "I don't know where anything is." The family moved into the house two months earlier, but he's been so busy promoting Lord of the Rings that he's spent only two days there. What the Senator really wants is to get his family's computers out of storage and then, after the kids have gone to bed, play Red Alert or Age of Empires all night long. "The sun goes down, and then the sun comes up," Astin says wistfully.

Astin is bright, friendly and extremely persistent. Although he's played everything from a street junkie (in Where the Day Takes You) to a mouthy racist (in Deterrence), his three most famous roles -- in The Goonies, Rudy and Lord of the Rings, each one filmed about eight years after the other -- embody the spirit of never-say-quit. Playing the title role in Rudy, Astin brought dignity to the true story of an undersize college student who scores big at football.  "That's who I am," Astin says. "I mean, I was really short. I remember going to the doctor to see if there were injections I could take to be taller. But whenever we ran a lap, I wanted to run the fastest. I don't know why, on the wheel of fortune of personality traits, it stopped on ambition and hustle and drive. Being cocky or arrogant never seemed like an option."

The Sean you see now, that energy and fearlessness, is not unlike Sean as a little kid," says his mother, Patty Duke. "But I was pretty sick when he was growing up. Bipolar, they call it now: yelling, ranting, belittling. My kids grew up in spite of me."

When Duke married John Astin, he adopted Sean and raised him as his son, but she always suspected the biological father was Desi Arnaz Jr. When Sean turned twenty-five, he got a DNA test, which revealed
that his biological father was neither of those men but rather rock promoter Mike Tell, with whom his mother had a brief, annulled marriage. Sean remains friendly with Arnaz -- who has given him a
collection of tabloids with stories about Sean's birth that had been saved by Arnaz's mother, Lucille Ball -- but wants to be careful not to offend John Astin, whom he calls his father and considers
his "moral and spiritual and philosophical touchstone."

Some of Sean's earliest memories are of traveling with his parents while they did summer-stock theater. Asked as a child what his father did for a living, Astin said, "He puts on his hair and does funny things." When Sean was ten, he begged his parents to let him be in a movie; his debut was opposite Duke in the after-school TV special Please Don't Hit Me, Mom. A few years later, Astin starred in the kid-adventure movie The Goonies. He got to take home several props, including the movie's iconic treasure map, which was later thrown out when his mom moved. Elijah Wood now has the map of Middle-Earth brandished by Gandalf in Fellowship of the Ring; Astin warned him to be careful with it.

In his spare time, Astin was making short films with his brother Mack, borrowing Dad's camera. An early effort, The Crook, began with a close-up shot of the lead character's to-do list, featuring the
item "Big Bank Job Today."

In high school (the posh Crossroads school in Santa Monica, California), Astin took a film class, where he made one short just so he would have an excuse to kiss the prettiest girl in the class. She
later cast him in one of her films when classmate Jack Black backed out at the last minute. "He was doing The Caucasian Chalk Circle or something like that," Astin says. "At our school, he was the serious thespian dramatist. When I see him rocking out now, I find it shocking."

When Astin was sixteen, he decided he wanted a real job. Over the vehement objections of his mother, he spent three months as a movie usher in L.A.'s Westwood district. He loved the work, even putting
the butter in the popcorn machine. "I was making $8.25 an hour, and they withheld the tax," he says. "Those checks were more meaningful to me than the $50,000 or the $100,000 that had gone into the bank
for acting work, because I understood exactly what I did for it."

On the job, Astin had to wear a blue polyester jacket and a name tag that read Patrick (his middle name). One night, Corey Feldman, his Goonies co-star, arrived with a large posse for the premiere of his new movie, Lost Boys. As Feldman stepped up to the concession stand, Astin was sweeping up the popcorn under his feet. When Feldman saw him, his jaw just dropped. "Sean?" he asked. Not believing his eyes, he flipped up his sunglasses. "What happened?"

I think people enjoy reading about money," Astin correctly observes, "but the people who are in charge of giving me guidance tell me not to talk about it in interviews. Why not? That's what
everybody thinks about."

So how much does he have in the bank?

He thinks it over. "Somewhere between 600,000 and a million, but I haven't paid tax on a lot of that yet." He breaks down his recent income: He'll be co-starring in Adam Sandler's next movie, 50 First
Dates, for which he earned $300,000. He appeared on fifteen episodes of the science-fiction TV series Jeremiah and was paid $44,000 for each, plus some extra money for directing an episode. He took
a "money gig" in Slipstream, a South African feature, for about $300,000. The eighteen principal actors of the Lord of the Rings movies successfully negotiated large bonuses, although Astin can't
disclose the number.

There's talk that Astin may receive a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Return of the King. If he does, it'll be his second nomination; in 1994, he and his wife received one for co-producing
Kangaroo Court, a live-action short about race relations. Astin has spent large chunks of money on setting up production companies and making other short movies.  "I talked to my dad about it when I was eighteen," Astin says. "I felt like it was irresponsible to invest $30,000, money I had made
acting in Memphis Belle, in my short film. That's like what a teacher makes in a year. And I remember him saying, 'What are you going to do with your money? Pile it up and throw darts at it?' " Astin laughs, looking as content as a hobbit who has come home.  (January 13, 2004)

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