When I arrive at his Dripping Springs ranch, Theo Rossi informs me that Willie Nelson has died. He’s referring to a goat he and his family named after the beloved Texas icon and who suffered from an unhealthy urethra. Thankfully, Rossi’s four other goats are fine, including Willie’s sister, Bette Davis. An auburn buck named Biggie eyes us suspiciously as he approaches the fence line, while Smalls, his counterpart, lazes near a dirt pit that the 49-year-old actor tells me was once a pond. Rain has been scarce, and Rossi would rather not water a hole.
Within eyeshot, Peanut Butter and Jelly, two Great Pyrenees that joined the fold after two of the family’s dozen chickens got plucked off by foxes, stand upon a hill in another pasture, their white fur rippling in the breeze. Juno, Rossi’s devoted shepherd-husky mix of four years, remains by the actor’s side.
Rossi and his wife, Meghan, purchased the property four years ago. He and their sons, Arlo, who’s seven, and Kane, who’s nine, coined the ten acres the Wolf King Ranch. The spread’s logo, a primitive crown with four points (one for each family member, Rossi explains), is emblazoned in metal on the gate and inked in black on the actor’s forearm.
Since moving to Texas after a thirteen-year stint in Los Angeles, the New York native hasn’t looked back. Though working in Hollywood does require a good deal of shuttling back and forth, Rossi has decided that this place will always be his home. “We have a bunch of animals buried in the front who have passed,” he says. “I’ve said, ‘Just bury me right next to them, because I’m dying here in Texas. I’m not going anywhere else.’ ”
And yet, Rossi hasn’t entirely purged himself of his New York roots. He still retains some semblance of his Staten Island accent, and his personal aesthetic is more street style than Western wear. Rossi isn’t cosplaying a Texan, like some of the state’s other recent high-profile transplants. In lieu of a cowboy hat, he’s wearing a flat-brim baseball cap on this warm October afternoon.
His path to Texas was forged by Meghan, a Houston native. The couple started dating twelve years ago, while Meghan was working for Boot Campaign, a nonprofit that supports veterans and active duty military families. Her boss at the time, a fan of Sons of Anarchy, hosted recurring fundraisers with the show’s cast, which included Rossi. Before she ever had an inkling of romance, Meghan knew Rossi professionally for two years. “I’m a girl from Texas who had, by any measure, a normal childhood. And I’m working for this military-veteran nonprofit,” says Meghan, whose eyes are a striking composite of blue and brown. “The last thing I would ever want on my radar was this Hollywood actor, the stereotype.”
It wasn’t until she traveled to Staten Island to help coordinate press for a fundraiser in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the borough in 2012, that the relationship took on a more familiar tone. After a day of press, Rossi insisted that Meghan come over to his house, where his mother was cooking a big family dinner for thirty or forty people, she recalls. As a Houstonian, Meghan was no stranger to hurricanes and floods, and the damage they can wreak; she was struck by the sense of community among Rossi’s family and friends. “It was at that dinner where it was the first time I allowed myself to really see him as a human,” she says.
Meghan caught a ride with Rossi and others back to the Manhattan hotel where she was staying, which gave her an opportunity to speak with the actor. “I remember everything about that conversation,” she says, and recalls how Rossi contradicted all her preconceived ideas about the big egos of Hollywood. “I remember thinking, ‘I just want to keep talking to him.’ ”
It wasn’t until years later, after the two had married, that Meghan first floated the idea of moving to Texas. At the time, she and Rossi were living in a house in Staten Island, near Rossi’s family, while the actor filmed Marvel’s Luke Cage, a series distributed by Netflix. “Like any good New Yorker, I was like, ‘Texas, are you nuts? We can’t live in Texas,’ ” Rossi says.
Meghan implored her husband, “Just come for the weekend, and if you like it, we’ll just look at places.”
Left: Animals on Rossi’s ranch. Photograph by JD Swiger
Top: The Wolf Kings Ranch logo. Photograph by JD Swiger
“I fell in love after six hours,” Rossi says. The first glaring difference was how friendly everyone was. An avid runner, Rossi was initially confused when strangers waved when they crossed paths. (“I was like, ‘Do I know them?’ ”) More than anything, he felt resuscitated by a sense of peace, a far cry from the feeling created by the fast pace of his work. “It’s very high-energy,” he says of his career. “So, I needed a place where I could be the polar opposite of that.”
At the Wolf King Ranch, he’s found it. On his front porch, where we sit for the duration of our interview, the only noticeable sound is the soft trickle from an electric water fountain Rossi installed for his five felines. One of them, a tuxedo cat named Ninja Warrior, splays out on the porch, absolutely degrading himself for a little attention. He exposes the soft fur of his belly and reveals a tiny red tongue as he mews forlornly.
“All man’s problems can be solved just by sitting quietly alone in a room,” says Rossi, inexactly reciting a quote by Pascal, the French mathematician. The actual quote is the inverse: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” But perhaps Rossi’s more optimistic take is a testament to the transformative power of nature—of sitting quietly—and the actor’s personal evolution within it. “I never knew myself till I got to Texas,” he adds.
In recent years, Rossi’s face has been popping up all over our screens—most recently in the hit HBO miniseries The Penguin, based on the DC Comics character, in which he plays a psychiatrist named Dr. Julian Rush. On December 13, he’ll appear alongside Taron Egerton, Sofia Carson, and Jason Bateman in Carry-On, a Netflix action movie that takes place in an airport on Christmas Eve and is being compared to Die Hard. But Rossi’s path to stardom was hard-fought.
By Hollywood standards, he got a late start, at 24. Before that, he was “living quite a nefarious life,” he tells me. “I had no discernible skills whatsoever except how to make money.” During summers in college, he’d lay carpet and do construction. Otherwise, he hustled “on the streets,” he says. “Anything that could sell, I would sell it. At one point I think I was selling Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s tape.”
Raised mostly by women—his mother, grandmother, and two sisters—he didn’t have a close relationship with his biological father. “Any bit of empathy or caring or emotion all came from them, because the men I was around were criminals,” he says. As far as career prospects were concerned, the outlook was uninspiring; most of the men Rossi grew up around held blue-collar jobs—in construction, or in city police or sanitation departments.
In his twenties, Rossi worked for a few months as a salesman at his stepaunt’s fax paper–distribution company, on Wall Street. He recalls a defining moment that occurred when he was shadowing a senior salesman at the company. “He said to me, ‘You’re so lucky that you started this young. In twenty years, you could be vice president of this company.’ ”
“I was looking down, and I saw his shoes were all worn and beat-up. This guy had been working so hard for so long,” Rossi continues. “I saw my entire life flash in front of me, and I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ ” He quit that same day.
It was by chance that he fell into acting. A friend was enrolled at an acting studio in Manhattan, and Rossi would often meet him at a nearby bar after his class ended. Sometimes Rossi would show up early and observe the students doing physical movements that, at the time, baffled him. Now he recognizes them as method-acting exercises. “I thought it was absolutely ludicrous,” he says. It was through his friend that he met the teacher, who took an interest in Rossi, and he landed a role in an independent film. It ultimately never came out, but the experience gave Rossi a taste of acting.
He eventually moved out to Los Angeles, where, like so many others, he worked as a waiter and bartender while auditioning for more substantial roles. Early on, he encountered a casting director who inadvertently set him on his path forward. After an audition, during which, Rossi tells me, she barely glanced at him, “she said, ‘Listen, I’ve been doing this a long time. No one’s going to know what to do with you. You don’t really fit into this whole thing.’ ”
“I don’t know what she meant,” he says. “My persona, my look, my whatever.”
The casting director continued: “ ‘I just want to help you. If there’s anything else you do, lean into that.’
“She was basically saying, ‘Don’t pursue acting,’ ” Rossi says, yet her effort to discourage him had the opposite effect. “What she’s telling me is I’m not like anyone else, and that’s what’s going to make me win. That’s all I needed,” he says, adding, “At best, I’m a petty motherf—er. I just wanted to prove her wrong.”
Rossi took stock and decided that what set him apart from so many other young actors in the industry was his lived experience. “I was dealing drugs; my father had gone to jail; I would lose people all the time, whether to suicide or death,” he explains. “I realized that I was so different from people at this age, at this moment in my life.”
In the ensuing years, Rossi made his career playing unconventional, somewhat complicated characters. Half Italian on one side and of Lebanese and Syrian descent on the other, Rossi can easily pass for various ethnicities. In Emily the Criminal, he plays Youcef, a Lebanese man, while Juice Ortiz, his character on Sons of Anarchy, is half Puerto Rican and half Black.
He’s often cast in a supporting role to a strong female lead, a place he feels comfortable inhabiting from his formative years surrounded by women. In Emily the Criminal, Youcef functions as a custodian for Emily—played by Aubrey Plaza—in the criminal world, showing her the ropes in an elaborate identity theft scheme. Similarly, Rossi’s role in The Penguin, as Dr. Rush, has him functioning as a psychological confidante and mentor to Sofia, a main character with a dark past. “There’s this kind of voice on their shoulder who’s like, ‘Hey, you can do this—even if it’s the most nefarious, horrible thing in the world. You can do anything,’ ” says Rossi. “We rarely have seen that. It’s usually the reverse, where the guy has a woman in his corner.”
More than two decades after he started acting, Rossi says he still feels like an outsider, which may be why he feels so at home in Texas. But he’s abandoned the effort of measuring himself against others, because, he says, “it’s an unwinnable game.”
Out on the ranch, he observes the natural order of things: the Great Pyrenees, who protect the chickens from the foxes; the chickens, who produce eggs for his family; the eight bee colonies, which do the work of pollinating his wife’s modest garden. As he did after that pivotal audition, Rossi often takes stock of the roles he plays in his life—from actor to husband to father to caretaker of his thirty animals. “When I got here,” he says, “it was the first time in my life where I felt like I’m just part of something.”
As I’m leaving, Rossi sends me on my way with a Styrofoam container of eighteen fresh eggs and advises me to wash them before cracking into them. An hour later, when I arrive back in Austin, I receive a text from Rossi: “Meghan wanted me to remind you to WASH THE EGGS!” he writes. “Which I believe I told you but just checking.”
Hair: Mel Martell; Makeup and grooming: Christie Rivers
