Joseph Gordon-Levitt On The Rise As Leading Man In Hollywood After Great Reviews For ‘Loopers’

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is no longer the fresh-faced youngster from 3rd Rock from the Sun. Instead, the 31-year-old actor is becoming one of Hollywood’s hottest actors after a year in which he anchored some of the biggest movies.

Since breaking through in 2009′s 500 Days of Summer, Gordon-Levitt has been taking bigger roles and appearing in more blockbuster movies. This summer he was one of the pivotal characters in the summer blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises, establishing himself as a star in the action-adventure realm after making a splash in Inception.

Now Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks to continue that streak with Loopers, a science-fiction adventure movie out this week. In the movie he plays the younger version of Bruce Willis, sent through time to kill himself.

Gordon-Levitt really committed to the role, The Sacramento Bee reported. In order to make himself look more like a younger Bruce Willis, he sat in a makeup chair for three hours a day, having his lips thinned, nose altered, and makeup and prosthetics added.

The illusion entailed three hours a day in a makeup chair.

“It is me sitting across the table from my future self,” Gordon-Levitt said of a scene with Willis. “It required a transformation.”

That wasn’t the only preparation Joseph Gordon-Levitt did for the role.

“I studied him quite a bit and watched his movies, and I ripped the audio off his movies,” Gordon-Levitt told the Sacramento Bee.

Gordon-Levitt’s performance in Loopers is earning him great reviews, and the movie is being called the best science-fiction film of the year. His reputation has spread so far that Hollywood.com referred to Gordon-Levitt as “The King of Science Fiction.”

The site says of his prowess in the science-fiction genre:

Gordon-Levitt has played a part in just about every conceivable facet of contemporary science-fiction and fantasy in his twenty-odd years as an actor. He’s tackled the otherworldly, the superhuman, the technologically profound, the transcendence of human conscience. He was even on a show about vampires. Gordon-Levitt’s new release Looper affords the actor the frontier of time-travel, a sci-fi staple dating back to stories of ancient Hindu and Judaic mythologies.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s rising star goes beyond science-fiction and action-adventure movies. He hosted the season premiere of Saturday Night Live this year, and will appears as Robert Lincoln, son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.

As the Sacramento Bee points out, his success is all the more impressive because of his background, saying that Joseph Gordon- Levitt blows up the idea that all child stars end up in rehab or on reality shows.