Thursday, June 25 2009, 1:00am EDT

By Simon Reynolds, Movies Editor

Rex Features

With roles in Traffic, Capote and Babel under his belt, Clifton Collins Jr has been quietly building a name for himself as a versatile character actor. This summer he’s a regular fixture on the big screen having appeared in Crank: High Voltage, as villain Ayel in Star Trek and in this week’s Sunshine Cleaning, in which he stars opposite Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as a one-armed store owner. DS caught up with Clifton to talk about kind-hearted Winston.

Could you give us a flavour for Winston and who he is?
“For me, the intrigue with playing Winston was… it’s so easy for us to forget how able we all are and take for granted our limbs and body parts. It was fun to play a guy who’s an amputee, he lost his arm in an accident which is a backstory I came up with on a collaboration with [producer] Peter Saraf. Just to see the positives in what you have and not what you don’t have and to hopefully share that with others, it’s so infectious I think when people have positive attitudes. It’s inspiring when you see people, who have some kind of disability, who don’t let it slow them down and live life to the fullest.”

You’ve spoken before about preparing for roles thoroughly. Were you practising tying your laces one-handed and taking up Winston’s model plane hobby?
“It’s funny you said that because I was shooting The Horsemen with Dennis Quaid at the time in Winnipeg and it was 50 below zero. The hotel I was staying in had double-paned windows so you couldn’t open them. Dennis Quaid saw that I was ordering paint and saying, ‘What are you getting paints for? You’re building model planes! For what?’ I said I was doing it for… READ MORE