A FRIDAY AFTERNOON in the part of Los Angeles that the maps call Elysian Valley and everyone else calls Frogtown, and here, outside an indoor-outdoor soccer facility on the west bank of the Los Angeles River, sits Wes Bentley, having made it through the better part of one more day.
The sun is dipping behind the buildings across the street; the wind’s blowing colder. Bentley has just had his picture taken a hundred times out there on the turf, gamely kicking the ball around for the camera while joking about the speed and agility he’s lost at 44. Now he’s talking about soccer, because of where we are, and because it’s a way into the story of his whole life—from the school team he started as a teenager in Arkansas who’d fallen in love with the sport during the 1994 World Cup, all the way to the private pickup game he fell into about 16 years later, in his 30s, here on the northeast side of L. A., right across the river in Glassell Park. He started out as one of the worst guys on the pitch—a “shitty little field,” he says, where if you slide-tackled on the turf, somebody would warn you to wash up immediately to avoid infection, that kind of city pitch—and spent six or seven years working his way up to playing better and better.
Between those two points—high school and the Glassell Park game—Bentley took up acting, very quickly, and he also very briefly became one of the hottest young actors in the country on the strength of his work in a 1999 movie called American Beauty. He then just as quickly slipped off the radar, into career paralysis, into drug addiction, into the kinds of roles you take when your only priority is paying for drugs, and so went approximately a decade of Bentley’s life.
But today he’s clear-eyed and smiling, a bit of a cable-TV show that’s watched by more people than anything except NFL games. He owes all this, he says, to his wife and his two children, and to 12-step programs, but he also owes it to soccer, which gave him something to focus on, a way to make positive use of all the energy and stamina and drive and desire he’d once put into scoring drugs and getting high.
