Rockwell likes the indie track and its edgy star roles

Many actors employ a “one for me, one for them” strategy of balancing quirky independent movies with big studio productions.

Sam Rockwell, though, has his own equation: Turn up in two or three indies for every major Hollywood flick.

So for each “Cowboys & Aliens,” “Iron Man 2” or “Galaxy Quest,” for instance, there’s “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Moon” or “Seven Psychopaths.” Just two months ago came “The Way, Way Back,” and now there’s the gritty action drama “A Single Shot,” opening Friday.

“Well, I can get away with that,” the 44-year-old East Village resident says in his distinctive, California-bred drawl. “I don’t have to make too much money to make my overhead, so that helps. It gives me the freedom to do theater and low-budget stuff.”

That includes work on the New York stage, with appearances in “A Behanding in Spokane” on Broadway and “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” Off-Broadway.

Or his turn in “A Single Shot,” where Rockwell plays a bad-luck, backwoods loser who accidentally kills a teenage girl while hunting. Not so accidentally, he walks away with the $100,000 among her belongings.

Then his troubles really start.

“It’s a private eye film noir movie with, like, hillbillies,” he says. “He does some stupid things, makes horrible decisions, more out of pride than greed. But he’s not evil, and that’s the key to keeping the audience sympathetic to his plight.”

Director David M. Rosenthal wanted to work with Rockwell for years, but admits he was nervous because he put the character actor’s charactor actor on such a high pedestal. Then they talked.

“We ended up hitting if off, and saw the movie in the same way,” Rosenthal says.

They hit it off so well, the actor and director hope to reunite for a biopic about boxer Billy Miske. Meanwhile, Rockwell has five more indies on the horizon, including “Laggies” with Chloe Grace Moretz and Keira Knightley and “Better Living Through Chemistry” with Olivia Wilde.

Then comes the big Hollywood trade-off: a reboot of 1982’s horror hit “Poltergeist,” which he starts shooting this week. But it’s not just about the fast buck — even here there’s a subtext he relates to.

“It’s a movie about family,“ Rockwell says of the ghosts-in-the-walls flick. “I think that’s what excites me. It’s about a family that’s making a comeback and they have a lot of adversity.”