By Gabby Wood

He used to be a fine painter. Then he tried his hand at pop. And now he's a great actor. Death. At least, that's what he tells Gaby Wood.

Vincent Gallo asks me to meet him in a tattoo parlour in deepest Italian-American Brooklyn. Why is he going all the way to Bensonhurst to get a tattoo? `Because this guy's good, you know, he's good. Is that OK?' Sure. `You never know,' I say, `I may even get a tattoo myself.' Gallo is horribly enthusiastic. `Could you get one that says, `I'll love Vinnie Gallo for the rest of my life'?' In one brief phone call, he's paved those mean streets, setting the scene for a drama full of borrowed references. Vincent Gallo, writer, director, talented actor of oddball chic, underground musician, Calvin Klein model, sometime successful painter, and hero of 1980s New York subculture, is not from Bensonhurst. He was born to hairdressers in Buffalo, New York.

The mobster accent and kick ass attitude are a nod and a wink away from the Godfather. In Emir Kusturica's 1993 film Arizona Dream, Johnny Depp's character asks the then beefy Gallo where he got that `funny accent'. `Funny New York accent, huh?' is Gallo's outraged reply, `Is De Niro funny? Is Pacino funny? Is Rocky funny?' Off screen, Gallo takes pleasure in the parody. `Only an Italian-American living in New York would be perverse enough to have this exaggerated, poetic, dramatic thing about being an Italian.' So these little white plagiarisms are all in the spirit of a postmodern joke: the at once self-effacing, self-promoting task of creating the character that is Vincent Gallo, whatever his professional guise. For instance, I bet nobody calls him Vinnie.

And sure enough, it's Vince. As in, Vince, there's someone here to see you. It's taken three hours on a hot day via a few wrong subway trains and 20 blocks on foot in a Hasidic neighbourhood to get here. Past a stretch of warehouse wasteland is a small suburban house with its basement door wide open. The sign says the tattoo artist is called Michelangelo.

At the end of a long corridor is a small room, whose doorway is blocked by a tall, womanly silhouette - bobbed hair, leather jacket, tight jeans and heeled boots. I can only see her from behind, but she looks like she must be a model or a self-styled rock-star. She's standing with her shoulders arched, hands on hips, overseeing the action and posing for an audience of maybe two or three. `Vince, there's someone here to see you.' On the phone, Gallo had asked if I knew what he looked like. I laughed. Of course, I knew what he looked like. I'd been watching his films. He got me. I didn't. There is little in the short haired would-be criminal of Palookaville or in the angelic corpse of The Funeral that could prepare someone for meeting the sharp-edged dude with gummy curls in the tattoo parlour.

It turns out he hasn't bought clothes for years, and he describes himself as `probably the ugliest guy who ever lived'. I assume he's referring to his broken nose, strong chin and slanting bug-eyes, but the overall effect is more terrifying than ugly. Gallo looks like a Pasolini boy grown-up and hardened. He knows he has the rough appeal of bad guy, and he doesn't wield his seductive powers lightly.

He asks me if I'm married. `I was married once,' he reminisces, `We got an annulment. Because she wanted us to move near her parents' house in Queens. I said you're crazy. I'm a sick person. We have to be a sick couple and have sick kids. We can't move to Queens.

`So I went to see the priest who married us, Father Vincent Gallo. You don't believe me, but that's really his name - he had a little bit of a thing for me, and I was painting at that time, so I gave him a painting for the church in exchange for an annulment.' The person undergoing the arduous business of having a tattoo done all this time is not Gallo but his friend, Tara. They pretend to be lovers for a while, but can't keep it up and dissolve into silent smirks.

I can see why the pretence is necessary. Why else would her arm have a tattoo that reads `Devoted to Vincent Gallo', under a portrait of Gallo's face? I am reminded of a TV ad for Disney's Hercules merchandise which has kids shouting: `To be a hero, you gotta be smart, you gotta be cool, and you gotta have your face on a bunch of stuff!', and I can only conclude that Gallo's desire to be a hero has made Tara's arm part of the `bunch of stuff' he feels his face should be on.

In Palookaville, which is directed by Alan Taylor, Gallo plays Russ, one of the palookas, or numbskulls. (The word originally meant a mediocre prizefighter.) Three pals try to make a living through crime, but what with their toy guns, penchants for pastries and instant admissions of defeat, they don't get very far. Alan Taylor cast `guys that look like they do because they have played the bad guys enough. Russ is trying so hard to be the bad guy and is such a tragic guy.' Gallo says Palookaville is `the film I had the most fun on. I think about that film the way one would reflect on one's high-school days or something.' The self-mockery in the performance is true to Gallo's style. There is a moment of inspired absurdity in Arizona Dream, when he does an impression of Cary Grant in the crop-duster scene from North By Northwest, standing motionless on a tacky rural stage, then throwing himself on to the ground. Several times over. The scene was Gallo's idea. `I wanted to do something with John Wayne or Charlton Heston, but that would have been too obvious. Cary Grant doesn't look like me at all. I felt, you know, it was so off, that it promoted more the character's delusion of how he saw himself.' It would be tempting to see Vincent Gallo as the next big thing, but it's impossible to know which big thing he might be. To begin with, he says he's quitting acting `because I think I suck', despite being what Abel Ferrara, who directed him in The Funeral, calls `the kind of intelligent actor I like'.

At the moment he's in the middle of editing Buffalo 66, a film he's written, directed and stars in. Truth Or Consequences, NM, in which he plays the romantic lead, and which he calls `a derivative, unoriginal piece of shit', has been and gone in America. He's just finished filming Roland Joffe's Goodbye Lover with Patricia Arquette, Anjelica Houston and Mickey Rourke, and a new album with his band, Bunny, is due out at the end of the year.

Then there's the question of whether he is in fact the last big thing. In the late seventies and early eighties, he was part of the underground music scene at Manhattan's Mudd Club. He was in a band with Jean-Michel Basquiat. They both showed paintings at the trendy Annina Nosei Gallery. He's written music for films, owns a cinema, raced motorcycles professionally. Last year, he was in one of Calvin Klein's `heroin-chic' perfume ads, and sparked a rumour that the scar lines on the outside of his arm were track marks.

The reason for the media mixture is not some wild hunger for culture but, Gallo explains, that `I crave an incredible amount of love and attention and approval. And at some point in my life I figured out many ways to get it. Many ways.' He is emphatic about being `desperate to constantly be in that excitement. I needed to conquer all of those things, because I needed to have the most sophisticated audience, I needed to have the kind of cult, emotional music audience, and then I needed the chimpanzee audience.

`And I really feel that I've been able to do that, and not only that' - he laughs quietly, as though this were some outrageous secret - `then I became a model. Which I think was the ultimate irony, the ultimate scam, you know, it was brilliant. I mean, to use me to sell anything other than to scare people away from bacteria and diseases and birth defects, I don't know, but - anyway, they did it.' By this time we have left the tattoo parlour and everyone's artwork is under bandaged wraps. Gallo's is on the bottom of his foot: an innocent-looking bunny rabbit, a reference to his band and also a good-luck charm (`a rabbit-foot, see?'). In the cab back to Manhattan, he is telling me how he'd like to be thought of. `The worst thing that anyone could say to me is that they think I'm weird, or interesting. You know, that's hurtful. That is so fuckin' hurtful.' The biggest compliment would be: `He's a nice guy. Sexy. Uh. . . Rich. Sexy. Sweet.' The radio is tuned to a classic seventies station, although `tuned' is a little flattering. It flares up from time to time with a whooshing crackle then conks out. The driver hits the dashboard with such force we nearly come off the road. Vincent is saying: `If I was Brad Pitt, or Johnny Depp, I wouldn't waste my time pretending to be interesting in that other way. I don't want to be interesting, I never wanted to be.

`The people who I knew in the late seventies who were hanging out in freaky clubs like that, they had no choice, man, there was no other place for them to go. But once you have that kind of dynamic success, and you've done work that's been that easily assimilated into that broad an audience, then why do you have to stay dirty and be weird and trash your hotel room?' This is a calmly made point, though Gallo is often so heated in damning others it's hard to focus on his own position. But throughout his soliloquy in the taxi he seems genuine. For all his spikiness, his chosen epithet, `sweet', is not so far from how he comes across.

On the street in Little Italy, Gallo tells me about his relationship with his Sicilian immigrant family. `We're incredibly stranger-like. I haven't seen them in years and years. Visiting them would be like when the neighbours from down the block came by for their once every three- or four-year neighbour hello.' At Christmas he's usually driving across the country. `I plan these giant road trips, so I'm usually in some motel. And I like it. I like the songs on the radio, and I like the starkness of the streets, and the kind of sweetness at the truck stop restaurants and stuff.' He keeps talking as we walk up the stairs to his flat on leafy Elizabeth St. `What I've become is the happiest, loneliest guy in the world, you know. Or, let's say as happy as a miserable person could be. You can't believe how lonely and how cold I can be.' We are in his bare plaster kitchen now. Gallo disappears for a moment and I find a book of his paintings on a table. That's when I realise this person is no jack-of-all-trades, that his metamorphoses are extreme and complete. The paintings are so quiet, so subdued and beautiful, it's hard to match them up with the intense character I've been speaking to. Huge still-lifes on rusted and corroded metal sheets, they are like Pompeii reborn in a scrapyard. When he returns, he speaks softly and candidly. I ask him what he could be next, what on earth he will be doing later in life.

`I'm 35 years old right now, and I keep getting these funny feelings that I'm not gonna be around much longer. I don't have a picture in my mind of myself even in three years. That's the first time in my life I've ever felt like that.' What he's talking about is not a self-destructive urge.

`I mean, I don't drink and drive, I don't take drugs, I don't eat anything that will make me have bad health later in life. But I can put myself in such a rhythm of frenzy, and obsession, or nervous working energy that I forget my boundaries, and whack! I'm hit by a car, or whack! The drill goes through my hand or. . . I've been in the hospital 20 times in the past five years.' In 1985, an art critic wrote of Gallo's paintings in Details magazine: `I have not seen work that scared me like this since I first saw Jean-Michel Basquiat's work, and we all know where he went. It is certain that Gallo is headed for some kind of stellar roller-coaster. I just hope he likes it.' It sounds like something Gallo might have written himself, but his way around the roller-coaster has been to get off that ride and on to another one at regular intervals.

He's still, however, in the same frenzied fairground, and as I leave I'm struck by how this next-big-thing, or ever-big-thing, could soon be gone. Maybe it's all hype, but the way Gallo tells it, it really feels as if any given moment could mark a beginning and an end.

Palookaville opens next Friday.