After 16 years in prison, Cajun rider is winning again in the saddle – and making headlines for his role in the critically acclaimed feature film Jockey
“I’m not afraid of dying. I’m just afraid of not being able to ride.”
This quote is from the critically acclaimed movie Jockey, which debuted this year in both the US and the UK, and the line is not from a screenwriter, nor is the delivery from a professional actor.
Instead, it comes from maybe the unlikeliest of sources. Logan Cormier would, in times past, be described as ‘rough-hewn’. The 42-year-old Louisiana native, one more in a long line of Cajun jockeys, peppers his speech with generous helpings of profanity, murders the King’s English, and, in a distant past, he killed – in a manner of speaking – on the racetrack.
Moving from his native Louisiana tracks to a tough jockey colony in Maryland as an apprentice in 1996, he won on five of his first 10 mounts. Seven years later in 2003, his purse earnings were just over $900,000 helped by 88 wins and a very respectable win rate of 16%.
His career for a long, long time ended there, and it was 16 years before a storybook return to riding in a stakes race at Wyoming Downs (more on this later). In the interim, he wasn’t just a long way from the track; he spent nine years in a Texas prison as a result of crimes linked to serious drug addiction including robbery and dealing.
Looking back at his life, it is ironic to think that he used to say his whole life could be a movie. Maybe, then, it is not surprising that after a trainer he rode for at Turf Paradise told him about a movie being made there, Cormier walked up to director Clint Bentley in the track kitchen and said, “Hey man, I need to be in your movie!”
That need came from a deep love for being a jockey and also resentment about the hidden parts of riding and the tough times that can go with it. The wild ride that has been Cormier’s life was tailor-made for the role of jockey Leo Brock.
“All the things that happen in the movie, I’d been through all of that already,” says Cormier.
“I knew immediately he’d be great in the movie,” says Bentley, who also co-wrote Jockey alongside Greg Kwedar. “My only worry was he would be so magnetic, that he might overshadow some of the other actors in the movie.”
Read Chris Smith's review of Jockey
Jockey is a brutally authentic movie about an aging jockey, Jackson Silva, played to perfection by long-time character actor, Clifton Collins Jr.
Silva is nearing the end of a career due to a progressing and debilitating disease but has hopes for one final hurrah on a promising horse.
A fellow jockey, Leo Brock, played by Cormier, is Silva’s friend and helps give dimension to Collins’ character. “He was the perfect person,” Bentley says of Cormier.
“I didn’t know if we’d find one jockey who could do that or multiple jockeys who would play versions of that. As soon as we found Logan, he became a much bigger presence.”
That is, perhaps, understating it. After reading lines from a critical hospital scene where Silva visits an injured Leo Brock, Bentley and Kwedar expanded the part and added extra scenes for the character.
Cormier and Collins were also given free rein to go beyond script and into impromptu, emotion-laden exchanges that warrant the universally positive reviews the movie has earned. Amazingly, the line about dying and fear only of not being able to ride was improvised by Cormier; the hospital scene elicited a tear not just from Collins but virtually everyone on the set.
“That was not scripted – that was just them [Cormier and Collins] finding the emotion of that scene,” says Bentley.
“Clifton is an amazing actor, but he got to that place because he had a good partner in that scene, Logan,” Bentley adds.
“You think about somebody who’d never been in front of a camera before … how much raw talent does he have to deliver a performance like that in that scene?
“Forget a first-time actor. Even if you are working with just a day player, a side actor who comes in—that’s a really hard scene to do. I cannot overstate what an incredible job he did at getting that emotion across.”
Cormier says he and Collins “had a vibe” when acting together. “We were on the same page,” he says. “Out of nowhere, when he’d say something, I’d kind of just go off of it, or he knew what to say off of me.”
Bentley says he has had those in the movie industry comment on Cormier’s acting, saying he is a “great actor” and asking where he found him. One review in The Hollywood Reporter lauded Cormier for playing Brock “to piercing effect”.
Bentley credits off-screen rapport between Collins and Cormier as a catalyst for a performance by Collins that had him in early discussions for an Oscar for Best Actor. Collins did win a US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Actor at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.
“Logan was a huge help in terms of showing Clifton what it’s like to be a jockey and explain things that Clifton needed to learn like how to hold a stick,” he says. “But he went above and beyond, helping Clifton get inside the psyche of a jockey. That was huge in terms of Clifton unlocking that role and that performance. Logan would definitely be a great actor.”
For Cormier, the movie was a reversal of the cliché of life imitating art. In this case, it was art replicating life.
He’s been in hospitals and had visits from jockey friends. He’s experienced, too, being replaced on mounts for no reason other than a bigger name becoming available to ride. Making a comeback out of prison, he’s been without tack [jockey equipment] and the money to buy it.
Among many parallels to experiences from Cormier’s life in the movie is a scene where Silva’s character gives his tack to a young rider, Gabriel, played by Moises Arias. “One of my best friends is Kendrick Carmouche,” says Cormier.
After getting out of prison, Cormier said Carmouche sent him all the tack he needed –boots, helmet, flak jacket and girths – and “put two-hundred dollars in the boot with a note: ‘Don’t worry about nothing. Just go ahead and get back going.’”
Cormier got going with a ride no scriptwriter could have imagined. He won on his first mount since 2003 aboard a horse named Westley in a stakes at Wyoming Downs in 2019. “I hadn’t worked anything out of the gate in 16 years,” Cormier says. “I galloped for three weeks and won that stakes race.
“When I crossed the wire, I lost my breath for a second and I couldn’t breathe. I started crying and my goggles fogged up. All the riders were like, ‘You ain’t rode in how long?!’”
Another scene is of a jockey going through an amazing litany of broken bones for most if not all jockeys with any experience but saying with authentic and genuine nonchalance for a jockey, “I’m lucky. I’ve never been hurt bad.” Collins, too, has a scene where he has a veterinarian examine him as he can’t afford a medical doctor.
Cormier truly lives what is represented in the movie. “I just broke my hand about a month ago and I ain’t stopped galloping since I broke it,” says Cormier, now back in Louisiana, where he is breaking horses at several farms in the Opelousas area. “My mom was like, ‘You need to go to the doctor.’ And I said, ‘No, I can’t afford it!’”
Authenticity borders on documentary for the movie that features other Turf Paradise jockeys with bit parts. There is an actual spill from a Turf Paradise race that is used to put the fictional character Leo Brock in the hospital.
Martin Bourdieu, the jockey injured in the spill, broke both femurs, punctured both lungs, broke many ribs, and was sidelined for six months. “I took him aside and told him, ‘I can find another spill if this makes you feel weird,’” said Bentley to Bourdieu. “He wanted it in the movie. He had a bit of pride about it.”
The future for Cormier? He has no idea about other acting roles in his future, but riding is a possibility in his home state in no small part due, perhaps, to the movie. A racing commission official in Louisiana recently called him about regaining his riding license in 2023. Before addressing the licence, however, the official asked: “Hey, are you the Logan that was in the movie?”
Jockey, while a mountaintop amidst many valleys in Cormier’s life, “ain’t registering with me yet,” he says. “I’m not going to say it’s a life-changer, but it’s helping me … the perception that people have of me.”
He said that the movie and his role in it have resulted in people in and out of racing who know him asking, “Maybe he’s doing the right thing now? They got me stamped because of my history.”
Cormier freely acknowledges his past problems with drug addiction that sent him to prison and says he is “waiting on society to let me in”.
In prison, he dreamed about being on a horse “but the horse not going or really getting anywhere.” In another recurring nightmare, he recalls, “I’d have a horse in and I couldn’t get to the track on time or show up late. I could never get there.”
According to a psychologist, the dream is typical of possible threats to achieving strongly desired goals. No spoiler here, but Jockey – “the realest movie you’re going to get about racing,” according to Cormier – is open-ended to a degree as it should be in keeping with its authenticity.
So, too, is Cormier’s life. “I ain’t got no more chances after this,” he says. “This is the last chance I got to do anything with my life.”
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