Joseph Gordon Levitt for DETAILS Magazine

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is about to hit it big. The 29-year-old actor can soon be seen on the big screen in the highly anticipated sci-fi action film, ‘Inception‘ (in theaters July 16th, trailer below) starring along side Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Christopher Nolan. Joseph, who grew up in front of the camera, starred for six years on the hit comedy television show ‘3rd Rock from the Sun‘, won rave reviews opposite Zooey Deschanel in the 2009 romantic indie comedy, ‘(500) Days of Summer‘ With Inception, he verges on potential box office stardom and becoming a “serious” actor.

Photographed by Norman Jean Roy and styled by Matthew Edelstein in Burberry Prorsum, the Details cover boy for August 2010 talks to the magazine about his fears of ending up a “former child star”, tabloid culture, the paparazzi, and being a certified pot-head. Here are a few ‘high’lights:

On if he was frustrated after 3rd Rock From The Sun: “I would answer that question with a resounding yes. I was scared and depressed for a while. Not that I had any reason to f–king be depressed—I mean, I was going to college and everything. It was not like I was hungry. But absolutely. I was like, ‘S–t, I don’t know if anybody’s gonna let me act. They’ll let me be in another sitcom, but I don’t want to do that. This is terrible.’ Yeah.”

On pot smoking: “When I was in high school, I loved smoking weed. I loved it. But I cut myself to once a month. That was my rule. And so as the first of the month came closer, my friends would be like, ‘All right, what’s the plan this weekend?’ And actually it’s really cool—when you do it that infrequently, you can really trip. In hindsight, could I have smoked weed on the weekends? Yeah. But it was cool to do it once a month. I still do that sometimes—I go on little weedfests. I’m a pothead. That’s my drug of choice.”

On tabloid culture being toxic:“It’s a bunch of bulls—, a waste of time. It depresses me. And I’m not easily depressed. When I’m at the grocery store, those magazines—they always suck me in. I go, ‘I can’t f–kin’ believe that this is what we’re looking at.’ It’s really sad. Why shouldn’t there be beautiful works of art on the grocery stands? Like Bob Dylan said, you know, art doesn’t belong in museums, it belongs in gas stations… Even in a purely selfish way, I would absolutely argue that you are bringing bad sh– your way by consuming and enjoying that kind of hostility.”

On the paparazzi:“Look, I’ve met some nice guys who take pictures like that. I don’t want to demonize anybody. But I do think that this notion that certain people are in a higher class than other people is unhealthy. We would be healthier as a people if we quit paying attention to that kind of bulls–t and paid more attention to more pertinent things and more beautiful things.”

Read full story at Details.com.