Christian Slater: Born Again Christian

Sounds good, but, days after Slater tells me this, reporters announce that Patrick Dempsey is off the movie for a spell to recuperate from a broken nose. Slater's handiwork, or not? I'll have to wait until my next meeting to ask him.

Luckily, Slater's been in rehearsal for the varied vicissitudes of an actor's life--the ups and downs, the trips to AA, and the rumors of fisticuffs, among other things--ever since he can remember. He grew up in New York City, the son of stage and TV soap actor Michael Hawkins and casting director Mary Jo Slater. When he was three months old, his mother, working on a stage show, hauled him onstage and hoisted him over her head to declare: "This is your life, my son!" His parents split up when he was five, but when his mom landed him, at seven, a small part on "One Life to Live" and the crew applauded, Slater recalls, "I was hooked." He attended the Professional Children's School, at which he remembers lighting up a cigarette in class, "just to get kicked out," and dropping out mere months before graduation. Often with his mother's help, he began landing movie roles. If something about him seemed to bring out the Humbert Humbert in Hollywood, Slater caught on fast. At 12, he insisted on wearing a body stocking for The Invisible Boy when the script called for him to get naked. At 14, in Twisted, "a piece of shit I did when I didn't know how to handle myself," he recalls, another character pantsed him.

Perhaps it was having to don Maybelline and drag, at 15, for The Legend of Billie Jean that made him willing a year later, when asked to show his all playing a wenching, pint-sized Watson in a monk's cowl to Sean Connery's ecclesiastical Sherlock in The Name of the Rose. "1 pulled Sean Connery aside," he recalls, and said, 'You've done a lot of love scenes. How do I do this?' He said, 'Don't think about it, just go with it, breathe, and do it.' Here I was, sixteen and naked while this crew of Italians, French, and Germans covered that fucking scene from every angle." Upon finishing that first love scene, he tells me he went back to a more congenial pastime: playing at making love-- with his pillow. His pillow? "Oh, yes, the pillow and I really got it on many times," he recalls, laughing. "Oh, it was the greatest. I didn't even need an 8×10 or anything. I just--" he grunts in mock passion, "loved it. Before I moved on to the real thing, it was me and my pillow. I suppose now I'll have pillows sent to me in the mail. That'd be good."

With his mother (and perhaps the pillow), Slater relocated in 1987 to Los Angeles, where he began to win industry attention for his performances in a series of movies little-seen by the public: Tucker, Gleaming the Cube, The Wizard, and Personal Choice. Finally, in Heathers, Michael Lehmann's stylish offender about suicide, homicide, and the tyranny of teenage cliques, he played "Jason Dean" with almost lethally seductive charisma, and his career took on a new heat. Though he refused to peel down during a strip croquet game sequence, it didn't matter. The teenies wanted him anyway and the movie shot him to the top of the list of new guys.

About this time, Slater's wild rep came into focus. He embroiled himself romantically with his Heathers leading lady. Make that ladies. When shooting began, he and Kim Walker, who had been his steady since their New York high school days, were just breaking up. "I don't know if the director knew that, but he hired her, which was fine," says Slater of the actress Michael Lehmann cast as venal Heather Chandler. Then came Winona Ryder. "I didn't know much about Winona at the time," he says, "but we were together in every scene, every moment and we just started hanging out, enjoying each other's company." And stuff.

But Slater blanches at the mention of Ryder's having portrayed their romance, in Rolling Stone and Movieline, as one giant spoof-o-rama. "I fell in love with the girl," he says, huskily. "I really didn't know we were playing a game. We did do something once, like a couple of fucking lunatics, when we were doing a thing at Lincoln Center and got the idea to tell the whole fucking group of people we'd gotten married. And then, we were going to do it, like, that night. We went to a couple of parties and I got pretty out of it and we just lost track of what our initial plan was. That's a blessing for both of us because we were definitely way too young to be married.

"I love the girl," he continues, jamming out a cigarette, and lighting another. "I think she's a great actress. I'd work with her again in a second. She's very hot. Extremely sexy. I guess, in a way, we did sort of play some games with people. I was, like, in a fantasy world with this girl. It was real for me. I didn't take her to the Academy Awards just for the image thing of it. I wanted to be with her. I liked her. I wanted to date her. Hang with her." He cuts himself off, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand and smiling slowly. "This is starting to sound like the pitiful lover. Hey, she's young. I'm young. I think we both needed to slow down, definitely not rush into any-thing. It's great what's happening with her and Johnny Depp, that she's met somebody that's really terrific."

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