Christian Slater: Born Again Christian

Okay, so he's set the record straight on his rep as a hit-and-run artist, but what about the whispered rumors that he was monstrous--and loaded--while making Pump Up the Volume? Did he really demand that no one speak to him or look him in the eye? Slater shoves back a cascade of hair and expounds upon "the malarkey of the media" in reporting his so-called bad behavior on the set. "One day there was a lot of press people there and they were just told, like, 'Stay out of my way for a moment while I just go do a scene. Don't talk to me now, wait until after the shot's over.' Some-how, that sort of escalated." According to Moyle, Slater was trying to do "something magical" while set visitors were being paraded in and out a door, and merely announced: "I can't have them doing that while I'm doing this." Since the resulting performance had moments of such riveting intensity that Slater seemed in training for future revivals of Lenny or Burn This, okay, maybe he needed his space to pull it off. But what about the drinking? "A six-pack at the end of the day for a 19-year-old?" said Moyle, sounding a bit annoyed when I asked him. "I mean, people drive drunk in L.A. when they come home from dinner. What sensitive 19-year-old isn't doing a Holden Caulfield?"

Slater calls Pump Up the Volume the last movie on which he "now and then had a nip of beer, or something, while I was working." According to associates, Slater at the time was "undergoing a very public display of some pretty basic teenage stuff, all of it exponentially intensified by the spotlight." Maybe so, but most teenagers don't have to undergo breaking off professional ties with their mother. Mary Jo Slater, aside from then being a vice-president of talent at MGM, had until that time continued to advise him on his career. "It wasn't easy for either of them," remarks an associate, "but the king must die." No one's saying whether it was his mother who got him into his next career moves--which would certainly justify firing anyone--but Christian defends at least one of these strange choices. If he says nothing of being stranded in the horrifyingly silly Tales From the Dark Side, he argues that there was nothing wrong about looking horrifyingly silly plugging Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a national TV commercial.

Slater rationalizes the whole thing as having come about because he want-ed to get his younger brother on camera. The younger brother demurred at the last minute and Slater went ahead and shot the spot, waxing ecstatic alongside his stepbrother and stepsister. "Fuck it," he argues, "I loved that movie, and I got more fans from the commercial than I've ever had." But Christian Slater, movie star, posing as a normal guy, endorsing movies to his fans? Can this be how Clark Gable made it to the top, or for that matter, Tom Cruise? He sees the point. "I guess it comes from my not believing that I really rate, you know?"

Now, after what Mobsters director Michael Karbelnikoff calls Slater's "reincarnation, after the booze and drugs," the actor seems prepared to listen to the advice of those who would appear to know better, if anyone in Hollywood really does. "This is definitely not going to be a film where I appear to be the most attractive," he says, with appealing earnestness. "I get a scar on my face and a droopy eye. I'm doing the best I can to be somebody else." Days later, when I meet with Slater again on the Mobsters set, he's cutting a commanding figure, gang-ster hair greased back, studded with flashy rings and poured into sleek threads, as he shoots a glitzy Mobsters nightclub scene where "Lucky" ogles a hoochy-koo chorus girl number. When it's over, he struts over and hits on a stunning dancer, played by Lara Flynn Boyle.

The previous week's papers have widely reported not only the animosity between Slater and Patrick Dempsey but also the on-the-set incident during which Dempsey's nose was busted. Dempsey is off somewhere healing while Slater, looking every inch the movie star, works the room between takes like an attention-starved, happy-go-lucky kid. "Patrick and Christian have definitely had their ego battles on this movie," Karbelnikoff comments during a break, like an affable referee. "At times, it's been really helpful for the film, at other times, detrimental."

Mobsters co-star Anthony Quinn, brimming with Zorba the Greek gusto, predicts that Slater "is going to be a wonderful actor, once he gives up playing with video games that are taking him over." Quinn, who's watched a lot of flavor-of-the-month actors come and go in his career of over 250 movies, makes no effort to hide his bafflement: until he'd worked with Slater, he'd never heard of a romantic action lead of a multimillion dollar movie ducking away whenever possible to diddle with Nintendo games.

Indeed, when the company moves in for close-ups as Slater makes his moves on Boyle--a scene requiring the two to trade smart talk as he maneuvers her away from her gorillas--he seems less the grown lady-killer than the awfully nice teen kid who really would rather be racking up computer game points. Karbelnikoff wants a retake. Between set-ups, Slater tells me it isn't the first time Karbelnikoff's asked him to turn on the juice. "I don't go out to do a scene thinking, 'Boy, I'm going to be really sexy now,' " he says, looking abashed. "The other day, I knew I was in the toilet with a girl I had to do a scene with. I didn't know where I was going. I was all over the place. [Karbel-nikoff] said, 'At least look at her.' I didn't feel sexy. I didn't feel anything at all. God knows how that'll look." Although screen-writer Nick Kazan admits he "prays for the best from all the guys," it's Slater who must sizzle--or perish. (Kazan himself directed Slater as a hired killer in "The Professional Man," an episode of HBO's "The Edge.") But can a guy whom Kazan calls "basically sweet, with a mischievous streak and a devilish look" dazzle in the kind of role that has been a star-maker for actors from James Cagney to Andy Garcia?

"Want some Gatorade?" Slater asks when we duck into his trailer during another break. He wings one of the "36 frigging, uncomfortable collars" he wears in the movie across his posh trailer onto a countertop. The mobile phone scarcely stops ringing, and taped to a mirror is a list of fans dying for autographs. Favorite foods are spirited in for lunch, and a violin case with "Lucky Luciano" inscribed on a brass plate--a gift from Rick Kurtzman, his Creative Artists agent--sits displayed. Grown-up, big star trappings. On the other hand, there's plenty of plain old guy junk: boots, jeans, and a T-shirt flung to the four winds, his girlfriend's photo proudly displayed. The photo of his lady love makes me ask whether Slater's shedding his Peter Panitis. The answer comes back: Well, to a point. After sharing Hollywood Hills and Westwood bachelor digs with Winston, a mountainous Akita, toys, and Nintendo paraphernalia, Slater says he recently bought a home in the Valley, furnished, at the moment with nothing except a bed and TV. "The way I like it," he says. Anyway, he claims his work dance card is too jammed to go furniture shopping.

Though Slater talks about going after roles with such directors as Peter Weir and Spielberg, for the time being he will have to con-tent himself with playing a modern-day San Franciscan in Gun for Hire (no relation to the old Alan Ladd-Veronica Lake film noir|, and then The Ride-Along, a rude comedy by Nick Kazan. Now that he's looser, away from the pressures on the set, I'm itching to pop the burning questions: how badly did he hate Dempsey and how did it feel smashing his nose? But, I decide, better leave that stuff for last, in case he decides to throw me out. Instead, how about some of the other rumors people have tried out on me when they heard I was going to interview Slater? I tell Slater how several people told me they had heard that he charges a reading fee to writers who submit scripts to him.

"Is that the word?" he says, pounding his leg and cackling. "If somebody's raking in some cash here, where's my percent-age? Fuck--this is really news to me. I've stayed so out of touch with all the behind-the-scenes stuff. All I know is I get a script, read it, and if I like it, I'll do it." Alright, but how about those rumblings--the kind you hear about nearly every young actor in Hollywood these days--that his sexual tastes may be less conventional than his career advisors might like people to believe? "I know the truth," he says, looking mighty amused, "so it doesn't really matter to me what [anyone else] says. Anybody that knows me per-sonally pretty much knows that I'm very into women. I do love women. I mean, who knows, maybe I'll get struck on the head with lightning and I find that I really like guys, but I really, really doubt it. I'd really much rather have [men] as friends."

Alright, it's time. "I did not break Patrick's nose," Slater says levelly, laughing away the question. "Actually, it's gotten pretty good. Things are pretty calm, pretty mellow." So, who rearranged Dempsey's features and what exactly happened during the shoving match that broke out between them on the set? Diplomatically, Slater urges me to get the story from others. Fine. "Patrick isn't one of the boys," says Michael Karbelnikoff. "The others are guy guys. In the past, when he's come onto a project, it's always been 'the Patrick Dempsey show.' We had a scene where we were creating an argument, which Christian and Patrick were both trying to make as realistic as possible. It's a classic situation of Method player working with a non-Method player, where one guy gets all emotional. After a certain number of takes, their emotions got the best of them. [Patrick] basically incited it out of Christian. The people that got kicked and scratched were Costas and Richard [Grieco] because the scene required them to pull them apart. I just fucking lost it-- with Patrick, with Christian, with everybody, and said: 'This isn't about people getting hurt.'"

A pair of technicians who overhear this conversation take me aside a few moments later, and put it even more bluntly: "Christian didn't sock Patrick," one says. "But a lot of us would like to." "We each have our different styles of working," slater says, when I return to his trailer and tell him what I've heard. "I think with pretty much everybody, I wear my heart on my sleeve, try to be as open and honest with people as I can. You get back what you put out. If I treat somebody with respect, I expect to be treated the same way. If that's what I'm getting back, there's nothing more to say," he says, the very picture of cool and calm. A second later, he explodes in laughter: "Then again, maybe that's just Lucky talking." As he launches into an elaborate story about how he prepared for the role of Luciano, I think at first he's trying to bury the subject of the competition among the co-stars. Wrong. "One of the movies I watched was the one where Jimmy Cagney stuck the grapefruit in his girlfriend's face," he says, referring to Public Enemy, made in 1931. "Cagney was brilliant, just a ball of fire--the littlest guy nobody could mess with." He pulls himself up to his full height, and asks me, "Did you know that I'm the shortest guy on this movie?"

I want to remind him of the old Hollywood axiom, "Short guys make movie stars," but before I can, an assistant ducks his head into the trailer. "Sorry for the lack of warning, Christian, but you're needed on the set. Now." "Bummer," Slater mutters, every inch of a Valley teen, and strides toward the set.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5