Rebecca DeMornay: My Lunch With Rebecca

"When you don't take into account what the actor or the artist was trying to do, what the body of work is shaping up to be, it's like-- okay, I grew up in Austria. And every year they have the World Cup downhill ski race in my town. And they have these slopes that sometimes become pure ice. They come down these slopes at 80 miles an hour. It's incredible. Now, when you're not a skier, when somebody falls you have a tendency to laugh--you know, 'what a jerk, what a schmuck!' But when you're a skier and you watch the thing, your heart misses a beat because you know how much damage you can do. And you know how hard it was and how good you have to be just to go down, I mean, at all. And you're not in the mood for jeering. But also, I know that if there's an accident and someone's lying in the road bleeding, everyone wants to stand around and look. There is a morbid fascination with failure and death."

What I'm thinking is that Rebecca should hone her ability to pick out which slopes to ski down in the future and which to avoid. What I say is: "When Michael makes love to you, he sees my face, and when Emma cries out in the night, she calls my name. Your baby gets his milk from me. You're all dried up, Pearl!"

Rebecca giggles. This is one of her speeches from her latest film, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the script of which I've gotten hold of. "Really something, isn't she? I've never played anyone deranged or anyone else quite so evil. There's something about the way I look or the way people perceive me that plays against that. It was a challenge to play someone that gone. I mean, I went through the script the first time and I was thinking, wow, if I do this part, I'm really bad news to the rest of the people in the script."

Rebecca plays Peyton, a woman traumatized by the loss of her baby in childbirth and the loss of her gynecologist husband to suicide. Posing as a nursemaid, Peyton sets out to inflict several varieties of mayhem on the people she holds responsible, in what ultimately becomes The Nanny meets Fatal Attraction. "I am the bad seed," she informs me, "but the reason I like this part is that it's not like, oh, my God, she's just this terrible villainess--you see the texture of the reason why. Initially, I didn't really like the script and I felt, well, who cares, and is it really that well written? But at the same time, I couldn't forget it. It was really haunting. Look, it's not a sweet movie."

One of the more loathesome acts committed by Rebecca's character Peyton has to do with breast-feeding. Rebecca tells me she used her own breasts in the film, and suddenly my eyeballs feel like they're on a float, since foolish pride will not allow them to fall below her chin. "You never see the breast," she explains. "I mean, the very first time I breast feed the baby, you see the breast for maybe a half a second." Given her tone of voice, Rebecca could just as easily be talking about a UFO or some other entity not attached to her body.

"I had the most amazing, sort of metaphysical experience, breast-feeding," she continues. "Even though we were simulating the thing, it was interesting because we were using these three triplets--Eric, Jennifer and Ashley. Now, I held all of them, but for some unknown reason, Eric and I had this incredible attraction. I mean, really strong eye contact, not to mention that he looked like me. The two girls of the triplets didn't look like him and they didn't particularly like me, and it was really obvious right away. I've always had a stronger affinity for girl children, girl babies, and not really known what to do about boys. But this little boy, Eric, gave me an incredible insight into boys. Really, for the first time I understood that this little innocent boy, this is where all men come from, you know? All men were once that, no matter what they've become."

And this is what they've become: I have followed my own glandular charge of the light brigade and allowed my eyes to drift south into the region probed by the tiny hands of the triplets. (It is in Saint Joan, after all, that someone says, "In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.")

"Now, the first scene where I'm breast-feeding, we do one take, and I do it with Eric. I'm smiling, and he's smiling up at me, and my character's supposed to feel this incredible release, of like, I've had this milk and I have a baby and the baby's responding to me. So I start to cry tears of joy. It's a really beautiful moment, and the baby's smiling. But then we have to go in tighter, or adjust the angle, whatever, and Eric's not into it anymore. So they bring in Jennifer. And Jennifer hates me. Most of the shot is me, you just see the baby's head a little. But Jennifer is screaming at me the entire take, staring in my eyes, like bloody murder is on her mind. But I look at her and I'm holding her and suddenly it's the same thing."

"That this is where all women come from?"

"No, silly. More like, that joy, bliss, anger, horror--it's the same thing. It comes full circle ... Is that your wedding ring?"

Pages: 1 2 3