Robin Wright: The Wright Stuff?

It perhaps says something about the nature of the beast that is Wright that she has failed to mention the name of another rival, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who replaced her, when Wright was pregnant, in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. After all, the deal had been set; she had even won co-star Kevin Costner's crucial casting approval. "It was really just a 20-minute meeting to see if we saw eye to eye," she recalls, staring distractedly out the window at trees rattling in a cold California wind. "It was like, 'Yeah, you're cool' and 'You're cool, too. We can work together.'" Any regrets that they didn't?

She shoots me an incredulous look and snaps, "It was The Princess Bride revisited. I haven't seen the movie and I don't really have a feeling about it. I've felt in the past when I've turned down movies, 'I'm dying to see what they did with it.' With this one, I just felt it was fate, a sort of knowingness that it was not meant to be." Did any career advisors suggest what impact a baby, particularly a Penn baby, might have on her career? "I wouldn't have let them say that to me," she says, evenly, squaring her jaw. "Nobody's here to create your destiny or write anything into your contract, whether or not they represent you. A baby is an act of some higher spirit that's so beyond Hollywood, nobody can even touch it."

But, so long as Wright chooses to make movies, she isn't beyond Hollywood, a town apparently undecided about whether to embrace her as a likely successor to Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer or to spit her out as just another willowy, spirited blonde. So far, she's transmitted mixed signals and crosstalk. She caused a critical splash by approximating for Reiner "the young Julie Christie" he wanted for The Princess Bride, then, bafflingly, went straight back to work on the soapy trials and tribulations of "Santa Barbara," on which she had at the time a continuing role. Career hara-kiri? Bad management? Sheer orneriness? "I had a clause in my two-year TV contract that let me out for four weeks once a year to do films," she explains, digging out a pot of balm from her handbag and smoothing it over her chapped lips. "But no film gets shot in four weeks and I did two movies, so every extra week extended approximately a month or two onto my contract. I could have walked, but I would have had to have paid [in legal fees] three times the amount I made on that show in the whole two years."

Wright says that she agonizes over whether to continue making what she calls the "small, quiet" movies to which she gravitates, or movies she knows could propel her career. "If I did one hit movie, I could be out of my rut, not trudging through the mud for the next 10 years. Being in a big movie means you don't have to audition anymore and you're offered things constantly. You are known. You are one of the pack. I still have to meet directors. My quote never goes up." So why not make the leap? Wright sighs and says, "I don't have an aversion to commercial movies. I would just love to find a potential hit that's also good, you know? I've heard that people perceive me as an uprooter, too dark, too serious, someone who loves to hate herself, someone who hasn't done her Lethal Weapons."

Get Wright going on the subject of how a Lethal Weapon or, for that matter, a Robin Hood can jolt a male star's career into mega, without doing likewise for its female stars, and she simmers. "I wish women could all congregate, have a meeting of the minds, and become this empire who demands: 'Give us more credit. Respect us. Stop condescending. Stop being so demeaning.' In every script I read there's a scene where the woman has frontal nudity and the man doesn't. Say you won't do it and the [producers] say, 'Too bad, we'll get somebody else who will.' If we could all just come together and say, 'No, we're not going to stand for it,' there wouldn't have to be a subordinate woman over there in the corner saying, 'I'll do it.' The world always does a 360 and I feel like we're at 350. But, I'm pushing it, you know?" After a moment, she adds, with a sardonic chuckle, "Aren't I being positive today? I need substance, otherwise, it's bullshit. This will sound self-indulgent and spiritualist on paper, but, if I don't like Chinese chicken salad--" she tosses down her fork to demonstrate her point, and continues, "I just can't eat it and I'm not going to act like it. When you're acting, you're showing your soul's clothes. I don't want to be an image. I want to follow my idea, to be my belief. I just don't want to sell out by doing anything other than what's here"she taps her heart"home."

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