Ellen Barkin: Born to Be Bad

Too strong, some say. Twice in movies, she's had to tone it down. Preview audiences watching a Switch seduction scene found the heat generated between her and Lorraine Bracco so palpable that the director cut it from the release version. "Audiences got very uncomfortable," she allows, "the way the scene was supposed to make them feel. But their reaction cards said they didn't want to feel uncomfortable. Blake made [Warner Bros.] keep testing the movie, but when he finally cut the scene, it broke his heart and ours." The distributors of Siesta, Mary Lambert's unsung 1987 quirkfest co-starring Gabriel Byrne and Jodie Foster, "thought I was too aggressive, unsympathetic, so I came back and revoiced my dialogue any time there was, like, an 'edge' in it."

Although Barkin rages against "moviemaking by consensus, " she is well aware of the power of the bottom line and of the concessions one sometimes makes to toe it. It was not until she pressed the bedsheets with Dennis Quaid in the French Quarter and frisked Al Pacino against a wall that audiences really started to pick up on her. Does she respect herself the morning after? "The biggest lure for me is my co-star," Barkin says, when I ask her about the slashy thriller Sea of Love. "To tell you the truth, I didn't even feel the need to read the script. That's not to say I didn't think it was real well written. But as soon as I heard it was an Al Pacino movie, I said, 'I really want this job.'" And what did she make of the end result? "Don't ask me. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. I saw it and thought, 'Smart girl.' It made me a star. What am I, an idiot?"

Anything but. "Huge," she calls her rise in salary between The Big Easy and Man Trouble, although she's got a way to go before she sees a payday like Jack Nicholson's. "The problem isn't 'pay me as much money as Tom Cruise,'" she asserts. "Until I pull in audiences like the biggest male stars, I don't want those salaries. What pisses me off isn't that women don't make as much money as their male counterparts, but that we don't bring 'em into the theater because we're not given the arena to do it in. None of us women do, no matter how big a star we are. Period. Hollywood tells you from Jump Street: We pay you in terms of what you bring back. But the attack should be on the people who make movies. 'Why don't you make vehicles where women can bring in $80 million?'" I interject: "How about Thelma & Louise?."

Barkin pats my arm, advising, "Get real. It garnered the most attention in the press of any movie last year, but in Hollywood terms what'd that mean? $48 million? That's not a big hit. When they make a woman's picture, they treat it like a 'woman's picture.' In the '40s, they didn't treat Joan Crawford movies like that, but as the big movies of their year. I'm upset that there's no Terminator with a woman in Arnold Schwarzenegger's role. Because that would make just as much money."

Well, Renee Soutendijk did play a cutting-edge cyborg in Eve of Destruction. "Nah, you have to really do it, pump it like Terminator," she says, riled. "I'm not for movies costing a lot of money, but you can't fudge on action and special effects. You can't make it as a $30 million movie, 'cause you're going to drop the ball. They've already got the man thing going and they don't want to really give women the arena to do it in. But you've got to spend the money and cast someone who's right for it, ya know, Arnold Schwarzenegger in a skirt. Someone who's gonna, like, clean up the universe." Such as, like, Ellen Barkin? "Well, I spoke to [director] Walter Hill, who's a good friend of mine, about really trying to get a movie like this going. But maybe it shouldn't be me in the part. Maybe Sharon Stone should be the Terminator girl. She's a great comedienne and real talented."

Barkin, hotter than a pistol just now, declined not only the role Stone won as the homicidal bisexual in Basic Instinct ("I wasn't prepared to do that kind of graphic movie," she explains), but also Catwoman in Batman Returns.

"Are you surprised that I would ever even consider it?" she asks, kiddingly, since it's the slinky part she seems born to play. "I could have done it, I might have--I mean, Jack was a great 'Joker'--but that's not my personal agenda." But she doesn't always best her competition. She lost to Geena Davis the Oscar-winning role of the dog trainer in The Accidental Tourist, which, she recalls, "I totally auditioned myself right out of. During the reading, I was thinking, 'Oh, bummer, I'm really letting William Hurt and Lawrence Kasdan down.'" And to her close friend, Lorraine Bracco, she lost GoodFellas, another shot at an Oscar. "I'd rather see a friend like Lorraine benefit from it," she says, "because she's like in my family."

Although Barkin is a big Debra Winger fan, she chafed at missing the lead in Bernardo Bertolucci's movie of The Sheltering Sky, the Paul Bowles book of which she is a self-professed "scholar." Through Jim McBride, who directed her in The Big Easy, she met Bertolucci. "We sat next to each other at a Madonna concert then, later, wound up eating pizza at somebody's house ... The Sheltering Sky was one of those rare occasions where I said, 'I'm gonna do everything I can to convince this guy to give me this part.' Obviously, it didn't work. He was totally unimpressed and I never heard from him again." Barkin won This Boy's Life when Winger dropped out, just as she won Man Trouble when Meryl Streep got preggers. Did she feel anybody on the shoot comparing her to Streep? "Well, the director and the star knew she was going to be in it, but who else? Do you think the grips knew it was supposed to be her and went around plaintively going, 'Meryl? Meryl! She got pregnant, they rethought it, recast it, and they just went on from there. There was certainly no attempt to have me play it the way Meryl Streep might've played it. Peter O'Toole was, like, the tenth choice to be Lawrence of Arabia--do you think once he got on the set anybody cared?"

These days, Barkin is clearly inching closer to the front ranks. One sure sign? A gleaming stretch limo waits curbside after our first meeting to whisk her to her dubbing session. Total distance from the restaurant to the sound studio: three blocks. But power isn't just about perks, and I ask Barkin, "What do you want out of your career?" It's the first time she seems thrown. "Yeah ... ummmm," she mumbles, looking around the room and stalling for time, "...wow...yeah, well, I like my work--I mean, I love my work. I would like not to play bad roles ever or, at least, to disperse them with stuff that interests me." Sure, but what about creating Ellen Barkin movies, stuff in which she's not a satellite, a victim, the male star's blue-collar bombshell? "It's no stretch to picture me standing next to Al Pacino or Robert De Niro," she concedes. "Those are ethnic New York men. I'm an ethnic New York girl. Everybody has their limitations. I mean, I should never be cast as Queen Elizabeth." What about her Sophie's Choice? Her Frances? Okay, her Terminator? "I really think I'm an actor and that's it," she declares, shrugging.

Then, after a moment, she says quietly, "It's only every three to four years where I read a script and say, I want to act that.' I mean, I cannot read another 'feminist backlash' script--and this is a pattern that's going to crop up in movies in 1992 and 1993--about women killing women, women hating women, women not trusting other women. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is just the beginning of loathsome movies about turning women against each other. But ask me to come up with an idea for a movie or a screenplay? I could never do it. Ever. But why can't I just be an actor? Why do I have to be a producer? But, you know, for a week I worked in a movie my friend John Turturro just directed and I thought, 'I would have loved to produce this movie.' I thought that, too, when I worked for Gabriel in Ireland on his movie. I like doing business. My lawyer says that I'm never so excited as when I'm negotiating a deal. Maybe I'd rather come up with some great film for an actress I go to the movies to see: Debra Winger or Anjelica Huston."

Some say that Byrne, the man Barkin describes as the "world's least difficult person," has done wonders to help one of the world's more difficult persons become, well, less so. "My dukes are so much lower than they used to be," she declares, staring off. And then her face lights up as Byrne strolls into the dining room, almost on cue, en route to a chat-up at a nearby table with Last Exit to Brooklyn director Uli Edel about co-starring with Madonna in a thriller. Byrne comes over and introduces himself. The Dublin-born actor, best known in America for Defence of the Realm and Miller's Crossing, watches his wife shimmy out of the booth to make huggy-pie with Christopher Lloyd, with whom she did The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and observes of her thorny reputation, "A lot of resentment comes up because she's independent, she thinks for herself, she doesn't take bullshit. But, you know, she's a total pussycat." Just then, the pussycat breaks away from Lloyd, nudges her husband's attention toward my tape recorder and says, "Turn that thing off." Not to worry, Byrne has revealed no secrets and is already clearing out for his meeting. Barkin snuggles him and purrs, "Button your shirt, Gabriel." He does.

"We travel en famille," she reports, smiling after him, pursing her lips mockingly at her own French. "We're usually not apart for more than five weeks. That long we can sustain without the relationship seeming to take steps backward. But once a child is involved... I mean, I took the baby to Ireland to be with Gabriel on his movie and now they'll both come with me to shoot This Boy's Life in Vancouver. We just moved into our new house in Pound Ridge and kept our loft in Manhattan so I don't have a nervous breakdown. I'm a very urban girl. I like seeing a tree, but if you took it away from me, I wouldn't miss it. But we're both sad because now we're working and can't be there. And Jack Daniel is ... the best." Does little Jack (named, she says, because "we like one-syllable names; the Daniel comes from Gabriel's family") favor his dolefully handsome father or spectacularly carnal mother? She collapses into herself, beaming, her features doing a manic little tap dance as she thumps her chest. "I spent nine months praying, 'Just Gabriel's eyes, please,'" she says, "and asking, 'How recessive is the gene for blue eyes?'"

Barkin is so immediate, and has such impact, I ask how she thinks she might have fared in the days when tough, scrappy dames like Joan Blondell and Gloria Grahame sold tickets right alongside James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. "I probably would have been one of those bad girls like Bette Davis--you know, straining within her straight jacket. But I cannot imagine anything better than how Hollywood nurtured actors then, especially women, compared to how we're treated today. Of course, there was a lot of shit to deal with then. I mean, Bette Davis didn't just get to make The Letter." But as much as Barkin loves her "Late, Late Show" heroes, she gets positively fan-like when she conjures up a more contemporary name: Faye Dunaway. "The week Bonnie and Clyde opened, I saw it, like, 12 times," she recalls, beaming. "I just sat there and watched this woman and I didn't know anyone else was in it. And, when I met her years later, she didn't disappoint."

Sure, you can glimpse something of Dunaway's anger and ferocity in Barkin, but more and more, lately, she reminds me of Angie Dickinson, circa late-1950s when she played in Sam Fuller's China Gate and in Rio Bravo for Howard Hawks. "Don't say this to me now," Barkin cries, mooshing her face, shading her eyes. "Whyyyyyyyy are you saying this? You know, Angie Dickinson is a very beautiful woman, but, looking at Man Trouble footage yesterday, I sat there saying, 'I just am Angie Dickinson.' It's wild--wild! I mean, I look exactly like her. It's also that my hair is up and it's a kind of sophisticated look. Cab drivers have told me this--I mean, it's not something that hasn't been said to me--but the older I get, the more I seem to look like her, which I like a lot."

For the moment, Barkin hasn't much time for nostalgia. After her movie with De Niro, she and Byrne may do Sweet Lorraine, set in the jazz scene of the '50s, for director Ralph Bakshi, who directed Byrne and Kim Basinger in Cool World. Then, there's the possibility of working with Joel and Ethan Coen, for whom Byrne made Miller's Crossing. She admits to calling the brothers "at least five times a day, begging them" to put her in an upcoming movie. As I walk her those few blocks to her looping session--"I knew you'd ride me about that limo yesterday," she says, laughing, "but it was just because I didn't know where the place was"--she says she's suffering from guilt pangs about that big, rambling farm she and her husband bought. "Gabriel wakes up in the morning and takes our son out for walks around the property," she says, sounding touched, almost mystified, "when I don't even have a clue where our second acre starts. Why don't I want to go out and take a walk? Why don't I want to see what property we own?" She rolls her eyes and grabs my arm, "Jeeeeeeez, Steve, don't write this. It makes me sound so nice and boring." As her heels clack down the hallway of the recording studio, I think: Not a snowball's chance in hell, Ellen.

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Sharon Stone for our January/February cover story.

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