After years of immersing herself so completely in her roles that she was barely recognizable from one film to the next, the extraordinary Jennifer Jason Leigh may finally have made her mark with Single White Female.
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I've known only one woman before Jennifer Jason Leigh who could come near to her for radiating a suggestion of how unforgettable, how ineffably mysterious, how monumentally creepy an erotic encounter can be. That girl--brown haired, features askew, mousy, even--didn't have to wear torpedo bras and tight sweaters, and never rat-combed her hair or troweled on the eye jazz, but she royally pissed off the trophy girls, the Junior Misses and pom-pom girls, of my high school. She read, but never made a thing about, Miller, Faulkner and Nabokov, while the rest of us settled for Harold Robbins, and, though she always had a snappy line or kind word for kids from every clique, she kept herself to herself. Her sensuality, I came to learn, was a life force that could unleash gales of laughter when we swilled her daddy's best booze and tore off our clothes in an attic smelling of camphor and orchids. When it came to a slow dance, an "Angel Baby" or "Moon River," say, no guy with half a hormone could ignore the musk she sent sailing across the gym. No one ever learned anything about her, really, because she didn't give up anything easily. Just when you thought you knew what she was, she changed. And finally, she took up with a college guy from out of town.
I've talked to other guys for whom Jennifer Jason Leigh, her brilliance as an actress aside, conjures up similar associations. If she stunned you as a high-schooler aching to be deflowered in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as the tenement Marilyn Monroe gang-raped by a pack of slobs in Last Exit to Brooklyn, as the runaway waitress who dreams of her own Burger King franchise in Miami Blues, or as the narc-cop-turned-junkie in Rush, then you know. Even when she's in crud-- Eyes of a Stranger (her first film), Easy Money, The Men's Club, Heart of Midnight or Grandview, U.S.A. --something's there. It's in that mouth, chiefly, those baby-like, slightly spaced teeth and the wry, mocking curve of her lips.
That she transforms herself from movie to movie--the walk, the talk, the affect--arouses admiration, certainly, but also heat. It's almost as if she plunges herself into acting not to find herself, but to gain release. The abandon, the masochistic languor with which she seems to give herself up to starvation (the TV movie The Best Little Girl in the World), being drawn and quartered by a truck (The Hitcher) and raped by vermin (Flesh + Blood) somehow says I will never bore you. The fact that she is the daughter of actor Vic Morrow, who lost his life while shooting Twilight Zone--The Movie--Hollywood's most bizarre, controversial on-the-set mishap and cover-up--only deepens her weird vibe.
Into that bargain she throws jolts of willfulness and passion that make for a highly watchable, if idiosyncratic career. Leigh's been getting acting raves from the beginning, and two years ago she copped a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Miami Blues and Last Exit to Brooklyn. But what might spin her into pop immortality is director Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female, an exhilaratingly nasty new thriller in which she plays Bridget Fonda's roommate from hell. It's a movie that could finally see her nose past those other three-name actresses (Jamie Lee Curtis, Mary Stuart Masterson, et al.) and into the Jodie Foster league, where she belongs.
Knowing that Leigh is as notoriously press-wary as she is critically acclaimed, I'm not quite sure what to expect from her on first meeting. She arrives garbed in a dark blazer over denim, and up close she radiates pouty, edgy sensuality and intelligence. I decide to start our conversation fast, so I bring up the scene from Single White Female that is sure to be the most talked about. In it, Leigh dresses up in Fonda's clothes in the dead of night and slips into a dark hotel room where she awakens Fonda's boyfriend (Steven Weber) with a stupendous blow job.
"Blow jobs aren't new to me on-screen," Leigh says softly, grinning when I raise the subject. She is referring to her character in Last Exit to Brooklyn, who had permanently chafed knees. "We didn't use any, umm, props, for those scenes in that movie, so what made this one so twisted is that Barbet Schroeder had the prop people go to a sex shop and get this enormous rubber dildo, because he wanted my mouth around something. Very authentic. I put mint-flavored oil on it, and it was so embarrassing and funny, I said, 'Look, if anybody laughs, I will fucking kill them.' Working with the dildo turned out to be awkward though, because I was crawling back up the side of [Steven's] body and it was crawling up with me. For a long time in the film, there was this point where I'm talking to [Steven] down around his abdomen, and suddenly there's like this two-shot of me and the dildo. Barbet, who loves actors so much, thought, 'Well, no one would notice it.' Of course, the studio removed it."
Leigh-watchers won't be surprised either by how good she is in the movie or how incredibly sexually fucked-up she comes off, a twisted moonchild who crawls under your skin. "I just saw an interview I gave for the electronic press kit to publicize the movie and I'm answering these questions with my face and eyes like. . ." she breaks off and suddenly takes on the aspect of someone you pray won't sit next to you on the subway.
Then, shaking her head as if to shake away the memory, she continues, "See, we had just finished shooting the movie and I seem so weird that . . . well, let's say that character was still infecting my system like a virus. I've never thought that I was the easiest person to be around when I'm shooting a movie. It always affects me. But I'd never before actually seen how that process changes me in my daily life."
While Leigh waits to see whether she will become America's favorite new screen crack- pot, she listens, curious, as I read aloud phrases from encyclopedias of movie stars that describe her as: "one of the most affecting actresses of her generation". . . "chubby-faced" . . . "admiration from critics, but not a fan following". . . "her star seems on the rise". . . "chameleon-like."
I ask Leigh if it isn't this chameleon thing--she's a hot-cha blonde in one movie, battered brunette in another, auburn-haired minx in the next--that explains why audiences can't quite seem to get a line on who in hell she is. "The chameleon thing is mine," she asserts. "I like not having a profile, that feeling of not knowing what you're going to see from one movie to the next because you're watching that character, not me. Reading or hearing people write about you is terribly alienating. I don't want attention for myself. I don't get followed, and I'm not one of those people who's whispered about in restaurants. I don't really think that I'm that recognizable. Or maybe that's just some wish I have. My ideal life would be to play all these great characters and disappear, in terms of the world." After a beat, she adds, laughing, "And I could have done without the 'chubby-faced.'" Indeed, nothing about Leigh is chubby.
Like such fellow Serious Actors as Eric Stoltz (with whom she made Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Sister, Sister and had a serious relationship), Sean Penn (another Ridgemont High grad) and Jason Patric (her Rush-mate), Leigh has been known to go to lengths to stake out off-center roles. For example, when she met with Uli Edel, director of Last Exit to Brooklyn: "One thing I wasn't willing to do was pretend I had enormous breasts like the character in the book. But I met him wearing a very tight dress so that he could see what my body looked like, and I smoked like a fiend, trying to convey the feeling of the character. The producer kept giving me these unfiltered German cigarettes, and my heart started pounding and I thought I was going to die. I wore very little makeup. And oh, I gave myself some bruises." Excuse me, but, self-inflicted bruises? "Oh, I just banged my leg, arm and neck into a door a couple of times," she says with quiet matter-of-factness. Then she laughs and says, "Gotcha! No, with makeup. Bruises are really easy."
What Leigh goes through to get roles is nothing compared with what happens once she wins them. She describes in clinical detail how she developed "an anorexic mentality" and starved herself to 86 pounds to play a teenager with an eating disorder in The Best Little Girl in the World. She worked at a Sherman Oaks pizzeria to check out high-school students before doing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She lay on the ground virtually naked for five nights in below-freezing weather to shoot a rape scene in Paul Verhoeven's Flesh + Blood. On every movie she keeps extensive diaries written in the "voice" of each character. Cripes, I'm thinking, head for the hills if Martin Scorsese asks her to play Saint Joan.
To enact a sole surviving twin in Single White Female, Leigh immersed herself in six weeks of classic psychiatric case studies, watched "Oprah" reruns about twins, and interviewed institutionalized twins and their shrinks. While shooting the movie she covered her dressing-room walls with photographs of Fonda, the object of her character's obsession.
"Something I learned from my research is how, unless Bridget's character's in the room, my character feels like a Siamese twin cut from her 'other' without being stitched up. As if her guts were spilling out. So, with the photographs I did a lot of face-splitting, where you take two photos and make one with my eyes and her mouth. I try not to suffocate people with my preparations, but Bridget's so honest, alive, funny that I loved working with her and it wasn't a problem. But I know, for instance, it frightened Lili Zanuck on Rush at first. The prep I do isn't for anyone else but me. It gives me a place of truth to draw upon. I often discover something that could inspire a scene. If the director is open to it, as Barbet was, it's great for me."
Having heard how Zanuck went to bat with the studio to get Leigh instead of box office-friendlier stars like Jodie Foster or Demi Moore for Rush, I ask Leigh if she was upset at the speculation about how a deeply research-oriented actress might have dealt with subject matter like pharmaceuticals.
"When I started shooting the movie," she recalls, "I started smoking heavily, even though Lili didn't want the character to smoke. I wanted to be addicted to something. I wasn't going to do it with drugs. I mean, I did in the past do coke a couple of times, but I wasn't like the addict who goes, 'Hello, God, I'm up there with you.' For me, it was, 'Where's the bathroom?' It gave me diarrhea and a headache. I never really liked it. When I had surgery one time, I found that Percodan was nice, but, hey, who wants to live in a coma?"
Leigh is so touchingly earnest, so clearly bucking for Streep and De Niro 'I'm suffering for my art' land that, at times, one can't help wanting to mess with her. Didn't she do any fun stuff to prepare for the movie, like check out any of the scads of movies in which stars play double roles? With prompting, she cops, "I watched The Dark Mirror where Olivia de Havilland plays both sisters who wear charm necklaces with their names spelled out on them so people can tell them apart. And, of course, I saw David Cronenberg's great Dead Ringers, and this documentary, Twinsburg, OH, about twins who gather there from all over the country. But no, Steve, sorry, not 'The Patty Duke Show.' "
I ask Leigh whether someone as career-oriented as she routinely calls directors with whom she's interested in working, as, for example, Ellen Barkin does. "I read about her doing that," Leigh says, "and thought: that's brilliant. I'm so shy that doing that would be really hard for me. I take a meeker approach. I call my agent and say, 'What are the Coen brothers doing? Is there anything for me?'" Still, she wasn't too meek to meet with Paul Verhoeven for Basic Instinct. "He thought I was way too young for it," she says, "and though Sharon Stone isn't much older, she looks like a woman." And she might have landed Pretty Woman which, when she met director Garry Marshall, was to be a tough, bleak little movie.
"The script was so dark," she recalls, "I couldn't believe that Disney was making it. And, of course they didn't, but instead turned it into a recruiting movie, the Top Gun of prostitution. One of the first things [Marshall] said was, 'The character hasn't been doing this long, she's having fun.' Fun? What can be fun about getting in a car with some 60-year-old and giving him a blow job?"
Lately, it's been Leigh who's been doing the turning down. She wouldn't even read the script of A League of Their Own because, as she puts it, "The whole idea of auditioning actresses by having them play a ball game? I don't think so." On the other hand, she calls sex, lies, and videotape, which she bypassed for Miami Blues, "one of the few times I saw the finished movie and went, 'Shoot, I wish I could have done that.' But Laura San Giacomo was so rich in it, I couldn't have done it the way she did."
Landing Last Exit to Brooklyn induced Leigh to bow out of a stage production of Lulu, the role that made a legend of Louise Brooks, but her fascination for the silent film temptress stuck. "I cut and dyed my hair like her for The Big Picture," asserts Leigh, "and people said, 'God, you look so much like Louise Brooks.' I liked myself so much like that, but it's hard on your hair and you can't go any other color from black."
Brooks, she says, "isn't my icon, or anything," but just in case one of several producers wants to cast her as the star--"not in one of those awful biopics, but something strange and beautiful about her tragic life"--she's had a black wig made in the actress's unique bob.
It might be something to watch Leigh do drop-dead glamorous, but at the mention of one of the few times she did anything like that--her role as fireboy Billy Baldwin's slinky urban girlfriend in Backdraft --she studies her hands and mutters, "Painful. In a strange way, it's not even me, so I always forget I'm in that." It's not hard to understand why Leigh would have selective memory about Backdraft --she looks uncharacteristically disengaged in her scenes--but why painful? She just had to act in it, not watch it.
"Because Ron Howard was incredibly generous and patient with me. He pursued me with this role. And I failed him. Everybody had been telling me for so long that I should stop playing women who go through grueling experiences, but there was no place for me in that character. It taught me that I can't take a role I don't really connect with."
A role with which Leigh did connect, in a movie which made roughly a zillion times less than Backdraft, was the junkie cop in Rush. It's been the story of her career, so far. "When my first movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, turned out to be this big hit, I was so innocent, I thought: all movies are hits. It took a couple of years to figure out that almost every movie I made after that didn't make money. Some of them haven't made money because they're not very good movies. It's not like I look at a project and go, 'Oh, this is going to be a box-office bomb. I want it!' "
Leigh looks stricken, then, in spite of herself, amused when I ask her to recall the standout screen lovemakers among such co-stars as Eric Stoltz, Jason Patric, and the brothers Baldwin, Alec and Billy, with whom she made, respectively, Miami Blues and Backdraft. "There are a lot of good kissers," she says, laughing. "I'm worried that in interviews after this, they'll say, 'So, you really like doing love scenes with so-and-so, huh?' Oh, all right. Alec and Billy are both very, very good kissers. Working with Alec was like being on a roller coaster. He's thrilling, incredibly funny, completely free, unashamed, trustful. It was one of those rare experiences where you really believe your fellow actor is the character he's playing. We didn't screw, of course, but our love scenes felt alive.
Rutger Hauer on Flesh + Blood, too, had that great sense of make-believe that makes playing these scenes fun. Those were the freest, warmest experiences, where I felt protected by the actors I was playing with." And when it didn't work? Recalling her love scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Leigh says that actor Robert Romanus was "very cruel. He wouldn't even look at me and chewed gum when he was kissing, so we couldn't really kiss. If I stroked or touched him between takes, he'd flinch. I understood that he was scared out of his mind, too, but love scenes don't have to be this terrible thing."
I note to Leigh that since she did press for The Best Little Girl in the World, the TV movie about anorexia in which she replaced a then blimped-out Yalie named Jodie Foster, she hasn't spoken in print about her love life. Nineteen at the time, Leigh was cozily photographed for People magazine with actor David Dukes, then 35, whom she called "supportive, giving, brilliant."
"Reading that People article made me want to throw up," declares Leigh. "It also made me promise myself I would never again take away someone else's privacy or talk publicly about that aspect of my private life. I don't like knowing that stuff when I go to a movie. It gets in the way. I watched The Philadelphia Story last night grateful that I didn't know the details of the 'dark something' about Cary Grant, but even then, it was like a cloud surrounding him. I mean, I'm uncomfortable when I even read articles where people talk about their romantic life."
Making the Southern Gothic horror movie Sister, Sister, Leigh liaised with Eric Stoltz, who's now involved with Leigh's Single White Female co-star Bridget Fonda. Any comment? "I want to spend my entire life staying out of those 'Who Fucked Who' maps of the world," she says, adding that she and Fonda "loved working together so much and were so ingrained in our roles, it wasn't an issue at all." After a moment she admits, "Actually, I've hoped the press never finds out about any of this because they could have a field day with it and, ultimately, it's just so meaningless, you know?"
Now involved in a relationship with "someone in the business, but not an actor," Leigh suggests that the scars left by the divorces of her screenwriter mother, Barbara Turner (The War Between the Tates), first from Leigh's father, the late Vic Morrow, and later from an Iranian-born television director, haven't decreased her wariness. "Divorce," says Leigh, "is a horrible, horrible thing and any child of a divorce has a really tough time believing in marriage. I don't think I would ever get married on a whim or if it didn't feel truly grounded, like a life commitment."
I wonder whether Leigh was as offbeat and private as a kid as she is as a grownup. She grew up in the high-end, conservative L.A. suburb of Pacific Palisades, and, after attending the tony, private Oakwood School, did two years at Pali High. "Ask anybody I went to school with," she says, "and they probably wouldn't remember me because I was bored out of my skull and ditched every day I didn't have play production. I just lived to go to acting classes, which were after school. I got sick a lot with stomach flu, so I would just stay home and watch old movies like My Man Godfrey and Mildred Pierce all day."
A former ace at school-skipping myself, I ask the middle girl of three daughters how she managed to pull off the trick so often. "I signed my own notes," she says, proudly, "and I'd say horrible things to get out of school. I know you're going to ask, so let's see, oh, yeah, my stepfather was Iranian and I once said that I was just a mess because he was trapped over there when the whole thing with the Shah was going on."
Leigh dropped out of high school to act full-time, apprenticing one summer at the prestigious program at Williamstown, Massachusetts, where her glibness for cheap excuses paced her acting skills. "I remember chatting on the phone for 45 minutes and being late for crew, which was grounds for being kicked out. So, I said, 'My parents are getting a divorce and I'm just really a mess about it,' and they gave me two days off. When I got home, I found out that my mother and stepfather were getting a divorce."
But even a reclusive, certified acting diva with a penchant for privacy must sometimes cut loose, no? "I'm not comfortable with people looking at me," she says, and I don't doubt it for an instant, "but once in a while, I think, 'It would be fun to go out dancing.' I never do it, but the idea is there. You know when I like going dancing? When I'm in a really small town on vacation, and you go to a horrible divey place where the choices of music are really bad, but you can completely let go." When I ask the name of the song she last let go to, she answers with great seriousness, "Well, the last time I did that was 11 years ago. But I remember having a really good time."
No, really, she insists, "this shyness stuff is awful and the more in touch I am with my feelings, the harder those things are for me." Leigh recalls winning the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Miami Blues and Last Exit to Brooklyn: "All I had to do was get up and accept and I thought I was going to throw up or pass out. Acting is my lifeline, my only way of communicating outside myself. I completely embody a character if she feels alive and free in a way that I can't in my own life, for whatever reason. To get up in front of people as me is terrifying." I suggest to her that she'd better get over it because, somewhere deep down, she has to know that sooner or later, she's bound to be onstage at an Oscar ceremony. The mere mention of the possibility makes her shrivel into the couch like a centipede.
"The joy would be in the huge honor and in first finding out that I was nominated," she says, hoarsely. "People tell me, 'Why don't you pretend you're a character who has won this award?' or, 'Why don't you pretend you're a presenter?' I took a course at UCLA, and when we had to go around the room and say our names and what we hoped to derive from the class, my palms were sweating. I am just not a public person at all."
Public or not, it looks like we're about to see more of Leigh in mainstream movies, though perhaps in offbeat roles. "The nice thing now is getting an opportunity to make movies that I would go to see," she enthuses, "as opposed to taking what I think are great parts in not-great movies." Among her current obsessions is trying to scare up a director and backers for a comedy-drama about sibling rivalry written by her mother. "It sucks that it's such a lengthy process to get something into production, especially when you look through the newspaper and discover that you don't want to see half the shit movies that are being made." Single White Female may make it easier for Leigh to shorten the process. "It would be fantastic to find a role that I could connect with in a movie that did well financially. I try to just sort of let it go after the movie's done because you don't have any control over it anyway."
Leigh's got to run; she's already late for a meeting on another movie.
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Ellen Barkin for our May cover story.