Sherilyn Fenn: Fenn de Siecle

Silent directing? Hmmm--that's a new technique. So it's a safe bet Fenn and Bogayevicz did not see eye-to-eye.

"Oh yeah," she says. "He painted the picture [in an interview] in your magazine that I'd done nudity in all my movies and how dare I all of a sudden not do it in his. To make a blanket statement like that and unfairly sum everything up ... When somebody decides to do nudity, it's a very serious decision and you want to be around people you can trust who treat you with integrity and this was not something he did. It was very destructive at the time."

Isn't tension on the set sometimes a constructive thing?

"Let's have tension if we need to accomplish something," responds Fenn. "But for that to be somebody's sole basis of operating ... I'm a professional. I do my job and then I go home. And I don't have to deal with you! You know?"

I do now.

Fenn sounds like she's been acting for a long time, and she has. When she was 17, she moved with her mom (a former member of rocker Suzi Quatro's band; Quatro, in fact, is Sherilyn's aunt) and brothers to Los Angeles. Here, she says she was so intimidated with the idea of having to finish high school at Beverly Hills High (who wants to be snubbed by Tori Spelling clones?), she convinced her mother to let her start acting lessons instead, and soon she was enrolled in Lee Strasberg.

"I wasn't into going to college for four years and that whole dorm thing," she says. "I had such an aversion to it. It's an extended vacation, isn't it?" Yes, Sherilyn, I'm afraid so. Instead, Fenn at 18 was going out on auditions and landing TV jobs. She's been working, more or less steadily, ever since.

There are early, pre-"Peaks" Sherilyn Fenn movies I can't find in any video store. I've heard that she won't even talk about them. So ... does she want to talk about them? "Omigod--you're going to bring up every nightmare in my life," says Fenn. "This movie-- ouch--that movie--oww! Like a voodoo doll you keep poking pins in ..."

"There's one," I say, witch doctor that I am, "called Backstreet Dreams, from 1990--I can't find out much about it, but you starred in it with Burt Young and Brooke Shields." Now there's a pair.

"It's not that the films were so bad," Fenn says all encompassingly. "Well--they weren't that good, either, but they were just low-budget independent films. I've made 18 movies or something, you know? I moved to L.A. when I was 17 and started making movies six months later. I turned 18 in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia making this crazy movie called Crosswinds [a.k.a. Out of Control] with Martin Hewitt, stuck on a deserted island... I would also waitress for a while and then I was like, forget this--I'd rather do a bad movie than waitress, where you get no respect.

"The first time I met Steven Spielberg," Fenn continues, "he had a list of all these movies I did and I was so devastated. I grabbed it from him, and he said, 'Oh jeez, don't worry. Everybody's got skeletons in their closet.' I said, 'Yeah, but--I've got a very big closet.'"

Buh-dump-bump!

"We all just like to be who we are now and not think about the things we did. I can't change the past. I'm trying not to beat myself up for it."

If I were Sherilyn, however, there's one director I'd seriously consider punching out: Zalman King, the lusty libertine who gave us the blue steam of Two-Moon Junction. The 1988 film was supposed to be a sensitive love story, Fenn's first high-profile starring role, a ticket out of the rank-and-file. Instead, it's essentially soft-core porn--and hard-core laughs. ''So what about Two-Moon Junction?"

"Oh God, I love the way you say that!'' laughs Fenn. "'Two-Moooon Junction.' I wish they could hear your expression."

Hell, it's hard to say the name of the film without both leering and feeling silly at the same time--Zalman's punning double-entendre title sees to that. Two moons indeed--buck naked, out in the Southern moonlight, doin' what comes natural when the summer breezes blow. Fenn, playing a bleached-blonde rich Southern belle, and her co-star Richard Tyson, the lion-maned carny hunk she ruts with, went at it with a frenzied authenticity that reportedly had something to do with the end of Fenn's engagement to Johnny Depp. On the plus side, the film, a box-office dud, is still a massive video hit--an electronic bodice-ripper which, video stores report, is a favorite of single gals prowling the aisles.

"I remember after it was shot," says Fenn, "[Zalman King] would talk about it and I wouldn't know what he was saying--that's not the movie I made. Because I don't believe sex without love is that powerful--it's just not a belief I subscribe to. Seeing the final movie was so crazy--I started wearing baggy clothes everywhere. That was a sad one for me. I really felt exploited."

"You were," I say. "Hell, even Tyson was exploited."

"Not as much as me, though," Fenn says ruefully. "All he had to do was take his shirt off no matter what. The funniest thing was, someone said to me, 'He even took his shirt off when he was washing dishes in a restaurant, which is against health regulations.' I thought that was perfect."

Then, in 1990, came Lynch and ''Twin Peaks.'' Lynch was always fond of talking about the "mystery" of Sherilyn Fenn--how it intrigued him and why he wanted it in his work.

Mystery was central to Audrey's sex appeal and mystery is what is noticeably not there in the more recent Fenn roles I've seen: the small-town stripper in Ruby, the urban contemporary teaching assistant in Three of Hearts, the ditzy agoraphobic young Pittsburgh mom in Diary of a Hitman. And is it significant that these characters seem, at first glance, much more like Sherilyn Fenn herself? Is Fenn, after all, as mysterious as Lynch thinks she is? "It's not something I think about," she says. "David loves women and all women are mysterious and weird and wonderful to him ... But you know what? Women are mysterious, I guess." Could she really have played Audrey the way she did and not have known that all along?

"I wanted to play Tinkerbell [in Hook] really badly--Steven fucked up. Just kidding!" Fenn adds quickly. "I didn't really have the opportunity anyway, but I loved Tink in [Disney's] animated version--the really cute, blonde sexy sprite with her little dress."

"So what was Julia Roberts doing, Sherilyn, with her hair cut off and dyed ginger?"

"She looked like Peter Pan,'' says Fenn. "I was shocked."

Are there any recent roles she was legitimately up for and wanted, but lost? "I was up for Gypsy--the TV remake of the musical. I really wanted it. They cast Cynthia Gibb." But if losing out to the star of Youngblood and Short Circuit 2 is worrisome, Fenn isn't letting on. "It means something better is coming along," she says firmly.

Sherilyn Fenn and Sharon Stone have more in common than the one scene they had together--they played sisters--in Diary of a Hitman. That film, in fact, was directed by Roy London, the acting teacher/mentor (and, some say, Svengali figure) they share.

Both Stone and Fenn have been on-screen frequently since the mid-'80s, and can each claim large numbers of forgotten films. Stone, seven years older than Fenn, didn't achieve megastardom until last year's Basic Instinct. Before that film, I remind Fenn, Stone had even considered giving up the Hollywood grind. So what does Fenn make of Stone's rapid rise? "I think it's great that she's become successful-- she's been working so hard for so long. I look forward to the same success. I feel that in God's time--I'm not Miss Religious, but I do think there's a plan larger than mine. I'm not considering quitting acting. I can't change the way things are except by working hard."

If you think about it for two minutes, I say, it's not hard to conclude that there are maybe--maybe--half a dozen good roles for young actresses in any given year's worth of Hollywood pictures. Fenn nods in agreement. "And also it amazes me," she says, "when a role will be offered--and one was--to Madonna, Geena Davis and Winona Ryder. I'm confused. We're talking 15 years [age difference], and I cannot even fathom whether there's any vision behind that. What do you want? Do you know? What's going on?"

What's going on, perhaps, is no good scripts, among other things. Doesn't that lead to ugly competition among Fenn and her actress friends? "I don't have a lot of friends who are actresses," she says. She doesn't sound too broken up about it. "And in my healthiest days I just remember that I'm in competition with myself. I try to say, 'Don't be negative. You're doing well.'"

"But wouldn't it be easier if there were more good roles to go for?"

"Yes," says Fenn, "but I don't know how to change that. Except to start taking some writing classes, which is what I want to do. You laugh--you laugh!" she says (because I'm laughing), "but one day--you'll see."

"Sherilyn, you may be the best damn writer in town."

"You never know," she says. And, finally, she shoots me Audrey's mysterious smile.

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Joshua Mooney is Movieline's Senior Editor.

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