It's been over two years since "Twin Peaks" was canceled. Sherilyn Fenn has made seven films since then, one of which she knows will make us forget all about those cherry stems.
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Sherilyn Fenn is surrounded by angels. In fact, her house in the Hollywood Hills is lousy with them. They are like heavenly vermin--as small as snails, as big and plump as overfed cats, made of wood, metal and stone. They climb the walls and perch on sills, or gaze out from picture frames. I'll bet she has tiny angel soaps in the soap dish in her bathroom, with bellies of lilac and lavender. They're making me nervous, these sinister cherubs, just hanging around, staring. And some of them are armed...
"Angels," Fenn nods. "You know how, once people find out you like something, they start giving you that thing? Well--everyone's given me angels. You can have too many angels."
But if Fenn has reached the celestial saturation point, the fact is the motif fits her house just fine. This is every inch a girl's house: four cats, an Akita named Yogi a living room of overstuffed couches crammed with cushions and pillows done in Laura Ashleyesque floral prints. A vague hint of incense in the air. Her CD collection: Suzanne Vega, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox. Sherilyn sits amidst it all like a Dresden doll, in white and cream lace, her legs tucked under her. Her skin is china white, her long dark hair swept up on her head, a small cross of pearls around her neck. She looks positively Merchant Ivory.
"It's Good Friday," I note. "I hope I haven't kept you from any extensive church services or confessionals or anything."
"I'll be going to mass later," she says. There's Catholicism in her blood. "Not practicing or anything," she' confesses, "but I put on a dress and go to church once in a while..."
Prince probably liked that. That's it! I'd forgotten until just now that she and Prince were an item, long ago. It was because of Prince that the name Sherilyn Fenn first made waves.
Across the room, Ruth Orkin's famous photograph, "American Girl in Italy," is blown up to the size of a bed sheet on the wall. In it, a dark-haired American beauty walks along a street, on the verge of tears, as a dozen swarthy Italian men catcall at her from cafes or Vespa scooters. Women, I've noticed, love the photo, despite its harassment theme, and are invariably miffed when I tell them it was a set-up. I feel they should know. I'm about to point this out to Fenn, but she beats me to it. "It was sad to find out it was staged," she sighs. "I didn't want to believe that. I fought with the person who told me--I said, 'No! No!'" Sherilyn Fenn, a dark-haired American beauty, has been to Italy. She knows.
Shattered illusions, flowers, angels, church, kitties--true, this is not what we think of when our thoughts turn to Sherilyn Fenn. But we can--we must--blame this on Audrey Home, the bad little rich girl with a taste for saddle shoes, tight sweaters and FBI agents, who turned Fenn overnight from a hard-working-but-obscure actress into an American sex icon.
Or have you forgotten? Don't the words "cherry stem" mean anything anymore? For there once was a place called "Twin Peaks." This short-lived TV series ended--Lord, can it be?--over two years ago. Ended with Fenn's Audrey getting blown to bits in a bank.
Ended not a moment too soon, but, while I've seen Fenn in many things since then, including a few post-"Peaks" movies, I've yet to see her in anything better than that classic first season of David Lynch's mad vision of beautiful Pacific Northwest babes, sex, dope, mysticism and murder. It's a safe bet that the average American hasn't seen her in anything else at all.
Fenn, 28, has been making movies and television for about 10 years, with almost 20 films to her credit. While she waits for a hit movie to take her back to the realm of stardom and acclaim she enjoyed, however fleetingly, with ''Twin Peaks,'' it must be a pain in the ass to be expected to come across like the sultry virgin teenybopper she played in a long-ago-canceled series. Like Tom Hanks finding out that they only really loved him as Kip in "Bosom Buddies."
I mention my Audrey dilemma to Fenn. "Even though you are an actress," I say, "and I do this for a living and should really know better."
"I knooow," she nods sympathetically (how un-Audrey). ''That same thing sometimes happens to me when I meet an actor--I expect them to be like their characters." Okay, but--she's never been expecting to meet Audrey Home. There's a difference.
As for 'Twin Peaks," she says, simply, "I'm happy to have been a part of something that was a success. The only time I was concerned was during the second season when it started to lose its focus and I was thinking, 'What if I get stuck here for five years? I would go crazy.'" (Or what if she went into a spin-off series: "Horne O' Plenty," maybe? ''Horne Blower"?)
It's easy to imagine that Fenn's had problems with typecasting ever since "Twin Peaks" ended. "Of course--they've offered every variation on Audrey Horne, none of which were as good or as much fun. I didn't say I'd never do it again, but..."
But she didn't do it in the big-screen version of "Peaks" (nor has she seen the film), because at the time she was off making movies that were worlds away from Lynch-burg.
Diary of a Hitman, Ruby, Of Mice and Men, Desire & Hell at Sunset Motel--these independent films of wildly varying quality barely made a ripple anywhere, but Fenn was clearly in a rush to exorcise Audrey from both her psyche and ours. Since then she's completed three more films--all radically different, she says, from each other and from what she's done in the past. They are: the much litigated Boxing Helena, Carl Reiner's Fatal Instinct, and last spring's Three of Hearts.
Few films in recent times have had the twisted history of Boxing Helena, an unapologetically outrageous, hallucinatory "love story" about an ice princess--played by Fenn--who falls into the hands of a demented, obsessional surgeon who removes her legs, then her arms, and keeps her in a box. Yowsa! And I've read the script--believe me, it's weirder than that. Jennifer Lynch (David's daughter) wrote it five years ago, when she was 19, at the behest of French import-exporter/fast-food chicken baron/film producer Philippe Caland. The script made the Hollywood rounds, where it disgusted and/or intrigued many, but was often dismissed as the vanity ramblings of a director's brat daughter. Unphased, Helena's producers asked Jennifer to direct.
That was three years ago. As if an independent film about a limbless lass, directed by a first-timer barely out of her teens didn't have the odds against it from the get-go, the producers couldn't seem to keep an actress in the title role. First Madonna said yes, then she said no (imagine what that means: Madonna scared of something). Then Kim Basinger took the part per a verbal agreement--but pulled out shortly before filming was to begin, leading to an astounding $8.9 million legal judgment against her that, among Hollywood actors at least, has given new, recycled life to the moribund phrase "Just Say No!"
"My agent sent me the script. She said, 'Oh God, oh God--but it's great. Read it.' I'd heard it described as a woman whose boyfriend gets mad, cuts of her arms and legs and sticks her in a box, and I thought, 'Well, that sounds ridiculous.' But I read it-- and it was about a million other things too. I met with Jennifer and we talked about what the story meant to us as women."
Such as?
"The idea of a woman being in a box--women do feel like they're in a box. The idea of having to be this woman who's very hard and doesn't let anyone near her and relies on her physicality, and then that's taken away from her. What it means to become handicapped and to rely on somebody that much. It scared the hell out of me. I could see this character. I tried to make her real."
The film was finally finished, with Fenn, and with Julian Sands as the doctor. But Boxing Helena doesn't yet have an American distributor. Will we ever see it here? "I think absolutely it'll be released, but they might not get the distribution they would like." That's a safe bet. No matter how you slice it, Helena is not mainstream American movie fare.
But Fenn remains optimistic about what the film could potentially do for her image. "I'm sure Boxing Helena will eclipse 'Twin Peaks' and Audrey Home for me. If," she adds, "people here go see it." While she waits, Fenn keeps her sunny side up and calls the film a "personal success. I'd do it again a million times. I'm very proud of the results."
Fatal Instinct, on the other hand, is definitely being released. It's an MGM film, directed by Carl Reiner, the television and movie legend responsible for "The Dick Van Dyke Show," All of Me, Rob Reiner and plenty more that says mainstream Hollywood/box-office potential/high profile. The film's a spoof of Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, et al. and, says Fenn, "it made me laugh. It's intelligent. Not like Airplane!"
Although Fatal Instinct satirizes noir detective flicks and modern day sex thrillers, Fenn says she doesn't play a femme fatale, but her detective-boss's "Girl Friday. Sean Young plays the vampy one."
And what was it like to work with legendary bad girl/set wrecker Sean? "I like Sean's work," demures Fenn. "In fact, at the beginning, I was one of the people who told Carl that he shouldn't listen to her reputation and should give her a chance. He ended up doing that, and she's funny in the movie."
Three of Hearts doesn't sound like it was an amusing film to make at all. I heard reports of trouble on the set of director Yurek Bogayevicz's love-triangle drama (Fenn and Kelly Lynch as estranged bisexual lovers, Billy Baldwin as the boy-toy), and I ask Fenn to elaborate. "Actually, speaking of verbal commitments, in Three of Hearts they were angry at me when I wasn't really happy with the project and was thinking of leaving. It was pretty wild because the director was confused and we were rewriting every day. And Mitch Glazer [one of the screenwriters] came on and started rewriting and silently directing and basically saved the movie--from my perspective."
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.