Madeleine Stowe: Mad About the Girl

"Let's put an end to that story right now," I tell her.

"Okay. It was a total lie, because nobody would take me seriously."

"Good. Now, for the first time, let's have the real story of Madeleine Stowe."

"All right. I wanted to go to USC cinema school and also study journalism. I went there and took a little acting so I'd know more about how everything worked, and I did two scenes. That was the extent of it. I was so bad. And I was more interested in just hanging out with these actors, because they were incredibly exotic to me. So I would just do all the stuff that needed to be done, like scraping paint off the walls and handing out programs.

One of the first real theater productions I worked on was The Tenth Man, which Richard Dreyfuss starred in. I loved watching him, he was really kind of at one of the peaks of his career. This is around the time of Close Encounters. I'd gotten fired from the job I was working on--I was a hostess in a restaurant--because they told me I was too spaced out and that I didn't know what I was doing. Which was totally true. So I had more time to go to the theater, because I had nothing else to do. One day, Dreyfuss's agent, his name was Mishkin, he saw me walking down the aisle of the theater. We were introduced, and he asked me if I would come in and meet him. He was kind of a legendary old guy. And then I started working as an actress, and I made up these lies about the plays. I even made up the titles. One of them was Speaking Of."

"I know," I say. "I saw that title and thought it sounded great and I was wondering why I never heard of the play."

"Now you know," she says, the giggles building again.

"Thank God you got that off your mind," I tell her. "Now maybe you can concentrate on getting your life settled."

"Nah, I'm about to do another movie, a Western called Bad Girls, with Mary Stuart Masterson, Andie MacDowell and Drew Barrymore. The deal is that we're women prostitutes in the Wild West. Very respectable women turned to prostitution back then because their husbands would die and there was no way of earning money and they were stranded out in the West. My character, Cyclone, is a woman who came from a very respectable family and just completely rebelled against it and took off and started running with a gang of real outlaws. She ends up running this brothel. It's a great story."

When we get to the ranch, Madeleine stops to introduce me to the horses. A new one has just been delivered, and she warns me that he probably won't be friendly. But she talks to all of them in this hypnotic tone that puts them, and me, into a trance. The new horse is nuzzling my neck within 15 minutes.

"Would you like me to get you some water?" Madeleine asks as we walk back to the house.

"Wait a minute," I say, coming awake. "You're not going to ask me to go into the house?"

Madeleine looks like a bird ready to take flight.

"Listen to me," I say, "I'm going inside. We just drove two hours and I am definitely going into the house. Don't worry, I won't peek in the drawers or the medicine cabinet."

She starts to laugh. "There is no medicine cabinet."

She ain't kidding. The bedroom has a bed and a lamp. Period. The bathroom not only doesn't have a medicine cabinet, it has no mirror.

"Jesus," I say, wandering around the partially furnished living room. "You guys are like some weird Buddhist sect...don't leave your mark on anything."

"I told you," she laughs. "But c'mon, I'll show you the upstairs." Two bedrooms, two beds, that's it.

We eat lunch at a little Mexican place where they make their own tortillas, and then head back to L.A. "Let me ask you something," I say as we cruise along. "In almost every movie I've seen of yours, there's always a scene where the director just has to get you naked. Sometimes they just linger there by your butt. It's almost funny."

"I've given a lot of thought to that lately," she says. "I never used to feel particularly nervous about love scenes. As I get older, I feel a lot more vulnerable about the whole situation, and it's very, very difficult for me to get in bed with another man. One of the things I liked in Mohicans was that there wasn't that kind of love scene, yet there was a lot of emotional intimacy between the characters. I think the reason I get a bit upset is that in the editing of love scenes, so much of the substance of the character goes, and the body is left there. When I talked to Bob Altman about Short Cuts, he wanted me for the role that Julianne Moore did. But I did not want to do that bottomless scene. I'm no longer much of a willing participant in that. Bob is great. He's not vicious. He has this way of getting these really personal things out of people, but I don't feel a maliciousness behind what he's doing. He's cynical, yet he has a lot of compassion. So when I told him I couldn't do that, he said, 'Okay, fine, let me think about this.' And he came back to me with this other part."

"I loved your character. She's totally politically incorrect. Her husband's cheating on her and she still wants to stay with him."

"Bob said, 'The main thing about her is, I don't really think she's got much of an attitude about it. She's just accepted it, it's just the way her life is. What would you like to do with it?' And I thought about it and came back to him and said, 'How about if her husband is a compulsive liar and makes these outrageous, outlandish stories up, and she's totally into it? She's the kind of woman who watches "Hard Copy," and reads the National Enquirer, and she can't wait to see what kind of ridiculous story he's gonna come up with, so she sets him up every time.'"

"Did you improvise that one great line?"

"We would improvise things in rehearsals. One day Tim [Robbins] made some kind of remark like, 'How can you bother me about this, I've been out all night with the crack kids and saving people's lives.' And I turned to him and said, 'Whose crack are we talking about?' It was just totally thrown in. It's weird, because she happens to like this unhealthy relationship. It gives her something to do. And I think it's a very honest thing for Altman to go for, because I think there are quite a few women who need that in their lives. So, anyway, I got to do a Bob Altman movie, but I didn't have to walk around naked."

"Wait a minute," I say. "Don't you play a scene where you're modeling for your sister and you don't have anything on?"

"Yes," she says with a laugh. "I didn't think you'd remember. It wasn't that big a deal, and it felt totally fine to me. In Blink, I had it in my contract that I would absolutely not be forced to do any nudity, and what I did choose to do would be of my own choosing at that particular moment, and I had the right to go over it with the director, and anything I didn't like would be destroyed. But there's this love scene between me and Aidan [Quinn]. We had very carefully discussed this a couple of days ahead of time. We're lying on our sides and Aidan is basically entering me from behind. You don't see anything, you only see my breasts for a flash, and my character is talking about how she could be with a man, any man, they're all interchangeable to her because she's blind. Aidan's character is totally incapable of being in any kind of relationship. Anyway, you see what's happening to these two people. It'll be interesting to see what the ratings are, because, even though you don't see anything at all, there is something about it that shocks a person. We're not accustomed to seeing people like that."

"Is that a big no-no, getting it from behind?"

"Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, it's not anal intercourse, but it's like somehow, in their head, they think that you're buttfucking."

We laugh so hard we have to pull over to the side of the road.

"You can maim and slaughter," I say, "but no buttfucking."

"Yeah. It's so crazy. When you shoot love scenes, the emphasis is almost always on the female, because the director would rather look at the woman than at the man. When we were shooting the sequence to Blink, it was really, really important to me that they got Aidan's story in that love scene. To the point where we went back and picked up something, a bit where I'm sound asleep and you see what's happening to him. I don't want to sit there and look at me, I don't want to sit there and look at the woman, I want to see the two people together. But it's like the director wants to be that man.

"When I did Unlawful Entry, it had this scene where Ray Liotta beats up the guy who broke into Kurt Russell's and my house. They originally had a much more severe beating scene that evoked horrible feelings."

"Yeah, it was right after the Rodney King thing..."

"Yes. And Jonathan Kaplan did it to really mess with people's feelings about this black guy entering the white person's home. You were supposed to feel anger toward him, then turn around and see him become victimized. Jonathan really wanted to toy with people. I thought it was an interesting thing for him to attempt to do. But they had to cut that out, because people couldn't take it. They would rather see someone get shot in this totally unrealistic fashion at the end of the movie."

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