Marisa Tomei: Marisa Darrrling

"Ohhhhhh, ask them," she moans, cocking an eyebrow toward her cohorts. I assure her I will, but I want to know from her.

Did she, as rumored, actually growl and bitch at a hairstylist who had requested a delay in their appointed schedule so that she could mourn two unexpected deaths in her immediate family? Did she actually alienate slews of crew members on Just in Time? Or are people just gunning for her these days? "Well, darrrling, I had no idea I was actually being called a bitch on wheels," she says. "I don't think I am. I'm not an asshole. In this town, a girl better be ready for anything, from something that sweeps her off her feet to something that knocks her on her ass. Some people, even people I've known for a long time, automatically assume I'm going to be awful. They don't realize what they're seeing is just my same old habits from before."

Old habits? Is she telling me that she has always been a monster? "It's not that much of an issue, really," she observes, which sounds to me like "No comment." Certainly her purported behavior has been at the center of the storm in the gossip which insists that when Jack Palance announced the Best Supporting Actress two Oscar shows ago, he actually read out the wrong name--Tomei's, that is. This tale has been thoroughly disavowed by a representative from the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse, but even after the rumor had supposedly been put to rest, Variety ran an item titled "Tomei Poisoning" wondering why Tomei was the magnet of such talk, and quoted an unnamed filmmaker who claimed that no one who was close to Tomei two years ago is in her circle now.

Tomei says, "I don't think people, the press, are on my case any worse than they are on other people." She adds, with a laugh, "In fact, I think the response to me in the press has been pretty much apathetic. Which may be the worst injury of all, I'm not sure!"

Okay, sure, but what about the dire rumors of rampant diva-ism that floated back to the States from Italy, where she was shooting Just in Time? While she admits there were communication problems, she insists they stemmed from the fact that, although her great-grandparents came from northern Italy, she didn't learn much of the language growing up in a restored Victorian house in Brooklyn.

"People there would come up to me and start talking in Italian and I was, like, 'I can't respond.' Even though I've got Italian blood in me, I can't speak Italian. The miscommunication was with the local people. You know, Italians. But I really haven't heard those things about [me] to that extreme. You're hurting my feelings now." And here's what makes me certain Tomei can act: she stares up at me from beneath lowered lids, eyes brimming, lip trembling. What a performance! And with that, she rises, moist-eyed, and excuses herself-- "Gotta pee," she explains--and sashays off to the pee-shooter.

Matt, Tomei's co-star in the play, has been listening to all this and now looks as if he'd like to impale me with his fork. "She's not giving any bullshit to the press," he hisses. "It's that she doesn't take any. She knows what she wants and she goes after it. She's not about anything that can be an obstacle to that, which the press can be." Ivan, the ex-boyfriend confides, "Movie people don't understand her yet because there isn't a lot of work yet they can judge by. But she's really got the goods. I think her next movie will begin to show everyone that she's the real thing."

Indeed, when she returns, Tomei has apparently set aside her hurt feelings, and talks animatedly about her next movie, The Perez Family, in which she plays a woman in love with Anjelica Huston's husband, played by Alfred Molina. "I'm really happy about this movie, which has wonderful writing," she says of the script by Robin Swicord, to be directed by Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala). "It takes place in 1980, when a lot of prisoners were let out of Cuba's jails. Alfred's character is a political prisoner and we're on the boat together. We fall in love."

Let's talk about Tomei's winning the Oscar. What was the experience like for her? "You don't know, sitting home watching it, that it's scaaaaaary being there. You don't want to mess up. There's this whole roomful of very talented, very powerful people, plus the whole world watching."

When I ask her to complete the sentence, "Hollywood is a place where..." she says, "Well, didn't Marilyn Monroe say it best? 'Hollywood is a place where they pay you a thousand dollars for your kiss and 50 cents for your soul.'"

I've heard that Tomei got $2 million to make Just in Time, but I wonder, money and acclaim aside, whether the gold statuette helps do anything to even up old scores. Does it salve the wounds left by old boyfriends who might have shredded her heart, or the teacher who made her feel like dog do? "My past hasn't been too disturbed," she asserts. "When I was first starting, I went to an agent who told me, 'Listen, you'll be lucky if you do summer stock. Pack it up.' Once in a while I think about him, but I'm happy with myself. So, what does he matter?"

What's the best advice anyone's given her since her Oscar? She shrugs, "I better ask for some now," and calls out the question to her pals. Matt, the actor, shouts, "That you should play Lorena Bobbitt just like she wants you to!" This is a reference to the famous penis-slicer's public pronouncement that she wants Tomei to play her in the TV movie. Tomei roars with laughter. The playwright says, "Mine's serious. Particularly now, anyone in a situation like yours needs one person they can trust completely. If you don't have that, you die." Tomei listens, covers her mouth with her hand and whispers to me, "I think I'll go with 'play Lorena Bobbitt.'"

"Since you're talking about the Oscar," adds the playwright, "ask her where she keeps hers." Okay, I'll bite: Where exactly is her Oscar? "In storage," she explains. "Actually, all my stuff's in storage because my apartment isn't ready yet. I haven't seen it, held it, since the night I brought it back to New York for a huge party where I invited everyone, from childhood through right now. I knew everyone was going to want to touch it, so we all took pictures with it. Then we took it back to L.A. because we had to get it engraved. My assistant was carrying it in, like, a gym bag, and she put it through the conveyor belt at the airport and the buzzers went off. So, this very sweet Indian woman took it out of the bag and had no idea what the hell it was. She looked at it and went, 'You been working out with this?'"

I ask Tomei how she might react in real life, if, as in her film Just in Time, she went to a fortuneteller who told her the man of her destiny was Robert Downey Jr.? "What would I do?" she repeats. "Well, darrrling, first I wouldn't stake everything on a fortune-teller. I mean, really! But, I'd have to follow my heart. Ultimately, even the character in the movie does that, too. I would do what my character would do in the sense of following my heart. Going for it, totally. That's what I liked about the movie. But I haven't seen it yet. I just didn't know if it was going to be a little on the overly-saccharine side, you know. From what I've heard, it isn't that way. It's very, very romantic, which can just be a glorious, heart-soaring kind of thing. If it works."

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