In the wee hours of the morning, Marisa Tomei lets down her defenses long enough to chat about whether she and Joe Pesci will make a sequel to My Cousin Vinny, the gossip that hounds her, the advantages of dating men who hall from Beaver, PA, and the place where she keeps her Oscar.
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Be sure to call her 'Academy Award winner Miss Tomei,' like we have to, because it's in her contract" warns playwright Nicky Silver, grinning wryly. Marisa Tomei, the My Cousin Vinny Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner and featured actress of the recent The Paper, is starring in Silver's limited-run off-Broadway dark comedy, Fat Men in Skirts. The playwright continues, "And do get her to tell you how, since the Oscar, she's turned down everything, including Spielberg's offer for her to play Liam Neeson's part in Schindler's List, because she didn't want to put on all that weight or to play unsympathetic."
Tomei play unsympathetic on-screen? Get real. Offscreen, however, according to the nasty dish that dogs her, could be a whole other story. I'm in New York not only to find out who Tomei is but also why people are saying such terrible things about her. Considering the All About Eve-ish gossip that's hounded her for the past year--that she's become an utterly self-centered, self-enchanted, self-deluded spitfire--I find it amusing that Tomei has arranged for us to meet for the first time backstage after I watch her give her second performance that night in Silver's play. Very Margo Channing of her.
After the curtain falls, Tomei greets me cheerily, then finds herself set upon by effusively congratulatory friends, family members and such certifiably hip actors as Steve Buscemi, late of Reservoir Dogs and The Hudsucker Proxy. Buscemi indicates that their mutual friend, Rosie--referring to Rosie Perez, Tomei's scene-stealing co-star in Untamed Heart--said they'd all get together soon and hang out. "Well, you know Rosie," Tomei quips, assuring Buscemi they'll get together, but apparently no time soon.
Finally, around one a.m., we're hurtling along with a pack of Tomei's cronies toward a nearby post-theater hangout. The chat is fast and cutting when Tomei, looking up at me with her high beams, suddenly pulls a surprise: "I thought it'd be fun if we sat with my friends while we talk, you know?" At the moment, her entourage includes playwright Silver, an actor from the play whose name is Matt, the play's director, plus Tomei's personal assistant and her ex-boyfriend, Ivan. I tell Tomei I think a gang-style interview is a bad idea. As a matter of fact, if it weren't so late, it's an idea that would make me call off an interview on the spot. Laughing, she assures me that if her crowd's too rowdy, we can always move away to talk one-on-one.
When we're seated at the restaurant, Ivan the ex-boyfriend offers, from out of nowhere, "Did you know that I was born in Beaver, Pennsylvania?"
"We've known each other for 10 years, yet you have never before let that be known to me," Tomei says. "That explains a lot, babe.
"We shot the opening of Just in Time near Beaver," Tomei recalls, deftly dropping in the name of her upcoming movie, "and I used to crack up seeing the highway signs that read like, '10 miles to Beaver.'" The whole jolly group gets into beaver talk.
"Whose beaver are we talking about?" pipes up Ivan.
"Mine" Tomei bellows, then covers her face, muttering, "Oh, God, I'm going to come off in this interview like this total whore."
Shouting over Tomei, Silver declares, "Let me tell you, Beaver is an ugly and depressing place, I hear. Which is not the case with other beavers." This with a glance toward Tomei, adding, "I wouldn't know personally, but that's what I hear."
Just now, several more thespians drop by to buss Tomei's cheek and wish her well. She is, after all, a member of Naked Angels, the cutting-edge theater group, whose company includes Fisher Stevens and Lili Taylor. "Ahhhh, yes, darrrling, the theater crowd" Tomei says, making Channing-style moues with her mouth. But she doesn't hold any pose long--suddenly, she's snapping her fingers to oldies like "Too Many Fish in the Sea," doing an impromptu, impressive frug in her chair. But, for all her New York-girl bravado, it's clear she's skittish. I decide we should get on with the interview and broach Topic A. How has she gotten such a rep, so fast, for being a bitch on wheels?
"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."
If it works depends largely on Tomei and Downey Jr.'s chemistry. This is their second movie together, counting Tomei's teensy turn as director-comic Mabel Normand in Chaplin. I suggest Tomei fill in the blank: "Kissing Robert Downey is like..." Her eyes widen, she lets out a howl, and blurts out, "No fucking way. No way at all."
When I ask Tomei if she's romantic, she grins. "I try to follow my passion. I haven't been in love a lot of times. Three times." Is she in love now? I know she recently broke up with a man she met while making the movie. "No, not at this second," she answers. "Well, I mean, only with you, that is."
Humming along with Smokey Robinson on "The Tracks of My Tears," Tomei turns her gaze to her old boyfriend. "Ivan? When I was desperately in love with you, if you can think back that far, I'd play this song on a tape and warm up for a show I was doing. You were my total substitution for the guy I had to be in love with in the show." Ivan salutes her with his drinking glass. "Now, we're like best friends," she says. "I mean, he does come from Beaver, which means there are, ummm, certain advantages."
It seems the moment to ask Tomei for three good reasons why someone should never get romantically entangled with a celebrity. "Their narcissism, their narcissism and their narcissism," she answers. "There is a wound that spurs us to creativity. Otherwise, I really like show people. But the wound, the narcissism that comes from it, alone is a downer enough." What spurs her on in such a tough business? "The cool schedule, the hours," she quips. "I like that. And, seriously, I suppose certain wounds that I'll never know. And I don't want to know. Plus, I have no other skills. And it is fucking fun."
Tomei seems to have a lock these days on most of the better urban-Madonna roles around--she's grabbing all the streetwise, working-class, ethnic-girl parts once pocketed by Lorraine Bracco, Annabella Sciorra, Laura San Giacomo and Madonna herself. In fact, though both Tomei and Madonna nearly played tormented artist Frida Kahlo in duelling bio movies, consider how Tomei has since outstripped Madonna. When the latter pulled out of playing the waitress who falls in love with Christian Slater in Untamed Heart, Tomei did it instead; by the time Madonna was dropped from Angie and reputedly took a pass on It Could Happen to You, Tomei was already in a position to turn down both. And did.
"Yeah, but she was not going to do Just in Time," Tomei fires off. "Angie, well that was a possibility that just didn't work out. Frida [Luis Valdez's Kahlo project] was tossed around and, with Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip [now titled It Could Happen to You], I just opted to do Just in Time instead." So, did Tomei snatch the movie career Madonna might have had? "She snatched my career," Tomei says, laughing, "because I was planning to go on the road and tour with a lot of glue and a lot of wigs and a lot of boys. I mean, damn. I did so want to be a musical star, darrrling. I just can't sing."
But Tomei could still have Madonna's movie career, if she ever again does a corker like Zandalee, a sub Zalman King-esque sextravaganza, in which Tomei plays the white-trashy girlfriend of Big Easy painter Nicolas Cage. "A good late-night video, huh?" she says. "Hey, on that movie, I met Nic Cage for the first time and I worked in New Orleans, which I love. It was like, 'Come to New Orleans and have your own party.'" If fortune continues to smile on her, her Zandalees are behind her. How good is most of the material she reads? "Go to the next question, darrrling. Let me say this, there's always the persistent horror story that there's nothing but horrible material around. But I've felt lucky. The next project, The Perez Family, I feel great about."
I ask about other films she almost made, or wanted but didn't get. "Well, I nearly did Jungle Fever," she recalls, "but couldn't because it was at the same time as My Cousin Vinny. I almost did Four Weddings and a Funeral and I was really close on Mad Dog and Glory, which I wanted to do. I was in rehearsals for Hell Camp, a movie I was going to shoot in Japan for Milos Forman [but after] Sony bought Columbia, they pulled the plug. Milos was so upset. He suspected that something about the movie offended Japanese sensibilities, even though he kept saying, 'This movie is a love letter, a looove letter.' I'll go to movies that I nearly was in and go, 'Ohhh, why didn't I do that?' But, in the end, I see how it wouldn't have been right for me. Not just for my career. For whatever reason, that wasn't a movie for me. I feel I've made good decisions. I'm happy with what I've decided to do."
Does she admire her competition? "Jodie Foster," she answers, like a shot, "gives the best interviews. That's every thinking girl's fantasy. Every thinking actress's fantasy. Sometimes, I think about her and go, 'Oh, just give it up now.' But, you know, in terms of projects, I go through the same filter-down process for scripts from those 'top five gals' everyone talks about. I'm always in the position where I'm not necessarily somebody's first choice. It's par for the course--I haven't made a movie that's made a lot of money. Vinny made money, but not the 'superstar' amount of money. Let's say I have a while to go before I'd think about developing projects for myself. Do I personally make a lot of money? Yeah. How else, darrrling, could I treat everyone tonight?"
I ask her, since she once played a waitress, what is Hollywood's obsession with portraying hash slingers as earthy, worldly sages? I mean, think Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie and Johnny, Lily Tomlin in Short Cuts, Susan Sarandon in White Palace and Thelma & Louise. "It's more like how come all actresses have been waitresses?" she observes. "It's a fantasy that men have. They serve food, which is kind of like a mommy thing, huh? Also, lots of people who have been starving artists, like actors and writers, have been waiters and waitresses. It's a world that they know and they probably tap into that."
For now, Tomei has her sights set on wider-ranging roles. She played Michael Keaton's pregnant wife in The Paper, about which she says little beyond, "We were all going fast on that one." She is already shooting her Cuban movie--which she refuses to acknowledge sounds anything like the deadly Greta Scacchi/Jimmy Smits movie, Fires Within--and alludes to several more tantalizing possibilities. But what about that much-talked-about, but never delivered, sequel to My Cousin Vinny? Or is Joe Pesci too big a pain in the butt to work with again? "No, not at all," she says, "not to me." How could she possibly spark such chemistry with such a nudge? "It's got to be reincarnation, right? Karma? We got along like wildfire," she says. "We have a common sense of humor, a family, neighborhoody kind of thing, ya know? There were these strange things that we have in common. He was always like, 'You know what you're doing. Don't let anybody tell you you don't. Go for it.' The day of the Oscars, we had rehearsals because we presented together," she continues. "He looked right into my eyes and said, 'No matter what happens, don't you worry about it. I know that you're great and I love you.' Anyway, when I got offstage, he was the first one I saw and he said he was really proud of me. He gave me a lot of confidence. He's very generous and he has a great fucking sense of humor. What's so great about this business is that you have friends of all ages, people you wouldn't necessarily get a chance to meet in another business."
Yeah, so if they're so chummy, where's the movie, already? "I saw a script. Then they said they were going to rewrite it, but I haven't seen that yet and I haven't heard a thing about it," Tomei explains. "Timing's the thing. It depends on when and all that. I'm sure that we'd have a good time again--we were in a groove together. So, another one, why not?" But, surely, if she has high aspirations for her screen career, she might harbor some reservations about backtracking, some nervousness about letting pop-culture historians view her merely as Vinny's squeeze. What does she hope a future encyclopedia of actors might say about her? She makes a face and, doing an accent that's pure Olive Oyl, she says, "Her teeth were her claim to fame. She couldn't act her way out of a box."
Before we take our separate cabs, I ask Tomei what she wants out of her career. "To be able to fly with people who are just so fucking brilliant. To reach the heights with other artists," she says, "and to have a good time. I think the fantasy of being a movie star is more powerful than the reality. So, for me, even if it's not a great film or a great play I'm doing, to know that you went for it. You had an experience that made you grow artistically and personally. What's really satisfying is knowing that you did a good job." So, how good a job does she think she did on this interview? "I'll only know when it comes out," she answers. "And you know I'll completely deny everything about the beaver, darrrling."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Drew Barrymore for the April Movieline.