After being trapped in career hell, romance hell and scandal hell, James Woods says he's back on top, working with filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone. Here, the actor lets fly about greedy agents, double-crossing lovers, baring his all on-screen and why he hates hookers.
"I was treated so horribly, so genuinely evilly by one particular person in my life, that it stunned me to learn that people had to be that evil," declares James Woods with considerable passion. The actor, whose career went for a few years, by his own admission, "cold, cold," is hot. Hot again with three high-profile features on the heels of a blistering performance on cable as Citizen Cohn. Let's see. There's the high-octane The Specialist, opposite Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone, the festival-type fare Curse of the Starving Class with Kathy Bates, and Jason Alexander's hip comedy Stranger Things.
We'll get to all that career resurgence stuff later, but right now Woods is busy doing Woods. Which is something like being strapped into the front car on the world's biggest thrill-ride. Just like he is on-screen, the guy's pore-oozingly intense in real life. His psychomojo is in overdrive. He can be snarly one minute, then boyishly open, then confrontational, then sweet as berries, then vainglorious and self-deprecating.
I've been asking him how, after becoming a real comer for doing prickly stuff like The Onion Field and Salvador, he got trapped with Glenn Close in the politically correct amber of Immediate Family, with Dolly Parton in the gooey, feel-good amber of Straight Talk and with Michael J. Fox in the surefire-make-a-buck amber of The Hard Way. Woods, as is his wont, starts off answering a question on cruise control, then veers off-road into the personal. "What's the difference between Sleepless in Seattle and Straight Talk? It's a roll of the dice," he says. "But, truth is, I went through a really bad year two years ago. Whatever could go wrong, you name it, did. A best friend had a heart attack and died. Then I broke up with a business associate, went through a divorce, had unwarranted bad publicity, career problems, money problems. One of those years where, as a friend says, 'It's guaranteed that when you wake up, your shoelaces will break.' One of those years you look to the heavens and say, 'What else can you do to me?' It was almost Job-like. I say this with some degree of humor now. But only some."
Woods takes a deep breath, then continues: "And, in the confluence of bad things, there was this person in my life who caused me great trouble, who lied to me so venomously, so calculatedly and with such a horrible motive: greed. And, in the confluence of bad things, there was this person in my life who caused me great trouble, who lied to me so venomously, so calculatedly and with such a horrible motive: greed. I was being lied about and trashed by someone out to make a buck. I went through the wringer. People who lie and cheat and trash celebrities in the press just to make a buck--knowing that the person is vulnerable, knowing that a celebrity literally doesn't have the same rights under the law as a non-celebrity--are horrible. But that person has been utterly and completely eradicated from my life. I have scraped the shit off my shoe and I have gone on."
Hmmmm, I think, to which shit in Woods's very deep pile could he be referring to? Is he maybe referring to Sean Young, his The Boost co-star, whose entanglement with him was supposedly commemorated by dismembered dolls on his doorstep, harassing phone calls and photos of mutilated animals in his mailbox? Is he possibly referring to Heather Graham, with whom he made Diggstown, and for whom, at 44, he publicly declared of the actress half his age, "I'm wildly in love with her"? Or is he perhaps dissing ex-wife Sarah Owen who, in a 1991 People story and on TV's "Hard Copy," portrayed Woods as an emotionally volatile batterer addicted to porn videos, phone sex and such high jinks as spanking the monkey while lurking outside her cancer-stricken mother's bedroom door?
Though Woods won't say for the record exactly who he's bitching and moaning about, it isn't tough to smoke out the mystery offender. "A particular person sat down and decided that she was going to get millions of dollars out of me any way she could," he continues, raging with anger. "This became a mounted military campaign. I won't say who, but her life has only been about this for several years." I figure, scratch Heather Graham. "If you look at the rest of my life," he continues, "you've never seen me in drug rehab, I've never been arrested, never had complaints about me. Nothing. One person decided, 'I'm going to land this mine and dig as deep as I can.' And if you look at the facts, they're staggering. Staggering. The lawyer who stopped them said, 'Check the background, the credibility, the motive of the person involved.' And they did."
When I ask him point blank about the controversial People story, his energy revs into overdrive, as his speech turns voluminous. "Kathy Bates called [the magazine] and said, 'Does no one want to talk about the fact that this guy is still my friend, that we work together all the time and I've loved him forever?' I told her, 'They're not going to listen to you. They're a bunch of lying cock-suckers.' Gerry Spence, the lawyer who's never lost a case in his life, said, 'I will bring them to their knees. Sue these people and I simply guarantee unequivocally you will be a multimillionaire.' I said, 'If I do it and have these pieces of shit in my life for five years, it's not worth it.' Anyway, who cares? I wipe my ass with People magazine.
"I am not referring to Sean Young," he volunteers, eliminating the only other possibility I had in mind besides his ex-wife Owen. "But this person, by court order, can never talk to me, come near me, doesn't have a dime from me--goodbye. I'm not saying who it is, I'm only commenting. And, if you draw any conclusions, make sure you make it very clear they're your conclusions. That person I totally and utterly defeated. I never get involved with toxic people anymore. Woe to the man or woman who thinks that the capacity to kill is not lurking behind these civilized eyes. Because it definitely is. I've paid my dues for three lifetimes."
It seems the right moment to ask Woods how he would react if he learned that Sean Young was to be the co-star of one of his upcoming assignments? "Sean Young is not a problem for me," he asserts. "I suggested Sean for a movie that I was doing. I think she's a wonderful actress, a beautiful woman, very aware. And she has made clear to me through intermediaries and vice versa that we both know what the problem was, that the whole scheme was perpetrated on both of us by someone else--who will remain nameless. We were both victims, played off against each other, in a public forum, for profit. Period. That's the way we both perceive it. If it's true or not, I don't know. But I think we were both dumb. We both took the bait.
"This is a seven-year-old issue, so I get a little bored talking about it," he says, not entirely convincingly. "But let me make it clear: there's not a part of my life that doesn't have a positive welcome mat for Sean, artistically. We'll probably never be friends because I don't think she would choose to be. I don't know what her feelings are--probably not as positive as mine. Maybe they are."
For those of you who can't wait to hear Woods talk about his new movies, skip ahead. I'm having too good a time hearing him on more personal stuff--like when he tells me that he has temporarily sworn off romance, the better to focus on keeping going his career comeback. "I'm single," he says. "It's a bummer. I haven't been seriously involved with anybody for two or three years. And nothing against actresses, but it's not a good idea for me to get involved with an actress. I'm almost afraid to tell you this because I know you just want to trash me. My publicist said, 'They're going to trash you in this interview,' and I said, 'So what? It'll be fun.' Anyway, here's my life: up at six- thirty. The days I don't have stuff to do, I play golf, which is like the Zen experience of all life. I go to my physical therapist, because I've got a bad back. I go home. I work, I talk to the architect who's building my house. Maybe on a Saturday night I'll go out with a woman friend or double date. I have a frighteningly conventional life."
Knowing that conventional in Tinseltown is unlike conventional anywhere else, I ask Woods whether, as a bachelor about town, he ever trafficked with Heidi Fleiss or one of her equivalents. "I cannot imagine why a man would want to go to a prostitute," he says. "Why would I want to be intimate with somebody who doesn't care whether you live or die? They'd rather you be dead, so that they could steal your wallet. All that high-class call-girl bullshit? I don't care if you're at some Saudi Arabian sheik's house for $100,000 a night or you're blowing a guy in a car on Sunset Boulevard, a whore is a cock-sucking whore. I loathe whores, I loathe people who go to them. I would shoot myself first. A whore hates herself, hates the world, hates you by definition. When this [Fleiss] thing came out, I said, 'Why are they jeopardizing their marriages, their careers, their lives, over a whore?'"
Hey, just asking. After all, judging by his track record, long-lasting relationships with women may not be the thing he's best at. "I've had the shit pounded out of me every single time," he concurs. "The problem with everybody in Hollywood is that they want the BBD--the bigger, better deal. So, you think, 'Christ, man, my marriage depends upon my movie grosses! God forbid if the picture doesn't make a hundred million.' My marriages have been hurt because with so many women, you go to a party and the guy with the picture in the top five moneymakers happened to be there and goodbye, it's over. I mean, you have to check the party guest list to make sure you're not going to get a divorce that night."
Whether he's going stag these days or not, there's no question that Woods looks in great shape, lean and hungry. What pulled him through his ordeals? He tells me, "I quit smoking and every single day, I remember thinking, 'Well, at least I don't smoke.' It was one little thing to hold on to. The other thing I had to hold on to was the fact that my whole life had been one of a spotless reputation. I don't drink. I don't do drugs or beat my wife or gamble or do any of the bad things in life that people are haunted by. And also, I had this really terrific body of work, thank God, of which I could simply be proud. That took the curse off this confluence of events that was simply a string of bad luck and of not paying attention to the signs. I lament the missed opportunities in my life while I was busy tussling with the devil. But I decided, 'I'll lick my wounds later,' then I literally performed a bootstrap operation on my career and worked my ass to the bone."
Work, he has. I tell him how disappointed I am that he and Sharon Stone--who years ago was beaten out by Sean Young to co-star with Woods in The Boost--didn't cause a scandal or two while making The Specialist. "We had our little moments of 'actor intensity,'" he says, laughing, "but she has a terrific sense of humor. I'd say stuff like, 'Sharon, in this scene, do you think you could do such-and-such?' and she'd say, 'Well, I could have if you'd hired me for The Boost.' There's a scene where my character beats the shit out of her and I asked Rod Steiger if I could borrow something he did in In the Heat of the Night where he hit a guy with a lot of small slaps, which is very humiliating. Sharon said, 'Go ahead, do it. Don't bruise me.' What started as six or seven little slaps wound up, with 10 different takes, to be, like 60. I could tell it was really bothering her. It's really unsettling. Here's this multimillionaire movie star having to be degraded and humiliated and she was an absolute champion about it. I don't know why people trash her so much. She's really a movie star on-screen, absolutely electric and edgy."
I tell Woods how standup I think it is that a guy whose penis has been so talked-about publicly, by everyone from Dana Delany to Sean Young, chose to let it all hang out in a scene in Curse of the Starving Class. In fact, at the screening I attended, when the notorious Woods member appeared on-screen, a woman nearby turned to her companion and said, "What's the big deal?" When I tell him, Woods laughs off the subject, as well as the much-publicized comments about said appendage. "To have to end up naked in the rain holding a lamb--very Biblical New Testament imagery--with a crew of 100 big Waxahachie, Texas drivers and all, and these huge rain bars overhead to provide a downpour, I wasn't thinking about being exposed. I'm playing a man completely in alcohol dementia in that scene. A long way across the field, this big Texas guy bellows, 'Mr. Woods?' and the whole crew stops. I said, 'Yes, sir,' thinking this guy is going to beat the shit out of me with a crowbar saying, 'Are you crazy running around naked in Texas?' Instead, he said, 'I just want to say it's an honor to work with you because you're giving art to people and putting your heart and soul into it.'"
Fine, fine. But where, in the career dossier of a guy who seems born to weird-out in Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese movies, are his Tarantino and Scorsese movies? This strikes a nerve. "It's so bizarre that you're saying this--are you aware that I'm doing a Scorsese movie?" Woods asserts, peering at me oddly, telling me how he'd just landed a role in Casino with Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci. How did it happen? "About four months ago I heard about Casino, in which there were two leads and the rest are just cameo roles. Toni Howard, one of my new agents at ICM, said, 'Every agent in town calls Scorsese, it's like hitting a brick wall. I'd never recommend this usually, but how would you feel about going in yourself?' I called, talked to his secretary and said something most agents don't want you to say: 'Take this down verbatim: Jimmy Woods called and said he will work for you anywhere, anytime, in any part, for any price.' And I got an offer to play this wonderful, pivotal part, only a week's work, like, five little scenes, but the character precipitates the whole debacle of the script. So, how did it happen? I just asked."
The pointed way in which Woods had uttered "new agent" wasn't lost on me. After all, before recently moving to ICM, he'd been represented by Creative Artists Agency for over a decade, during which time he was doing award-winning turns in TV movies while losing out on such roles as the heavy in Philadelphia. While he goes out of his way to say nice things about the industriousness of his former agents, he nonetheless attributes some of his recent career woes to them. "People want to see me do powerful, great characters flying at the edge of the envelope or really bizarre, wacky comedy. I don't think trying to make me a conventional leading man working in 'these sort of fluffy movies was the right move. I'm really not that guy. Bobby De Niro is not that guy. Anytime one of us tries to do that, everybody goes, 'What are you doing? All CAA thinks about is the biggest salary you can get, period. My [former] agents were saying stuff like, 'If you star in a movie with so-and-so, and it makes $100 million, then you can work with anybody.' I said, 'You know what? I beg to differ. I don't think that if you do a movie with Pauly Shore, with all due respect, Sydney Pollack is then going to hire you.'"
Sighing deeply, he observes, "If there was anybody meant to star in a Tarantino movie, it's me. Ten days after I went with Toni Howard and Ed Limato at ICM, they sent me up to meet Tarantino. The first words out of his mouth were, 'Finally, I get to meet James Woods.' I'm sitting there thinking, 'I haven't worked on a decent movie in two years and he's saying this?' I said, 'What do you mean?' and he said, 'I wrote Mr. So-and-So in Reservoir Dogs for you.' I don't want to say the exact role because the actor who played the role is really wonderful. I said, 'Look, I've had a really bad year, so could you explain why you didn't offer it to me if you wrote it for me?' He said, 'We made a cash offer five times.' Of course, it was for less an amount than my [former] agents would want me to work for, but that's not the point. I wanted to cry. I'd rather work for a third of my salary and make Reservoir Dogs.
"But I didn't get to do Reservoir Dogs, didn't get to know Quentin, so I didn't get to do True Romance or Pulp Fiction. All because somebody else decided money was more important. They were treating me like I was an idiot. I told my new agents, 'Never treat me like a child.' Now I'm getting 20 scripts a week, and the day before yesterday, I finished my fourth film in a row, and I've signed on to do two more. I made less money this year doing six movies than I made when I was at CAA doing two movies. And I couldn't be happier."
Oliver Stone will produce one of those two upcoming pictures, Killer, based on the journal of a condemned psycho killer who rehabilitated himself while doing time in Leavenworth in the '30s. Speaking of missed opportunities, I'd always heard that Stone bypassed Woods for the role Tommy Lee Jones landed in JFK, and when I ask for details, Woods replies, his voice dripping with disdain, "A young woman secretary mismanaged some communication between Oliver and me about two years ago and it caused an incredibly bad rift for about a year. Our friendship and our love for each other was victimized by somebody else's narcissism and carelessness and lying and stupidity."
An employee slip-up aside, didn't something more specific-- and decidedly more unpleasant--transpire around the time Stone made JFK? Woods admits, "Oliver offered me a part in JFK and my agent at the time said, 'You shouldn't do this. You should be on equal footing with Oliver.' I said, 'This is a very expensive, complex film and they need a box-office star like Kevin Costner to play the lead role. I'll do one of the smaller or cameo parts--everybody else is.' He said, 'No, you're too big for that, you're not doing a cameo.' I listened, I let my friend down and I really regretted it. That's why I called Scorsese and that's why if Oliver wants me to play an extra in his next movie, I'm going to do it. I made a mistake. I'm proud of the fact that I was gracious enough to tell him that I had made a mistake and that he was gracious enough to say, 'Don't even think twice about it. Let's just continue with our friendship.' When we finally resolved it, there was this incredible sense of loss when we both realized that each of us thought that the other was dealing in this kind of adversity. In fact, both of us were missing each other's friendship, company and artistic nourishment."
These days, Woods is full of bright hope about the upturn in his professional and personal fortunes. "Like after any disaster, a fire, an earthquake or anything else, there's a rejuvenation process. Now, I have no crummy girlfriends or wife, no toxic business relationships, I'm building a wonderful home, I have a great career, my health is good. I'm being offered four movies at a time, all of a sudden people are willing to pay my price. I'm back."
But I want to know who is back? Is this the real Woods? Or a nicer, more agreeable Woods--one that's perhaps just a veneer? "I'll tell you who is really back: the guy that I always wanted to be and didn't have the courage to believe I really was," he confides. "I had the confidence as an actor, but not as a man, to believe that I was worth all of the good fortune that God has graced me with. I think a lot of it had to do with having my best friend killed in front of me when I was 10 and two years later, my father died. I think those early childhood traumas make you feel like you're living on borrowed time. You're very hard on yourself. It took having someone lie about me so horribly, so hatefully, with such terrible motives, to make me realize, 'You know what? This is so untrue.' All of a sudden it liberated me from all those other pressures of guilt that I felt in my life. I said, 'I'm a really decent, good man. Why am I so hard on myself?' If I have a few warts, make a few mistakes, hey, I'm human. So what? That's who's back."
So, is little Jimmy happy at last? "A year ago, I would have said, 'I'm not satisfied with my career, I've lost my direction.' Now, it's almost perfect. You know why I do what I do? I'll paraphrase Zooey: 'I do it for the fat lady in the dark in the fourth row.'"
______________
Stephen Rebello interviewed Johnny Depp for the October Movieline.