Rebecca De Mornay explains why she thinks she's already famous enough, reveals how she got the scar on her lip and confesses that there's something "weird" about the way her face changes so dramatically from one role to the next.
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By the time Rebecca De Mornay knocks on my door at the Mondrian Hotel, I've just about had it with her. I've been in L.A. for five days waiting for this interview to happen. She kept canceling because, her publicist assures me, she's got a terrible cough. Today I have my bags packed. It's now or never.
When I open the door. I'm completely bowled over. De Mornay is a knockout. Her hair is blindingly blonde, her eyes the color of the Caribbean. She's wearing a snug green T-shirt and black pants that seem to be spray-painted on. I'm not the first to say this, but I have to repeal it because it's true: she is much more beautiful in person, without a drop of makeup, than she has ever seemed on-screen.
The coughs racking De Mornay's body are painful to witness. I take back everything I've been thinking about her. I feel like I'm torturing her. not the other way around. But she listens attentively with her head cocked to the side and talks with a quick laugh while noodling a scar on her lip with her fingers. If she's thinking she'd rather be home in bed, she shows no sign of it. She looks you square in the eye and dares you to look away.
"I've read everything ever written about you," I say, pointing to the two-inch stack of magazine articles on the table. "And I know your life story by heart..."
She blushes. "Is it awful?" she asks.
"Not at all," I say. "Your father is [right-wing talk-show host] Wally George. He left when you were two months old. Your mother remarried, a man named De Mornay, and he died when you were five. Your mother became sort of a gypsy and you wandered around, finally settling in Austria. You overcompensated for being the new girl in town by be coming really smart..."
"I said that?" she asks, startled.
"I'm extrapolating," I explain. "You learned three languages and people noticed you. You went to a free-thinking school, and you got to see some of your teachers sun-bathing topless. You excelled academically. When you were 19, you came back to America, did a small part in Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart, and then got your big break in Risky Business. You hate to talk about the men in your life, but you've had four lovers who were famous--Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Cruise, Bruce Wagner (the writer of Force Majeure and Wild Palms) whom you married and divorced quickly, and poet/songwriter/ singer Leonard Cohen. After Risky Business you made a series of either bad or unsuccessful films, some-times both, until you played a nanny from hell in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which put you back on the map again. You directed an episode of 'The Outer Limits,' and you executive-produced your new movie with Antonio Banderas. And you've been writing a novel for years. Did I leave anything out?"
De Mornay is laughing, "My God, Martha, you know everything about me."
"No, Rebecca," I remind her, "I know nothing about you."
"Well, can we clear something up? It always says in the press that my first film was One From the Heart. I was an extra in that film. I had one line. This is not my film debut. My debut was Risky Business. I was an apprentice on One From the Heart, and Francis [Coppola], as a favor, gave me this one line.''
"OK, anything else you want to clear up?"
"No, I can live with the rest. But what are we gonna do now? I don't have anything else to say ..."
"Not to worry. We'll talk about movies, we'll talk about life."
"I better eat," she says. When her shredded wheat cereal with a banana and skimmed milk arrives she leans over and begins shoveling it in her mouth.
"Whoa, you don't have to eat like it's a marathon."
"No, I always eat like this. Let me get it out of the way."
"Where'd you get the scar?" I ask. "When I watched Risky Business with my boyfriend last week, he said that he remembered the first time he saw you, that you had this fabulous scar on your lip. But on the video, it wasn't apparent."
"I got it from a jealous boy when I was five. It was a birthday party that my mother gave for me, and she invited all the little kids, my friends, and she gave them all musical instruments. She wanted us to be creative at the same time we celebrated my birthday, and she gave this one boy these cymbals, and he was sort of jealous that I was talking to this other boy. And he came over and slashed my face with the sharp edge of the cymbal, split open my lip, and then I was rushed to the hospital. I had to have my lip sewn up, and in those days, they didn't think enough to put those dissolving stitches in where you would have never noticed it, so what you actually see are the stitch lines."
"Happy birthday, huh?"
"Yes. And guess what? I still love men, anyway! I remember something so funny, that when I did Risky Business, one of the reviews said that I was 'a very imperfect beauty with this delicious scar on her lip.' I was thinking, that's what reviewers talk about?"
"You look so different from one film to the next. When I saw Backdraft, it took me 10 minutes to figure out that it was you. I figured you had had cheekbone implants or some other kind of plastic surgery."
"Stanley Kauffmann, who is a really wonderful fan of mine, once said in a review, 'It seems to me that Rebecca De Mornay changes her actual chromosomes from role to role.' But it is a very weird thing that my face really does become something else according to what I'm thinking on the inside. It literally changes around, somehow."
"In Guilty as Sin, you looked just like Hillary Clinton!"
She slaps my hand. "Martha, I do not look like Hillary Clinton! But once I had this boyfriend, and he said, You know, you have this Hillary thing going...' I don't see it."
"Did you ever meet her?"
"Yes, I met her at a fundraiser before [Bill] became president, and I spoke with her and said, 'It's so funny because people say that I look like you.' And she said, "Well, I'm really flattered, thank you. because people have said it to me, too.' We both really laughed."
"In Details magazine a few months ago, they interviewed Traci Lords..."
"I saw that," De Mornay shrieks. "And they kept saying that she looked like me!"
"Yeah," I say, "but I'll bet nobody ever had the balls to tell Hillary she looked like Traci Lords."
"I'll bet," De Mornay agrees. "By the way, you can see that I never had any, right?"
"Any what?"
"Any plastic surgery. I mean, one day I might, but I haven't yet. I hate plastic surgery. I have a horror of any kind of knife. I don't like it. I just think that I'll never have plastic surgery if I'm not in front of the camera. If you make your living selling this thing, which is the way you look, then maybe you do it. But trust me, the minute I'm directing or producing and not starring, I would never even think of it." She turns her face from side to side, so that I can see that she's scarless.
"OK, are we ever going to see your novel?"
"What happened is, I became famous again. I really started writing it during the downtime, and then suddenly everything's moving and I'm doing other movies. I have to wait till things slow down, which is starting to happen, by the way. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is wearing off. If my new film, Never Talk to Strangers, doesn't really click, I might be spending a lot more time on my novel! I've got to finish it, though, because it's good. I should never have spoken about it in the first place, but I did and then I had to keep talking about it when really, what I should have been doing is writing."
"Let's talk about your films ..."
De Mornay groans.
"Come on," I urge her. "You've made some good ones."
"Oh. I've made some great ones. Risky Business still stands up. It's timeless. They study that film in film school. And because of that movie. I had a 10-year run, until The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. I just kept getting work, which is a thrill. I liked Runaway Train, although not too many people saw it. The Trip to Bountiful I love. I just adore it."
"It's beyond tedious to watch," I say.
"Maybe to you it is, but I'll tell you something. You have no idea how much that movie has affected people. Although I know what you mean. It's one of those slow films."
"I kept thinking, 'Maybe they should take the train to Bountiful instead of the bus.'"
"Truthfully. I'm with you. I grew up in Europe, and I used to like those very slow-moving European films. I've been contaminated by the American TV culture, and I just want things to move faster now. But it's a beautiful movie, Martha, it really is."
"What about And God Created Woman?"
De Mornay just laughs.
"Well, I guess maybe you wouldn't have worked that year if you didn't do that, right?"
"Exactly."
"How about Feds and Dealers? I've never heard of either one."
"Let's just keep it that way."
"Backdraft?"
De Mornay makes a little sound in her throat that translates to. "Uggghhhh." "Did you see Getting Out?" she asks.
"Never heard of that one either."
"It was for TV, I did it last year, and it's based on the Marsha Norman award-winning play. That is one of the best things I've ever done. What an incredible film. Ellen Burstyn plays my evil, sadistic mother. I'm this white-trash girl. I have this thick accent. And I get out of prison, and I have a baby, and I get it back, and it's up for adoption, and I'm fighting with my ex-pimp and all this stuff."
"I hope nobody's listening at the door," I say.
De Mornay talks a bit louder. "I'm fighting with my ex-pimp, and my mother's this evil bitch..." She laughs. "You know, people talk to me about my films as if I did them while I could have been doing others. Sometimes you do a film because that is all you're being offered. Period. And you need to keep working so you do them."
"Do you have people who you depend on to read scripts with you? Or do you make all these choices on your own?"
"Every single choice I made on my own. I stand by it. There were some choices, in retrospect, that were probably bad. but I know that the alternative would have been to not work in that time period. Every step I made. I made myself. I can't say, 'Oh. no, my agent told me or my manager told me to do it.' I've never had a manager, and I've had various agents, and, fortunately or unfortunately, I've been blessed. I've had two huge hit films, A lot of actors don't have any. But I've also made a lot of forgettable things. I don't regret any of it."
"Not even Guilty as Sin?" I say, referring to the movie she did with Don Johnson, which is about a lawyer who defends a man she knows is guilty of pushing his wife out a window.
"No, not at all. I liked working with Don, and we had chemistry together on-screen."
"That's true," I admit grudgingly.
"I think that's such an interesting thing, chemistry on-screen. Because you never know what's going to make that happen. I have chemistry with Antonio Banderas in Never Talk to Strangers. All the people who have seen it so far have said so. When I directed this 'Outer Limits' thing, it was basically a two-hander between Frank Whaley and John Savage. I had these two actors talking to each other for an hour, basically that was the whole story. They sit together, they talk. As I was watching them I was thinking, these two have chemistry! And I realized for the first time as a director what it is. It's when the body or the face really wants to look at the other person, and you can see that as a spectator when the other person actually wants to listen. It's an involuntary thing. If people don't have chemistry, you can sense that they're going through the motions."
"In Risky Business, you and Tom Cruise certainly had chemistry."
"We had it on and off the screen," she adds with a smile.
"I wrote this story about kissing, about who can kiss on-screen. And I said that Tom proved in Risky Business that he could, and then spent the rest of his career proving us wrong."
"Oh, good," she says with apparent glee.
"Because he never had chemistry like that on-screen again ever. The two movies he did with Nicole are a joke."
"Wow, I'm very flattered."
"Maybe it was because he was your boyfriend at the time..."
"No, it started after," she says. "I don't think it's good to sleep with anyone you're working with ... in movies, in schools or anywhere. I don't think it's good to sleep with anyone that you're in a professional relationship with. Certainly not if you're a psychotherapist. Or if you're a doctor or if you're a priest. Definitely not then! But I hold to that rule."
''What would be worse: knowing that the best roles in your life were in the past or that the best sex in your life was in the past?"
"This is a question?"
I nod.
"I wouldn't give credence to either one. I know that neither is true."
"An optimist, huh?"
"No," she says, really laughing, "a realist."
"If you knew that in order to be successful you'd have to be mega-famous, would you want that?"
"I'm a mini-star, and I'm comfortable with that. But what's the choice here? Mega-famous or not famous at all?"
"Yes, but you still get to be rich either way," I add, making the stakes a little easier to bear.
"Well, I don't want to sound boring and philosophical about that question, but I think ultimately it's something that you don't choose. You can't choose to be famous. You can aspire to be famous, as do maybe three million people a year who come to Hollywood, but it's something that you really get chosen for. You're chosen by the people and by coincidence and by timing and by fate, and it's not something you can do anything about. The caliber, or the degree, of how famous you become, I don't think is anything that you can alter. I saw it very first-hand with Tom Cruise. We were together and Tom was chosen by the American people, and then, subsequently, by the world. He has a great talent, and he has a great quality. A lot of other people do, too. But something about Tom's face, about Tom's certain energy, is something that--phoom--people in the theater just went, 'He's our man, he speaks for us.' And that's ultimately what makes someone a mega star."
"So, you'd take it, huh?"
"Honey. I'm just happy to be working. It's either that or go back to the novel!"
"So, tell me about Never Talk to Strangers. Haven't we seen that film before?"
"No, we've seen When a Stranger Calls. We've probably seen Don't Be a Stranger. But this title is new. It's about a woman, me, who's a criminal psychologist. She's very cool and poised in her profession, and personally she does not have it as together as she does professionally."
"You mean like everybody else?"
"Exactly. That's why I think we can all relate to it. She lives by herself, is somewhat shy and reserved, but very educated, intelligent. She winds up falling for this guy, Antonio Banderas, who picks her up one night in a supermarket and he's a biker. He's got leather pants, a Harley, tattoos--"
"I love it already."
"--and he's exactly the guy she never thought she'd be attracted to. She finds her-self melting in his presence, trusting him more than she's trusted anybody, and then this series of very bizarre things starts happening to her. Sort of intrusive and slightly ugly things, in her home, things she can't put her finger on. Who's doing these things? Of course, the prime suspect is Antonio. The film has the most unexpected ending. I liked it because it's like a classic suspense drama that has some wonderful sexual clashes between these two characters, which was a parable, to me, about the arena of dating in the '90s. All the things you worry about now. Can I trust him? Does he have AIDS?"
"Last night I was out with these friends," I tell her, "and one of them said that a guy she dated five years ago called. We all looked at her and said. 'Is he OK?' Because we all thought he might have called to tell her he tested positive."
"I know. It's a very different climate these days for dating. If you think you're falling in love with someone, it's just different than it was in the '50s, the '60s, the '70s."
"So do you?"
She rolls her eyes, ready for almost anything. "OK. Martha, do I what?"
'Think you're falling in love? Because everyone told me that there was a story about you in People last week ..."
"It wasn't a story," she says with some exasperation. "It was just two little lines."
"Well, everyone seemed to have read those two little lines, which had the name of your new boyfriend ..."
De Mornay starts gathering her things. "Don't you think it's sick that everyone reads every line of that shit? Doesn't it upset you that we're such a celebrity culture in America? That's our astrology, that's our royalty, that's everything we think about. Doesn't it drive you nuts?"
"Sweetie." I say nicely, "when people stop caring about that stuff, both of us may be out of jobs..."
"Well," she says with a wink, "at least I can fall back on that novel."
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Martha Frankel interviewed Andy Garcia for the September Movieline.