Denis Leary: Making Hay

Leary went on to make The Neon Bible, a low-budget adaptation of the John Kennedy Toole novel that no one's read (as opposed to A Confederacy of Dunces). Leary describes the soon-to-be-released flick thusly: "a beautiful film, but very depressing." Right, Only slightly less depressing was his next Disney project--the summer stinker Operation Dumbo Drop--which fell out of sight faster than the plummeting pachyderm. Which brings us to the upcoming Two If By Sea, which looks to be Leary's best chance of carving out a slice of mainstream success.

Back when Leary became friendly with Sandra Bullock on the set of Demolition Man, he thought she'd be perfect casting for his story of a small-time thief and his truculent girlfriend. In the year between her agreeing to do the movie and the commencement of shooting, she up and became our country's Girl Next Door, the heiress apparent to Mary Tyler Moore. "It was right when Speed was about to open and we'd all committed, he recalls. "We had all this other work in between, [films] that she was going to do, and [films] I was going to do, but we knew we were going to do these characters. Then Speed happened. And then--bang!--_While You Were Sleeping_ came out and, all of a sudden, Sandy is America's sweetheart. I'd known her for a long time, she's an incredibly funny person and a great actress, but I just thought it was really funny that she was America's sweetheart. We've always had a competitive, combative relationship--whenever you can find a nail to stick in the other person, you always get them with it-- so the America's sweetheart timing was just a classic."

With the amount of worshipful press Bullock gets these days, it can't be long before someone claims they knew her when she used to inject heroin into her eyeballs, but, Leary says, "The thing is, she never did. She doesn't have any skeletons in the closet. There is not much dirt to find, beyond the fact that she can be a slob. I said, 'Give me the opportunity and I'll be glad to go out and spread stories in the press.'" What he's less willing to do is divulge details of his on-screen romantic encounters with Bullock. ''Yeah, we had some love scenes," is the most I can pry out of him about Two If By Sea. It transpires Leary is not much of a campaigner for the breaking down of cinematic taboos. "I'm kind of an old-fashioned guy when it comes to sex scenes. I think less is more when it comes to that."

When pressed to cite a favorite cinematic sex sequence, Leary at last offers, "Woody Allen has had some great sex scenes. Like the one in Annie Hall, when she smokes the joint and he doesn't want to get high, and then she leaves the bed. And when Albert Brooks, in Modern Romance, breaks up with his girlfriend for the umpteenth lime, but then he's obsessed with her, comes back and has great sex with her, I find that stuff much more realistic and valuable about what relationships are really like. But Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas? Big deal."

OK, even if we can't look forward to Leary taking on a role as a sloe-eyed sex object-- "I think comedy and sex is hard to pull off," he explains, "except in Showgirls" -- we will be seeing a lot of him on the big screen in the coming months. Next up is a role as a guilt-free Irish gangster who's best friends with Joe Mantegna's Italian hood in Underworld. Then he dons hockey stick and mask in the sports-action-comedy hybrid, Stanley's Cup. Then he'll co-star with Rosie O'Donnell and Dana Delany in Wide Awake. After that, he's scheduled to reteam with Ted Demme--director of Who's the Man? and The Ref--on both Hair of the Dog and Blow. "Soon as you put one down, you're picking the other one up," Leary says about his jam-packed schedule. "Gotta make hay while you can."

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Jonathan Bernstein interviewed Salma Hayek for the August 1995 Movieline.

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