Taking a break between movies, comic charmer Denis Leary chats about his Two If By Sea co-star and pal Sandra Bullock, gamely reviews his checkered movie career to date and explains why he is "old-fashioned" when it comes to sex scenes.
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Remember when Denis Leary was The Hot Guy?
The rapidity with which pop-culture phenomena are excavated, assimilated and discarded makes it seem like a hundred years ago, but, in fact, not much time has passed since his smoke-stained presence was unavoidable. MTV's judicious use of bite-size chunks wrenched from his scabrous stand-up act sent his career hurtling onto the fast track. Suddenly he was the guy in the battered leather jacket who condoned carnivorousness and nicotine addiction as lifestyle choices. The guy with the ranting, teeth-clenched, machine-gun delivery, spewing bilious truth between deep and frequent cigarette inhalations. The guy known for catchphrases like "I've got two words for you," and "I think you hear me knockin' and I think I'm comin' in."
Added to his array of visual and aural hooks were a theatrical background, which meant he could act, and a healthy dosage of Irish-American street-punk pugnacity, which gave him a bad-boy appeal to the female audience. His sneer, cigarettes and succinct turns of phrase were quickly embraced by a variety of mediums. While continuing his MTV spots, he also appeared in commercial breaks as a Nike pitchman: his No Cure for Cancer one-man show became a successful lour, book, album and video; and he signed a movie deal with Disney. There was a moment when Denis Leary seemed on the verge of becoming the hottest comic property since Eddie Murphy. Then the moment passed.
The Ref, the best of his films for Disney, performed only modestly at the box office. Meanwhile, the press was scrambling to catch up with Jim Carrey, a comic performer whose rise they had failed to anticipate. So where does that leave Denis Leary'? Optimistic and relieved, so he would have me believe as we sit in his production company, Apostle Pictures, located in New York City. The optimism springs from a healthy slate of forthcoming roles, the most imminent of which, Two If By Sea, finds him co-starring with pal Sandra Bullock. The relief comes from resuming a career as a working actor without the burden of living up to the Flavor of the Month status.
"I'm glad," he says of his diminished hotness. "It's not that I wasn't savvy. I just didn't expect it to become as big as it did. Suddenly, I was getting all these offers." He assumes the seductive voice of Hollywood Temptation: "We wanna work with you, but you're gonna wear the leather jacket, smoke the cigarettes and say the Two Word thing. You're the fast-talking guy in the leather jacket and you come out of the truck and kill all these people, or you're the fast-talking guy and you live next door to these really nice people."
A long drag on his cigarette, then he continues in his own voice: "I saw plenty of scripts, believe me--all with titles like Two Words--suddenly, out of the blue, within months. You could tell that they were nailed together from other scripts; you could see where it had been pasted in. All these bad retreads from the MTV monologues or stuff from No Cure for Cancer. They'd just taken scripts that existed and put this character into it. If you'd said, 'Well. I don't like the script, it's not ready yet, but I'd like to get involved,' you'd get millions and millions of dollars to do that project, but then you're on the edge, because if it bombs, you're done. And if it works, you're that guy--and it's the only guy you can be for the next five years.
"You start to realize that there's huge chunks of money that people have in a secret Hollywood vault and as soon as they see something that might have a chance of working, they'll just throw all this money at it. You have the choice of taking the money---and waking up, five years later, going. 'Holy shit, I'm stuck in mud, my feet are cemented in one place!'--or trying to do something worthwhile."
A brief review of earlier projects he signed up for suggests Leary wasn't always quite so discriminating. Following his debut in the 1991 buppie dud Strictly Business (''Jesus, I forgot about that. I never actually saw the film"), he turned up in three dubious attempts to initiate big-screen double acts. He did a cameo, spreading some Hefner oiliness across National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon I, a brilliant but doomed attempt to start a franchise with the comedy team of Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson. Then, too, there was Who's the Man?, a brilliant but doomed attempt to turn hip-hop personalities Ed Lover and Doctor Dre into the next Abbott and Costello. You may have missed him as the bad guy in Gunmen-- a brilliant but doomed attempt to alert the world to the special brand of chemistry shared by Mario Van Peebles and Christopher Lambert--because the release was delayed almost a year.
While we're accustomed to poring over reports about the calamitous effect of sudden fame on callow youngsters, Leary was in his mid-'30s, married (to writer Ann Lembeck), with children, when success struck. Was he ever a victim of temptation? "Temptation's something you have to deal with even if you're not famous." he says. "It's harder when you're famous because it's a lot more in your face, and that makes it a little more difficult to walk away from sometimes. There have been moments of temptation, but nothing that would make me act on them. With me, it was always, 'So, you're interested in me? Was that because of the MTV thing or do you just think I'm a really interesting, funny guy?' Then again, I grew up in an age when you could have sex with anyone, anywhere, anytime and the worst thing that could happen was you'd have to get a shot up the ass. I came up in a different time. There's a lot of famous guys I know who aren't married who are always saying, 'I wish I could meet a girl who didn't know who I was.' I would hate to be in that position."
Perhaps in deference to his familial position, Leary played a dad in the kid-pic The Sandlot. Next, he took on a bad guy role in Judgment Night, a suburban-guy-stranded-in-urban-hellhole actioner that found few takers. "I had a good time with those guys," says Leary of co-stars Emilio Estevez, Stephen Dorff and Cuba Gooding Jr. "There was a lot of carrying on. I think Chicago was glad to see us head home. We were always going out in this big mass of guys, showing up in clubs and restaurants. We started to get those kind of looks, 'Oh, no. It's them!'"
Although Leary pronounces a distaste for translating a stand-up persona directly onto the big screen, that's essentially what he did when he showed up as the grubby rebel leader in the greatly underrated Stallone cryonic cop action-comedy Demolition Man. "I did it because I wanted to work with Stallone and try one of those big movies. I would have preferred to have had more freedom with it, but I was the guest star popping in, so that's the gig." All the same, the film was remarkable for Stallone's never-before-or-since displayed willingness to be the butt of jokes. ''Yeah, I got to give him credit for that. Even with me and Sandy [Bullock] and [Wesley] Snipes, he was really eager for us to steal the spotlight, more than willing to stand there and watch us shit on him in our characters. He was a really funny guy. Sly had his golf pro on the set, just standing around all day. He'd be like, 'You wanna hit some balls?' So we'd be there wearing these futuristic outfits with this golf pro going, 'You know, you're pulling your left elbow up,' and I'd be saying, 'I can't help it, I've got a suit of armor on.'"
About the side-splitting black comedy The Ref--with an inspired Leary playing a burglar driven to distraction by the constant bickering of hostage husband and wife Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis--he says, 'That was a dream come true." Leary's Who's the Man? director Ted Demme was on hand, and, Leary says, "writer Richard LaGravenese is an old friend of mine from acting school. Kevin Spacey's a friend, too. Judy Davis none of us knew, but she was the dream choice for that role." The only problem was that The Ref was viewed by the studio as a vehicle designed to prove that Leary could carry a film on his own. "I thought the film was an ensemble piece," he remarks dryly, understating the obvious. "It was like a play set in a house. I never really got the sense from the marketing guys that they understood that. They were thinking, 'College kids are gonna love this,' 'No,' I tried to tell them, 'they're going to love Pauly Shore. We're looking for college graduates.'"
Leary views The Refs speedy exit from theaters with some bitterness: "It's such a crapshoot. Nobody knows what's going to be a hit or how it's going to work or what weekend it's going to open and they're all married to the box office, which just kills me. If it doesn't have its due immediately, they chop its head off. And some things [need time] and have to grow."
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.