Jon Bon Jovi: Music to the Eyes

"I felt this character was so much like me," Bon Jovi continues. "He likes his town, he likes his family, he likes the bar he hangs out in. He takes up with his best friend's girlfriend."

"Your wife Dorothea was your best friend's girlfriend?" I ask giddily.

He nods yes. "When my friend left for the navy I took his girl."

"And did you grow up with that guilty Catholic thing?"

"Oh God, yeah. I'm going to hell no matter what I say or do."

"So, what happens between you and Ed Burns?"

"His character comes back into town to rekindle the glory days of when he was a kid, and he wants Lauren Holly to choose between him and me. She can stay with me and have a nice life, or she can run off with him and her future will be uncertain, at best. I think there are a lot of people who have to make those choices."

"Yeah, but their choices aren't Jon Bon Jovi and Ed Burns. It's the fat guy with the acne or the skinny guy with the drug problem."

"Don't be so bleak," he says to me. "We're talking movies here."

"OK. So your two years of self-imposed exile from Bon Jovi are almost up. What now?"

"I am not about to quit my day job. The guys and I will go back into the recording studio and do another album. We'll tour, but not those mammoth 250-city tours. In the meantime I'm doing another independent film called Row Your Boat. It's about two brothers who were orphaned as kids and they become petty criminals. My brother is played by William Forsythe--"

"Isn't he the guy with the flat head from Dick Tracy?" I ask. "What kind of parents could have produced you and William Forsythe?"

Now Bon Jovi is rolling his eyes. "You have to learn to suspend disbelief, Martha. The movies present their own kind of magic, and if you look for it to be too much like life, you're going to be disappointed."

Leave it to Jon Bon Jovi to be the person who tries to talk me into suspending disbelief. Though if I were ever going to let a rocker or an actor be the one to do it, it might as well be him.

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Martha Frankel interviewed Juliette Binoche for the August 97 issue of Movieline.

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