Jon Bon Jovi was a rock god in the '80s. Will he be a screen god in the '90s?
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I have a confession to make. I've never listened to Bon Jovi. I know that they were a band of the '80s and they racked up a serious roster of number-one hits. I know that lead singer Jon Bon Jovi is married to this day to his high-school sweetheart, Dorothea. But that's the extent of my knowledge of the rocker as rocker. Jon Bon Jovi the actor I actually know a little bit more about. For example, I know that he practically stole Moonlight and Valentino from his costars, Elizabeth Perkins and Whoopi Goldberg, back in 1995. And I know that since then he's taken a two-year break from music to pursue acting, and that he's managed to crank out four films, all of which will be coming out in the next few months, which is why I'm talking to him. And I know he just signed to do another movie, for producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
In person, Jon Bon Jovi is simply breathtaking. His features are chiseled, his eyes are searing blue, his skin is smooth and flawless. In tight jeans, a T-shirt and suede boots, he could pass for a college student, even though he's 35.
His New York City apartment is equally attractive. Floor to ceiling windows. Walls painted a soothing shade of gold. Comfortable furniture. Everything is done with style. No leopard prints here. Pictures of his two children (daughter Stephanie, four, and son Jesse James, three) line the long hallway.
"It's really like a great hotel room," Bon Jovi says as I look around. "I still can't believe it--the doorman will go out to buy you a pack of cigarettes. It took me months to get up the nerve to ask him to do it for me."
It's hard to imagine that a famous musician who's been on tour for the past decade and a half isn't used to snapping orders. But it's part of Bon Jovi's charm that he projects that aw-shucks, I'm-still-just-a-New-Jersey-boy-at-heart attitude.
We sit down at the dining room table, where Bon Jovi pours a few packages of sugar into his takeout coffee and stirs it with his fingers, then politely licks them clean.
"Are you wearing makeup?" I ask.
"What?" he gulps, totally perplexed.
"On your face? Are you wearing makeup?"
He takes my hand and rubs it across his cheekbones. "Of course not," he says indignantly.
I continue to touch his face, running my hands around his jaw, his eyes, his pouty lips. "It's just that I've never seen skin quite like yours. It has no pores."
He finally starts to laugh as I remove my hand, but doesn't say anything.
"I should let you know right off I don't think actors should be rock 'n' rollers and I don't think rockers should be actors," I say.
He smiles. "I know, I feel the same way. I mean, would De Niro make a record if he didn't do it perfectly? But I think there are rockers who have acted--"
"Please," I say, waving the whole notion away.
"So why are you here?" he asks. We both start to laugh.
"Because you were really good in Moonlight and Valentino," I say. "You were sexy and sweet and funny. And you seemed like a man, instead of a boy, which is really unusual in Hollywood movies these days. Maybe you'll be an exception to the rocker-in-movies rule. It helps that I don't know you at all as a musician. I've never heard Bon Jovi."
"Oh yes you have," Bon Jovi says without the slightest attitude. "Bon Jovi is so much a part of the culture that you may not even know that you've heard us, but I bet you have. Songs like 'Always,' 'You Give Love a Bad Name,' 'Runaway.' Trust me on this, you've heard us somewhere, somehow."
"I know young actors in L.A. who go nuts when your name is mentioned," I tell him. "They feel they shouldn't have to compete with you for roles, that you should be happy with your music success and leave the acting to actors."
Bon Jovi takes a deep breath. "I've already conquered the world I'm in. I know how to write a hit song. I know how to put on one hell of a concert. I know how to make fans happy. I needed something else. The band made a decision to take off two years and do the things we never had time for. So I started studying acting with a great coach, Harold Guskin. And I found that I really liked it. I did that small role in Moonlight and Valentino, and I went back to study with him again. The next thing I did was a small indie movie called The Leading Man. It was an unbelievable experience and I think the film, which was made a couple of years ago but only found a distributor recently, came out pretty well. I thought I'd be better off playing my first lead in a small film, so if I sucked, not too many people would know."
Bon Jovi flashes a killer smile. He's right--taking The Leading Man was a good idea. I've seen it, and he doesn't, in fact, suck. His character is a Brad Pitt-ish actor who goes to London to do a play, but winds up seducing everyone in the company, which then helps advance his career. He comes off as conniving, charming, funny and just enough of a prick to make you drool.
"There's a great sex scene in The Leading Man," I say, "where you and Thandie Newton are in bed and you try to get your hands in her panties. It's really charged, even though it's so short."
"This is the way I look at sex scenes," he says. "I have basically been doing them for a living for years. Trying to seduce an audience is the basis of rock 'n' roll. And if I may say so, I'm pretty good at it. So it wasn't much of a stretch. The interesting part was that the director, John Duigan Sirens, was going out with Thandie, and he was encouraging us to be really wild. It was like voyeurism at its best--with the proper lighting, no less! And Thandie, God bless her, was up for making it as hot as we could."
I'm blushing. Bon Jovi is not.
"I don't have any problems with any of that," he says with a shrug. "Plus, being married and monogamous, it's the closest thing I can do to having sex without getting in trouble for it."
As I ponder the notion of a rocker who's a faithful husband, Bon Jovi continues, "The only thing I like more than my wife is my money. And I'm not about to lose that to her and her lawyers, that's for damn sure. And you can quote me on that."
"Don't worry," I assure him "I'm going to."
He lets loose with a raucous laugh. "There's going to be hell to pay for that line," he says.
After The Leading Man, Bon Jovi studied acting some more and made two small films: Homegrown, with Billy Bob Thornton, and Little City, with Annabella Sciorra and Penelope Ann Miller. Working on all these little films, he believes, has really paid off because he's had time to build up his confidence, his resume and his bag of tricks. Although his role in Homegrown is a tiny one, he says he took it because of a recommendation from Heather Locklear, who's married to Bon Jovi guitar player Richie Sambora. She did a TV movie with Homegrown director Stephen Gyllenhaal (_Paris Trout, Waterland_) in which she played a housewife with Multiple Personality Disorder.
"Heather and Richie happened to be in Jersey the night the movie was airing," says Bon Jovi, "and we were all watching it together. She said that Gyllenhaal had gotten more out of her than any director she had ever worked with. So I was intrigued, and I wanted in if the guy was so good."
As I'm trying to imagine what it was Gyllenhaal got out of Heather Locklear, Bon Jovi continues, "Gyllenhaal wanted to meet me, but I had read the script by Nick Kazan, and knew there weren't a lot of roles in it for me. It was the day of my best friend's wedding and I flew to L.A. to be the best man. Gyllenhaal met me at my hotel before the wedding, and the meeting was going rather well, so he said, 'Let's read.' We started reading and we had so much fun that I wound up being an hour late for the wedding."
While making these films, Bon Jovi wrote and put out a solo album, Destination Anywhere. But instead of touring, he decided to make a 48-minute companion film that was cut into individual videos, and he released it on MTV and VH1. He stars in the film with Demi Moore, who gives, surprisingly, one of the best performances of her life.
"I met Demi and Bruce [Willis], and I really, really liked her," he says. "She's a very soulful girl. She looks you right in the eye, and when she says, 'How are you?' she really wants to know. She's not just bullshitting you."
My eyes are practically rolling back in my head. Bon Jovi sees my reaction and looks annoyed.
"She is," he insists.
I'm not about to fight with Bon Jovi about Demi Moore's soulfulness. "So what about Little City?" I ask.
"I play a bartender who's a recovering alcoholic."
"Sounds like the story of a man who's made a bad career choice," I say.
"No, it's good for him, because he doesn't mind being around drunks as long as he's not. He's in his 30s, he's going nowhere fast, but at least he's coming to terms with life and with love. He starts sleeping with Annabella Sciorra because the guy she's going out with, Josh Charles, isn't giving her what she wants. Yet she has a great relationship with Josh, and she feels she can have both--a good relationship and great sex. Only they're not with the same person."
"Everyone's dream come true, huh?"
Bon Jovi winks. "Well, it's what every person thinks they want. But emotions get in the way, as they always do, and she gets caught and has to choose."
"And she chooses you, right?"
Bon Jovi looks as if I've just answered the Daily Double. "How'd you know?" he asks with genuine surprise.
"Because it's the law of the very good-looking guy getting the girl. Although I think Josh Charles is adorable and a good actor, c'mon Jon, if the girl is not a complete twit, she goes for you."
Now he's blushing. "Then you're going to be surprised by Long Time, Nothing New," he says, referring to the film he just completed with Lauren Holly and Edward Burns, director of The Brothers McMullen and She's the One. In this movie, Holly has to choose between Bon Jovi and Burns. I guess she chooses Burns.
"It's not as cute as anything that Ed's done before. It doesn't have the big laughs in it, and I think it's a darker film. It's probably the most similar to my own life story, because the characters are these guilty Catholic, East Coast shore people. They live in a no-way-out kind of place, very similar to where I grew up. A great little town, Americana personified, the kind of place John Mellencamp writes songs about. Where I come from, you either joined the service or went to work for the town. All I wanted to be was a rock 'n' roll star. Silly me. So if I hadn't learned those three chords I'd be working for the township, too. The three guys I hung out with joined the navy to get out. They grew up and I didn't.
"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.