The new millennium will get a sexy boost this summer when supermodel Rebecca Romijn-Stamos joins superheroes on the big screen in X-Men.
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Let's suppose Rebecca Romijn-Stamos knows what you're thinking. A for all, having spread her nearly six feet of scantily clad, honey-and-meringue, aerodynamic perfection across scads of magazine covers, most memorably the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, she's got to be ready for you to wonder what the hell she's doing on the cover of a movie magazine--even if it is the More Sex Than Usual issue. And, with only small parts in Dirty Work and the Austin Powers sequel to her name, just how different from Pamela Anderson Lee's contribution to cinema in Barb Wire can she think you think her summer 2000 turn in the megabudget X-Men will be? Well, let's find out. In a friendly Greek restaurant called Taverna Tony in Malibu, the 28-year-old beauty wolfs down a feast of a lunch ("I eat like a horse--like, twice as much as my husband does") and confesses, "I almost feel presumptuous doing this interview. I'm not a movie star. I'm just sort of dabbling. But then she shrugs. "Oh well, let's have fun anyway."
Yeah, lets. Because a closer look at Romijn-Stamos's immoderately provocative curves reveals a radiantly healthy, unexpectedly assertive presence. No wonder that even when sharing a (megaselling) GQ cover with likes of Dennis Rodman, this knockout's fresh-faced luminosity saved her from the ranks of the permanently cheap-by-association. You might have happened upon Romijn-Stamos on MTV's "House of Style" and listened for the wind blowing through her gorgeous rafters, but you'd have had to work hard to ignore how funny and inviting she is as the host of that show. If you caught her playing the supermodel wife of David Spade on "Just Shoot Me" and you thought, "stunt casting," you obviously didn't stay to hear how she can toss off a zingy line and handle a physical bit with the madcap aplomb it took Brooke Shields, Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd years to muster. All that taken into consideration, perhaps you still diss her for being the wife of buff, smoldering John Stamos, the former TV hunk who's been flying relatively low on fame's radar screen lately. So let's start there. How did this superdish, a woman who could easily marry her way into useful, powerful echelons of Hollywood, enter into the holy bonds of matrimony with someone who'd played a guy named Blackie Parrish on a soap for two years and was then winding down his eight years as the sexy Uncle Jesse on "Full House"?
"If I have to read one more time how John proposed to me naked, I'll throw up," Romijn-Stamos laughs, before getting to the point. "My husband is extremely funny. The thing that I love first and foremost in a man is the ability to make me laugh. I've always loved funny boys, and I've surrounded myself with the funniest boys since I was four. Funniness completely attracts me. Like, I really get turned on by it."
Turned on, as in erotically? "Oh, definitely," she says, practically purring. "I don't respond to beautiful men flirting with me. I don't get it. Never did. Steve Martin is the first person I ever had a sexual dream about when I was a kid and saw him in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Recently, he was sitting a couple of rows in front of me at the 'Saturday Night Live' anniversary and I was like... 'Oh, my God.' Then, I saw him on an airplane, too, and I couldn't even look his way, because I didn't know what would happen to me if I did. I was like that when I saw John for the first time--I couldn't even look at him."
OK, so funny turns her on. But she didn't marry a guy who looks like, oh, say, Bill Murray. She married a guy who, like herself, has appeared on People's Most Beautiful list. What else attracted her? "A cute ass," she giggles, adding, "just kidding." And what about another, rumored charm? Or to put it another way, does size matter? "It matters," she grins with a hint of a blush, "and that's all I'm gonna say." But then she does say a little more: "John is somebody who completely gets my sense of humor and there is unbelievable chemistry, and that's very, very rare. We're both passionate people who have a great combination of really old inside and really little kids inside. Our priority is our marriage--it's great and it's real. We keep our public life completely separate and we don't like to shove ourselves down people's throats. We don't do the nightclub thing and we tend to hang out with friends we feel safe and comfortable with, either at people's houses or here at Tony's. Also, we're both very close to our own and each other's families."
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos was raised in Berkeley, California, the daughter of a Dutch custom furniture-maker and an American-born Dutch mother who teaches English as a second language. Not that it's a surprise, but both parents (who divorced when she was seven) are tall, thin and extraordinary looking. "I grew up in this hippie environment in Berkeley, where they don't really care if you're good-looking," Romijn-Stamos says. "It's a very anti-vain place where it's cool to own a progressive bookstore or to work with abused children, but not to want to be in the spotlight or even to pay much attention to your looks. I honestly never even put makeup on or had my hair done until I started modeling in 1991. Neither my sister nor I ever really thought about the way we looked growing up. In our teens, we didn't know or care about makeup or designers or anything like that. We both lucked out in the genes department. In fact, my first agent wanted to hire my mom as a supermodel-making machine. It was like, 'I'll pay you to make more babies.'"
Even in a land of Birkenstocks instead of Blahniks, though, this girl must have been a lollapalooza guys lusted after. She says no: "As clichéd as it sounds, I was never treated as 'the pretty girl' in high school. I wasn't even that into boys in high school. I was insecure and felt gawky because I was so much taller and skinnier than everybody else. I remember when they were doing the senior polls for the yearbook and I was sitting with a friend whom I'd known since elementary school I saw him write down my name as the best looking and I did a double take. He was like, 'Don't you know that you are?' But obviously not everybody thought that, because I didn't win."
Just a year later, when Romijn-Stamos was 18 and on a semester break from her freshman year at University of California at Santa Cruz, she was persuaded by a Parisian model scout to try a career in front of the camera. "I was a poor student, so I was thinking, 'I'm missing out on something and here's a chance to travel the world and make money at the same time.' It was uncool to admit it to anybody, but I knew I wanted to be a performer someday. I saw this as, somehow, vaguely, a stepping stone toward that. My only previous connection to pop culture was that I was obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. I mean, I certainly wasn't somebody who had posters of John Stamos on my wall."
Romijn-Stamos spent from 1992 to 1995 in Paris learning the language, acquiring a sophisticated patina, making serious money and turning up on the covers of Elle, Marie Claire and the like. "After the third year, I moved to New York and divided my time between there and Europe," she says. "But modeling became less fun and more business-y. It was like, 'I'm making a good living, all right, but I am really, really bored.'" Did her boredom ever grease one of those slides down the rabbit hole we know from Gia? Emphatically tossing her mane of hair in the negative, she tells me, "I saw some really sad girls who started modeling way too young. I treated modeling as a business and never made the mistake of believing my own hype. If I had to work the next day at six in the morning, I went to bed at nine the night before instead of going out and parrying. One time, Tyra Banks and I were reading excerpts about drugs, sex and ugliness from that Michael Gross book about the fashion world Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, and I asked Tyra, 'Have you ever been offered drugs as long as you've been modeling?' and she said, 'No, have you?' When I said, 'Never,' she said, What's wrong with us? We're like the nerds the pretty, popular girls shut out, aren't we?'"
"Have people tended to give you a hard time because you're such a dish?" I ask. Romijn-Stamos lets forth a hearty laugh. "People don't want to like pretty people. In fact, I've discovered that the general public really wants to hate good-looking people. Sometimes I find myself having to try extra hard to be goofy and disarming to prove to people that, yeah, I pick my nose just like you do. In a way, I don't blame people for judging pretty people. I find that a lot of them, because they've sailed along for most of their lives just for being pretty, don't feel they need anything else to get by on."
Did modeling manage to convince Romijn-Stamos of her sexiness? "I sometimes think I'm sexy," she answers, laughing. "I don't think you can try to be sexy. You are or you aren't. When I see somebody trying to be sexy, I can read it immediately. What I think is great is that people like Cameron Diaz are bridging the gap there used to be between beautiful, sexy and funny. It's refreshing that you can actually respect a beautiful and sexy star for the work she's done, for her talent. And there's Pamela Anderson Lee--say what you want, but I'm a big fan. I'm glad she exists because there's no one like her, although a lot of people try. She's really cornered an international market. She's such a fantasy and she's our pin-up girl now. I don't look at myself and think 'sexy person,' that's for sure. I never take myself seriously. I look at some of chose Sports Illustrated photos I've done and go, "Who is that very serious girl?' You're talking to someone willing to go on 'The Tonight Show' in a full Dolly Parton outfit to do an impression, you know what I mean?"
This attitude helps explain why Romijn-Stamos is close friends with stars like Kristen Johnston (whom she calls "big, loud, strong and adorable underneath all that boom-boom-boom!") and Elle Macpherson ("a brilliant business-woman, sexy, chic, amazingly seductive in her dealings with people"). But her closest friend is easily her husband, so I ask about his role in her transition out of modeling. "I was silting in the kitchen with John and I said, 'I'm really restless and unhappy with my career. How can I shake things up?' He asked, 'What do you want to do?' I told him, 'I want to get into TV,' and he said, 'OK, you've got this personality, but you need to develop it in front of the camera.' I knew I would be taking a huge cut in pay--it's amazing what people pay a model--but we sort of used my Sports Illustrated and Victoria's Secret profiles to maneuver me onto 'Conan O'Brien' and 'The Tonight Show.'"
Indeed, they did. With no previous TV experience, she emerged as a talk show host's dream. She was genuinely funny, game and sweet-spirited, and everybody cakes notice when a ridiculously beautiful girl can be ridiculous. Though she couldn't afford to stop modeling yet, she followed in the footsteps of Cindy Crawford and Daisy Fuentes and in 1998 became host of MTV's "House of Style," despite having given what she calls a "disastrous" audition. She wanted the job so much she phoned the producer from a Caribbean airport en route to a modeling shoot and begged for it. "I said, 'I know I can do this well and I really think you should hire me.'" And they did. "Now I rewrite the scripts with my husband and comedian friends." The show made her exponentially more famous and won her the devotion of 15-year-old girls everywhere.
She won devotion, too, from moviemakers, but the first film roles they offered she didn't take. "The failure rate of being just another model-turned-actress is so high," she observes. "I remember turning down a movie costarring Joshua Jackson that I don't even know if they're still going to make. I was supposed to be playing a supermodel and I was like, 'No, thanks.' They also kept asking me to audition for the new James Bond movie, but I didn't want co put myself out there as if I were saying, 'Now I'm ready to star in a movie.' I did a little cameo as a drunken bearded lady in Norm Macdonald's Dirty Work just because John and I know Norm and it sounded silly. I did Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me for similar reasons and we wound up becoming friends with Mike Myers and his wife. Mostly, I was completely fighting the actress thing, especially if it meant only playing a supermodel. That was my rule: no supermodel parts."
Why then, after she'd made her acting debut in a 1998 "Friends" episode playing what one character called "the most beautiful girl in the world," did she jump into playing a supermodel on NBC's hit sit-com "Just Shoot Me"? "They kept asking me to come on the show, and they finally sac me down and said, We know you haven't had any acting experience and we're willing to make this as comfortable for you as possible. If you want to be funny, we'll give you those chances. If you don't, we'll write around you. We want you to marry David Spade's character and do a few episodes. Are you willing?' How many opportunities am I going to get like this? The show has amazing writing, a talented cast--I mean, Wendie Malick is the funniest woman on TV--and I just wanted to let that stuff rub off on me. They've had a number of models on that show trying to act. The cast calls them 'the fake actresses.' At first with me, they were like, 'The fake actress is here,' and then they were like, 'She got the joke out--yea for the fake actress!' I think they ended up genuinely liking me and now they say, 'You're a real actress now, but can we still call you the fake actress?' It's gotten more and more comfortable for me on the set, so I'm getting loose and having much more fun with it."
And that brings us to X-Men, her first substantial foray into film. The movie version of the comic book sensation X-Men is being directed by The Usual Suspects director Bryan Singer for something like $100 million, and features Academy Award nominee Sir Ian McKellen and winner Anna Paquin, as well as Halle Berry, James Marsden and new Australian sizzler Hugh Jackman. So does this make her an even more real actress? "Well, I'm going to have my own action figure, so that does put me in another league, doesn't it?" she observes, laughing. "Actually my part is pretty small and I don't say that much."
No matter. People will be gawking, if only at her costume, which, rumor has it, may end up helping to earn the movie an R-rating, "Bryan Singer loves that," she says. "I'm not allowed to say what my Mystique costume looks like. I will tell you that it's absolutely cool and really beautiful. But Mystique is covered in blue scales and morphs into many other characters--I mean, 70 percent of my body is covered with prosthetics, so nothing's hanging out. It is very revealing, but I'm totally unrecognizable once I go through this whole process. When Bryan Singer first had me come in for X-Men, he asked about my body painting for Sports Illustrated shoots. When I told him that one of them took 14 hours, he was like, 'She's in.' I think I got hired because I could sit still for 14 hours. They said, 'Your Mystique makeup will take 8 to 10 hours in the beginning,' and I was, like, 'Oh, but they'll figure out a way to whittle it down, so that they'll be able to do it in two by the end.' I now realize it'll never take fewer than 8 to 10 hours. I had no idea what I was getting myself into."
What she has gotten herself into is a high-risk, closely watched summer block-buster-wannabe in which she shares most of her scenes with the estimable Ian McKellen. "The first day I met him, I saw him drinking Welch's Grape Soda and, I don't know why, but I just started laughing. He asked, 'What is so funny about my drinking grape soda?' and all I could say was, 'Because you're a knight, you're like the world's most phenomenal actor and....' Well, he just looked at me like, 'Your point is?' It's moments like that when I know how I'd cast myself in a movie--as a silly six-foot spaz."
Is she bummed by how filmmakers appear less inclined to cast her as a silly six-foot spaz?, than a six-foot sex object?
"There are plenty of gay filmmakers out there that aren't interested in you for your sex," she asserts. "I have no problem with being a talented moviemaker's fag hag," Straight, gay or somewhere in between, most of the moviemakers she's most interested in working with are edgy. Don't even get her going on the subject of Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze. "My taste runs to really out-of-the-way things," she enthuses, "and I've loved Spike Jonze ever since his Fatboy Slim video, which was the greatest thing ever, I've read everything about him and he seems like a very classy man. I dig that he's very offbeat." Another challenge she's aching to tackle is a Broadway musical, the way her husband did when he unexpectedly won outstanding reviews for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. "I'm a complete musical comedy freak," she tells me, "and I studied classical voice seriously for years and years growing up, but haven't sung since I modeled. Seeing how great John was onstage really inspired me to work with a coach again."
Does she have a five-year plan? "To have babies with John and have a wonderful family life. I really mean it when I say that I'm not going to die if acting doesn't work out for me. I took a huge pay cut to leave modeling and try acting, and right now it's a scary transition time. But I'm having so much fun--which is the point, isn't it? I would love to continue to give acting a try and check out the feature film thing or maybe do a TV series. If that doesn't happen, there arc plenty of other things I could totally get into doing instead. The one thing I'm not willing to do is to risk my life, marriage and happiness for success in show business."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Anthony Minghella for the Dec./Jan. issue of Movieline.