Bravo,
baby: My first thought when I saw you in Todd Solondz’s controversial
new Palindromes was, “Look! The ‘90’s sex goddess
is actually letting herself age.”
Thank
you! Listen, I cannot bear what my generation of actresses are doing to
their faces. Enough already. God bless the Europeans and their very different
sense of what is appealing—like, the other night, I was watching
Swimming Pool and thought, “God, please let me look like Charlotte
Rampling when I’m 58 years old.” ‘Cause everybody still
wants to fuck Charlotte Rampling—she’ll always be ‘Charlotte
Rampling.’ But if she started to screw with her eyes, she wouldn’t
be. And it’s not only the rampant surgery—I want to know
why these women dress that way in Hollywood. Hey, I still have a good
body, but I’m 50 years old and everybody got to look at it when I
was younger and now it’s not time for them to look at it.
Oh,
but when it was time—in films like Sea of Love,The
Big Easy and Siesta—ooo la la.....
I
totally embraced being referred to as a “sex bomb,” because
for years I couldn’t get those jobs. And I clearly had no problem
with sex scenes—I was the naked one on set and felt fine about
it, but everybody else was so panicked that it seemed like it was the
only time I was on “top.” I always thought, “Oh, good,
I’m going to be the boss for a day.” (laughs)
Yeah,
in earlier work like Diner and Tender Mercies you were usually
relegated to abused waif status. Though Pauline Kael did compare you to
Brando in her Diner review…..
(sighs)
That was my first movie review ever. You know, Diner was not going
to be released and Kael saw it and wrote a positive review so the studio
was either embarrassed into releasing it or thought, “Fuck, we better
get this movie out fast because this brilliant review is gonna come out
by the only real film critic left and we don’t’ even have a
release date!”
Hail
Kael. A few years later, after Sea of Love made you big B.O., you
made some interesting choices that weren’t so celebrated, though—like,
say, Blake Edwards’ Switch where you played a dead, womanizing
male sent back to earth to redeem himself in the body of a woman. Explain.
I
knew I could play a man. (laughs) I used to always send my brother my
scripts to read and he said, “You have to do Switch because
you’ll never get a chance to play yourself again.” I thought,
“He’s kind of right.” (laughs)
Yep,
you may be the butchest sex symbol in history. And that’s a compliment.
Okay, I have to ask: You’ve starred twice with Robert De Niro [in
This Boy’s Life and The Fan] and, lately, there’s
been lots of talk of how he’s “trashing his legacy” by
appearing in stuff like Meet the Fockers and Hide and Seek.
What do you—
Fuck
them all! I have a 15-year-old son who,because of Analyze This
and Meet the Fockers, has now seen every movie Martin Scorsese
and Robert DeNiro have ever made.
Yet
just today I read Russell Crowe slamming DeNiro’s American Express
ad, saying, “He’s been disappointing me for a while now.”
Oh,
I’m so sorry you’re disappointed….gladiator. Please. Russell
Crowe is a wonderful actor who owes his entire whatever it is to Robert
DeNiro—he’s the spawn of DeNiro. Actually, no, he doesn’t
deserve that, because Sean Penn carries DeNiro’s legacy, not Russell
Crowe. How dare he say that about Robert DeNiro!
And
she’s off! You’re so passionate, Barkin, why don’t you
act more?
I’m
lazy. (laughs) Also, ‘cause I’m not going to leave my family
(with Revlon’s Ron Perelman) just so I can keep my face on the radar.
Too
bad—‘cause it’s a face that looks ever more
intoxicatingly like…..Angie Dickinson.
(joyously)
I am Angie Dickenson, what do you mean? I love her with all my heart and
one of my favorite ever 'celebrity moments' was her saying to me, “Let
me meet the young me.” So let’s just say it again: I am the
Angie Dickinson of my time!
© 2008 Brantley Bardin. All Rights Reserved.
