Kelly Lynch, Still Waiting For Her Hitchcock

Waiting for Hitchcock

by Lyall Bush | Published July 2, 1997

In a big, sun-kissed house in Vancouver, B.C. which is the location set for Mr. Magoo, (scheduled for a Christmas release by Disney) Kelly Lynch's stunt double is having trouble taming her flimsy dress. Take after take, a kick that ought to toss an assailant from a couch onto the floor causes the garment to billow up, exposing, well, everything. The crew titters while wardrobe hunts for some decent cheek glue, and Kelly Lynch, in matching gauzy dress and long, blond, curled wig, stands behind the monitor, grinning that lead guitarist grin of hers. "Imagine, before lunch I said, `I could do that kick no problem,'"she says, proud that Stanley Tong (Jackie Chan's director) chose her for the rawbone athlete as well as the beauty.

Cigarette in hand, she calls her role as the villain of the piece a toss-up between 'a no-brainer' and 'the hardest physical role I've ever had.' A minute later, in front of the camera, she wraps one hand around co-star Matt Keeslar's throat. In his Hong Kong English, Tong says, "Keerie, don't be too gentle with him." Everyone breaks up.

Kelly? Too gentle? Between takes she's back behind the cameras to kid around (`I really think of myself as one of the workers, I punch the clock, you know?'), talk about Alec and Billy Baldwin ('Oh, I just love the whole damn family'), and laugh with milk-snorting pleasure at a story about obsessive compulsive disorder she's reading now in David Sedaris's Naked. A native of Minnesota, she breaks into a Minnesota impression straight out of Fargo, which was her favorite film last year. "Oh, geez, I hafta bearf," she says, doing the Coen brothers' Marge, bending over as if to puke.

Lynch, over lunch, is a relaxed combo platter like this, by turns demure and strong, laughing, teed-off and composed: part regal Elite model (the tape measure snaps up to 5'10" or so), part don't-give-a-damn, leggy rocker (think Aerosmith's Joe Perry sans the skank.) Digging into her plate of bratwurst, kielbasa and salad, she talked about being an actress in her late 30s (she turns 37 this year), the elusive breakthrough role, psycho directors, and Alfred Hitchcock. She also happens to love the movies, so we slid into our conversation by talking about what she was seeing these days.

Kelly Lynch (KL): I saw Chasing Amy the other day. Really smart movie my husband [Mitch Glazer] is a really good screenwriter, and I could tell he was feeling the heat of talent around him.

Lyall Bush (LB): What was it you liked about it so much?

KL: I liked that [Smith] had different voices for the characters. Usually a writer has a particular point of view in a film, and you find that all the characters come in and out of this one tone and rhythm. All [Smith's] characters had their own weird way of looking at the world and explaining things and he's done a very complicated thing as far as the differences between how men and women look at things. And here's this woman, playing a "woman with a past."

LB: This is the bi-sexual woman?

KL: Yeah. She explained why it's okay to be who she is and why she has the right. And how dare you. And I felt I learned something.

LB: Well you played a lesbian in Three of Hearts. What did you think of Joey Lauren Adams, who plays Amy?

KL: Oh, great job. They were able to do things that we were all fighting to do and couldn't do in our film. It's not like I thought we had to have sex, but I wanted it to be more believable. But what I was proud of was that you finally saw a character who who was gay and not dying of AIDS, and not killing a man with an ice pick. You saw her at work, with her friends, as a normal person living in New York.

LB: Did you have jitters about doing that part? Repercussions about your career, etcetera?

KL: I've never had that. Whether playing a drug addict or whatever, I've never thought, "Oh, God, what does this mean? Will I only get cast as a junkie now? My whole career is based on taking a left turn after each film and doing the opposite of what I've just done. And I've been married, I have a daughter. And I don't care.

LB: Don't care in what way?

KL: I don't care what people's myths are about me. The worst thing would be for them to find out who I really am, because that's where I hide.

LB: You say you don't care, that you take left turns from part to part. But I have a feeling that maybe there's a Kelly Lynch constituency out there that feels disappointed, that after Drugstore Cowboy, which was something of a breakthrough role for you, you ended up making films like Curly Sue, films that were commercial or blah or flat. Whether they started that way or not. Do you feel a responsibility to theman independent fan base, which is where you started out?

KL: Well, I always go back there. It's where the more interesting scripts are. I just did two films. I did Homegrown, with Billy Bob Thornton, and a movie called Cold Around the Heart for Oliver Stone. That's where I got my start and where I'll continue to work, but I can't tell you the number of films between Drugstore Cowboy and Curly Sue that I auditioned for and wanted that didn't choose me. I have really good taste. But actors at a certain point take the best of what's available to them. Rather than sit around, I'll work. And sometimes I do films so my daughter can see me work. My daughter Shane is 11 and she's still innocentI haven't shown her the dark film roles yet.

LB: Haven't shown her Drugstore Cowboy?

KL: No. I mean, she has an unaffected heart and soul. I make no apologies about what I do, and that film says [drugs are] fun. But you have to be very careful of what you do and when you do it and how much and why. I make no apologies about what I do. I make a good living and I've never looked at myself as being an artiste. I look at myself as someone who comes to work, punches the clock and does my craft.

LB: Is there a part of you that's driven? Did you, for example, push for the Nicole Kidman role in To Die For, having worked with Gus Van Zant?

KL: Oh, yeah, I really wanted to do it. Who they wanted was Meg Ryan, and she turned it down. It was really the biggest movie star available. The fact that I got Drugstore Cowboy at all was a fluke. It was before movie stars were aware of the independent film market.

LB: It was pre-Miramax.

KL: Exactly. I read the script and went berserk and then went after it. It was me, Cathy Moriarty and Amanda Plummer who wanted that part. I hadn't done a thing, but I thought, `Where's Michelle Pfeiffer? Are they insane? Where are these people? Don't they know?' I saw the script on my agent's shelf and said, `Whoa, what's that?' She said, `No, they want someone brunette, older. Tough.' [Smiling] `I could do that'. But now that it's broken through [independent filmmakers] want the biggest stars they can get. It's really a rare caseHomegrown, for example, Billy Bob Thornton wanted to work with me, and that made a difference. And the director wanted me. Otherwise it's who has international numbers. Amazing anything is ever cast correctly. The least consideration of any film I've ever worked on is who is right for it. You look at Gone With the Wind, how right Vivian Leigh was for that. Don't know if that would happen today.

LB: How do you know a good script when you see it?

KL: It's important for me to see as many colors in the character as possible. I'm not a sort of iconic actor who they say, "Get Kelly, she does that one really funny thing." I like to show as much of a woman as I can. I like to fill things out.

LB: So when you read a script, do you look at character rather than the movement of the whole piece?

LB: You must consider directors.

KL: Yeah, that's very important because they're the puppet master. I sat with Gus [Van Zant] for five minutes [on Drugstore Cowboy] and knew we got the joke the same. And that was probably the most free I've ever been on a film. Every day we had a really good time. I didn't know if anybody else was gonna like it. I knew I was gonna like it. And still the first cut was terrible. Matt Dillon said he wasn't going to support the film. So you never know.

LB: You were so cool in that film. I know a lot of men who were in love with you for that role.

KL: [laughing] That's so funny. It's such a dark part. Sort of scary to men, a woman who runs the show, a matriarchal thing. Bob [Matt Dillon] always had to ask Diane [Lynch], "Okay Diane, we're thinking of doing this..." She was the mother of them all.

LB: I want to go back to what you said about not being an iconic actor. In his book about Hollywood, Monster, John Gregory Dunne talks about the "ruthless economy" of a star's features, that stars are stars because they are able to convey an enormous amount of information without seeming to do very much. You have that.

KL: Well, for someone who looks like me you wonder where Alfred Hitchcock is. That's the kind of guy who would have gotten my beauty and my humor and my intelligence and my power and known what to do with it and not be afraid of it, and not feel that all the women have to be friendly now.

LB: In Desperate Hours I remember you being photographed coming out of carsankles, calves, knees coming out of cars. From what you just said I'd think that would be frustrating for you.

KL: That was a very frustrating film for me. I had spent three weeks with a lawyer in Los Angeles for that part. She wore no make-up and was economical with her sexualityused it when she needed it in the courtroom. And she had these killer legs, which the director [Michael Cimino] and I both keyed in on. But then he decided to make me look like Claudia Schiffer. I just said "You're not going to put this drag queen makeup on me,I just don't see her with this super model look." He said, "All that's in the back of your character's mind is that you want Mickey Rourke's character to fuck you." I remember saying to him, "Are you crazy? How long do you think it would take for me to have a person who looked like Mickey Rourke have sex with me? Do you think it would take a minute? Thirty seconds?"

LB: How did he respond?

KL: You can imagine. This is Michael Cimino; he just looked at me and shook his head and said, "I never want to see you on the set without your make-up on. You look like a little boy." And I thought that's exactly how I would see her. We put the makeup on and those high-heeled shoes and we had to practice me getting out of that Jagmy leg straight out in the air and down on the ground. I was pulling stomach muscles getting up to the level. It was his own psycho-trip about beautiful women and taking away a woman's power, as opposed to making her a powerful woman and attorney in the world. I don't care how good an actress you are. When you're working with someone who's a psycho, who doesn't have the same feeling about how the world works as you do...And I think he's brilliant, he's done brilliant things. I just think Desperate Hours is beyond flawed. And when Mickey Rourke rips my shirt he says, `Tell me you need me?' And my line is, `Tell me you love me.' Cimino cut that out. In [Cimino's] head it was about me wanting to have sex; for me it was about my character seeing a future.

LB: That's an interesting thing to hear, given that in the film your character does seem a focal point in the beginning and by halfway through is just a hysteric.

KL: Look at Year of the Dragon, he took that beautiful Japanese model. He did the same thing with her. This is a trip he has with beautiful women. He's always attracted to beauty and then he wants to destroy it and humiliate it and take its power away. That's why I say someone like Alfred Hitchcock, he might have been as sick as they come...

LB: Apparently.

KL: Apparently, but he certainly knew how to exploit that kind of beauty. Look at Rear Window. There's so many levels of performance in Grace Kelly, it's justyou start to see it opening like a Chinese box. At first you think what a beautiful socialite she is and by the end you realize how sick and twisted this girl is. It's so great.

LB: Let's talk about making an image on screen. Whether you're in a battle with a director or not, do you have control over the creation of that image? How conscious are you of creating an image that's all "male gaze"?

KL: That's a good question. In a collaborative environment directors hire actors because they want their input, not just their bodies. I have a lot of input. I do come shackled with whatever people think I am. You know, I change my hair color a lot, I do all sorts of different things. I think women have a harder time. Most movie stars don't change their look at all. They have a certain thing that they do; that they cultivate and protect. That would be too frightening for me to go along in that path.

LB: Why?

KL: `Cause I won't repeat myself, the way I dress and look. There might be crossover bits and pieces. But I have to start breaking into someone else. No one wonders why Sean Penn or Gary Oldman changes the way they look.

LB: Do you ever feel a little envious of younger actresses doing independent film after you broke the ground. It's given actresses like Parker Posey the option, in a way. In `89 only some maniac would do indie stuff.

KL: [Laughing] Yeah, a maniac. Well, I'm a consumer as well. I go to the movies with my popcorn and believe everything I see. So when I see some great talent, male, female, old, young, writing, acting, I feel like I'm in the right business. Yeah, I do feel badly sometimes, not for whose coming up and getting roles I'm not right for anymore but the people I compete with, who range from Uma Thurman on up. I was number two for Pulp Fiction. I mean, there were a number of movies like that. Often it's between me and someone younger.

LB: So who is the Hitchcock today you'd want to work with?

KL: God, good question. [Pause.] Well, it could be Gus, Gus has a little of that in him for sure. But with Hitchcock there wasan intensity.

LB: Gus Van Zant seems maybe too quirkily brilliant.

KL: Yes, he is, but what I mean is he's not afraid of women like that. Nicole [Kidman] certainly has that icy beauty and intelligence. He's just, he's not afraid of tall, attractive women, obviously. Maybe it's because he's gay [laughing]. But for him it's cool. It's part of the fun of it to work with strong personalities. [Pause] You know, when it comes down to it there are only a few good actors but there are how many amazingly talented actresses? I mean, I always feel incredibly lucky to get a job. When I hear who else is up for parts it's always these immensely talented actresses.

LB: What about the men?

KL: I just think that acting and dressing up and putting make-up on is something that attracts more women than men. I heard a story of Sean Penn at one point shooting We're No Angels with Bob DeNiro and saying, "Fuck dis - I'm not doing this anymore, I wanna direct" [she's laughing]. When I sit in the make-up trailer and see these men getting eyelash make-up put on and eyebrow pencils. I think, "God, kinda weird." And I'm in my 30s now, and what men are in their 30s? Alec Baldwin, Andy Garcia I guess, Mel Gibson.

LB: So what about being in your 30s. Actresses seem to have to face turning 40and then great actresses like Jessica Lange and Barbara Hershey disappear for five years before they reappear doing different kinds of roles.

KL: I can't wait. I can't wait. You just mentioned two incredibly talented, incredibly beautiful actresses who are now doing some of their best work. In their 30s women really start to live...they're not children anymore, and they're not just mothers. And that's the time that's the most scary to men? The most scary to Hollywood? Whoever makes those decisions? Maybe it's the audience. I can't wait til I get the chance to be a character and how my face looks isn't the first consideration. It's stifling. I don't care about that. My idols are all older. There's no one my age or younger I think, `Ah, wish I had her career.'

LB: Who are your idols?

KL: I love Jessica Lange. Susan Sarandon's always great, always believable. Never studied acting in her life. I just believe everything she does. I love her sense of humor, her earthiness. I love that her intelligence shows. Those are the women, in life, I always like.

LB: Because they're strong, maybe.

KL: One day when my daughter was young I was on the phone with my agent, breastfeeding my daughter, taking a pee and making breakfast. And I said, `You have no idea what I'm doing now.' I told him and he said, "It's always like that with you," and I thought, no, it's always like this with every gal who's bitten off a big chunk of life. Scariest thing I ever heard was Kate Hepburn saying you can have two out of the three: kids, a husband, a career. Kate, you can't be right.