Rebecca De Mornay on Reconnecting With Tom Cruise and Making Her New York Theater Debut

Rebecca De Mornay knows all about arresting debuts. In 1983, her first film “Risky Business,” in which she played the streetwise prostitute, Lana, opposite Tom Cruise’s cocky entrepreneur, Joel Goodsen, proved a smash hit, catapulting them both to Hollywood stardom.Since then they’ve pursued rapidly different career paths. Mr. Cruise is the biggest Hollywood film star in the world. Ms. De Mornay, now 66, has adopted something of a lower profile. But in another first, she’s soon making her New York stage debut in John Patrick Shanley’s play “The Pushover.”Ms. De Mornay, who was in a romantic relationship with Tom Cruise for nearly three years following the release of “Risky Business,” discloses she saw him in Los Angeles late last year for the first time in a while after he received an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards last November. “There was a party for him celebrating his Governors Award, and I was invited,” she recalled. “We hadn’t seen each other in many years, and I told him how proud I am of him and proud because that film was the beginning of my creative life.”Even in interviews around the time of “Risky Business,” Ms. De Mornay had expressed a desire to be a New York theater actress. “She would like to have a shot at a Broadway part someday,” reported the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndication service in 1983.Over four decades later, Ms. De Mornay is acting in the world premiere of “The Pushover,” a play by the Pulitzer Prize winning writer-director Mr. Shanley that opens April 6 off-Broadway at the Chain Theatre. Yet as befits an actress renowned for doing things her own way, she downplays her arrival into New York theater having any special significance, instead saying she’s here for the material rather than for any career milestone. “I would have gone to any stage in any city to work with John Patrick Shanley,” she told the Sun when we met after a rehearsal one recent afternoon. “He is one of the greatest American living playwrights, and he’s my personal favorite playwright.”“His writing is like music, it’s poetry,” Ms. De Mornay continued about Mr. Shanley. “The long and short of it is I’m here because of this play and I would have been anywhere. I didn’t think of it as, ‘Here I am — my New York debut’. It was more I get to work on one of the most complex characters ever. It’s three powerful women [onstage] which often doesn’t happen and it’s one of the best roles I’ve ever had a chance to play, including on screen.”Rebecca De Mornay might be new to New York theater, but she is no stranger to the stage, having previously appeared in “Marat/Sade” in Williamstown and “Born Yesterday” in Los Angeles. Yet this is her first theater role for 25 years, since she acted, alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal in Patrick Marber’s raw relationship play “Closer” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.“Unbeknownst to the people who cast me, I was four months pregnant,” she said of that role. “When I was doing the show I was five months pregnant. It’s got so much pornographic dialogue. At the end of the first act I have a screaming match with my husband where we’re talking about, ‘Did my lover come in my mouth, it tasted sweeter than yours.’ Every time we got to that scene my little daughter, who’s now 24, started kicking in my stomach. It was surreal but was also kind of frightening to be in that mode. I think that kind of just shocked me. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I ever want to do this again’…so I didn’t gravitate towards the stage and I didn’t try to get into theater productions.”The part in “The Pushover” arose after Ms. De Mornay performed in a benefit reading of a one act play by Mr. Shanley for the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, with Alec Baldwin (she fell into acting after walking past the Lee Strasberg Institute in 1980.) Her character, Evelyn, in “The Pushover” — which is set in Queens and New Mexico — reminds her of Mephistopheles, the demon in Goethe’s “Faust,” in that “she wills forever bad or evil but does forever good.” Stage work might be unusual but she says Evelyn is connected to the characters she has portrayed in films such as “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and “Runaway Train.”Rebecca De Mornay. Shawn SalleyElaborating on her preferred choice of role, Ms. De Mornay added, “I felt some kind of responsibility to women and girls in my audience that I never wanted to portray the woman being the victim that just kicked around and nothing good ever happens to her. There’s too much of that. I wanted to play the woman, no matter who she is, if she’s the prostitute or a Wall Street broker, and even if she doesn’t do good things, she’s a force.”Such a specific attitude to the characters she plays perhaps explains why Ms. De Mornay has never attained anything like the stardom of Mr. Cruise: “John [Patrick Shanley] said I think you actually find reasons to say no to parts. That’s your MO [modus operandi]. It kind of is. I’m not somebody that is like, ‘I’ve got to work.’ A lot of actors they don’t feel alive unless they’re acting. That’s not me.”Yet recently Hollywood economics has put these standards to the test. When I put it to her she has never been in a terrible film, she replies, “I have, especially in the last few years. What’s happened to the Screen Actors Guild is if you don’t make $29,000 a year, you lose your health insurance. It doesn’t matter I’ve made millions and millions in the past. If an actor makes $29,000 and I don’t, they get their insurance and I lose mine. Before I used to say ‘No’ and not work for a full year because I didn’t like what was being offered. Now if I don’t find something good, I have to do something just for the insurance. There have been a few very bad things, just for that.”While she has produced and directed in Hollywood, Ms. De Mornay now feels she might have been more proactive in trying to collaborate with the best talent: “I think I’ve been remiss in not contacting people that I wanted to work with. Alec Baldwin told me that he writes to people directly. I thought, ‘Why have I not been doing that?’” Mr. Baldwin memorably depicted Donald Trump in “Saturday Night Live” and that show provides another instance of Ms. De Mornay sticking to her guns: “They asked me to host it once and I turned it down, because maybe I was scared. I turned it down and I probably shouldn’t have.”It would be easy to dwell on commercial outcomes but Ms. De Mornay’s resume is filled with rich acting roles deserving of retrospective appreciation. Proving that timing is critical in a film’s destiny, two sophisticated erotic thrillers she made in the 1990s, “Guilty as Sin” (1993) and “Never Talk to Strangers” (1995), both suffered from being released after the backlash that followed the success of “Basic Instinct.” “Dealers,” envisaged as the British equivalent of “Wall Street,” had the misfortune to be released in 1989 when a recession was looming.Yet there’s no trace of bitterness about any of this in Ms. De Mornay who says she has always preferred to be a “character actor.” “I have no idea why my first movie would be this huge smash and guaranteed me pretty much — unless I completely blew it — a career,” she said. “I’ve just been incredibly lucky.” Recently she re-watched “Risky Business.“ “I knew it was good but it held up completely today which films don’t,” she said. “It’s so beautiful… the film that we made was what I saw when I read the script which is very rare.”Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay in ‘Risky Business.’ Warner Brothers/Getty ImagesHer creative mindset seems more European than American, which is appropriate given she spent her childhood in England and Austria, prior to her acting epiphany. She was raised by her mother Julie De Mornay and was estranged from her father Wally George, a Californian conservative talk show host. George died in 2003 but I ask her if he would have suited the modern political climate? “You got that right,” she said. “I didn’t grow up with him and he had really nothing to do with my life. He got very interested in my life when I became famous. The reality is he was my biological father and he was an entertainer and he fooled a lot of people because the thing that he put forth on his show was a hoax. He was not an arch conservative at all… he was a precursor to what came.”Ms. De Mornay lived in New York in the 1980s before relocating to Los Angeles. Can she ever see herself moving back to the East Coast? “At this point I sort of can because both of my daughters have moved to New York… I’m actually living with one right now, squatting in her place.” The insurance premiums aren’t her only reservations with Los Angeles: “Hollywood is really changing from when I started. I know what filmmaking is but it’s a different world. The people have moved out, the money that they’ve had for making movies is disappearing, everybody’s penny-pinching everywhere.” The upshot is, she adds, “they just throw shit on screen… they want to make it fast and cheap and hope it’s good. A lot of it isn’t.”Commencing with “The Pushover,” one can see Ms. De Mornay graduating into being a regular accomplished theater actress in her advancing years, in the vein of Kristin Scott Thomas and the late Val Kilmer. She has also written a novel, provisionally titled “Way Too Deep,” about a girl who comes across a Zen Buddhist monastery.For now, Ms. De Mornay is determined to enjoy her creative rebirth. “I have a lot of energy,” she said. “I just buzz around the whole day, no matter what.” Taking her career full circle she has just been elected Chairman of the Lee Strasberg Institute. “I really feel at least 15 years younger than what I am,” she says, adding drily, “You have to get old before somebody calls you youthful.”

Rebecca De Mornay on Reconnecting With Tom Cruise and Making Her New York Theater Debut

Rebecca De Mornay on Reconnecting With Tom Cruise and Making Her New York Theater Debut

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