Category: Interview

Fun with George and Brad

Fun with George and Brad

Posted June 1, 2007

Being one of the most famous men on earth comes with its share of problems. You can’t take your kids to the playground. The simple pleasures just evaporate. Like, say, sneaking a smoke while waiting for your buddy George Clooney in a villa outside Cannes. “Sorry about this,” Brad Pitt says, contorting his body into a mess of angles and elbows to hide behind a low wall and light up. “Actually, I’m less worried about the paparazzi catching me than someone, ahem, who doesn’t know I still smoke once in a while.” Pitt puffs away, extinguishing the cigarette only when […]

Orlando Bloom| The Reluctant Heartthrob

Posted May 1, 2007

Orlando Bloom is a master at revealing very little about himself. The British heartthrob offers thoughtful, often sensitive, answers to all questions thrown at him, but is careful not to expose any more of himself than necessary. For instance, when asked what his biggest vice is, he takes a moment to think and then replies, “Vintage watches.” When I point out that his collection of 60-plus watches is an awfully G-rated vice, he laughs, knowing I’ve called his bluff. “Believe me, I have plenty more, but I’m not going to share them with you,” he says. It’s ironic, then, that […]

The Pirates of the Caribbean star is plotting a new course.

Posted May 1, 2007

There is a layer of smog hanging like a translucent violet ribbon just above the horizon. Orlando Bloom and I are sitting on a balcony, looking south over West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, the city brown and gray and smudged by dirty light. The traffic on Sunset Boulevard is noxious and slow. Suspended over the road, on a walkway between the metal girders of a 10-story-tall construction crane, is a man eating a sandwich. He is a silhouette: We see the human shape, the lifting and lowering of the arm and the head bobbing as he chews. Bloom leans against […]

Christian Rocks

Christian Rocks

Posted March 24, 2007

Even in a career in which you’ve demonstrated an amazing ability to pull off accents, the one you do for Dieter in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn is kind of a tour de force: the speech of a man born in Germany who came of age in America, as delivered by an actor born in Wales.The Germans I was working with told me that people from the Black Forest have a slightly strange accent, even for Germans, and beyond that Dieter had a very exaggerated way of speaking. In Werner’s 1997 documentary about him, you see clips from when he’s younger; […]

Dakota Fanning| Cinderella in Sneakers

Dakota Fanning| Cinderella in Sneakers

Posted January 19, 2007

Dakota Fanning picked the place. A little Mexican restaurant called Casa Vega, on Ventura Boulevard, in the San Fernando Valley. “It’s the greatest restaurant ever. I usually get a chicken enchilada and a beef taco, or two beef tacos, but I get beef and cheese. I’m very simple. I don’t get the sour cream like most people. My dad had a burrito last time. A lot of people, like my uncle, get an appetizer that’s pretty big, I guess­ Mexican pizza.”

Angelina Jolie| The Bold and the Beautiful

Angelina Jolie| The Bold and the Beautiful

Posted January 1, 2007

“The middle of nowhere” is about halfway between L.A. and Las Vegas at a dusty old airstrip in the desert called the Barstow-Daggett Airport. Angelina Jolie loves this place. Something about its broken-down beauty and military history speaks to her dual craving for authenticity and manliness. She calls it, simply, “Daggett.” As in “Brad and I like to fly in to meet our motorcycles at Daggett. One time we took a three-hour bike ride in the desert to a place where we spent the night alone. And then we rode the bikes back to Daggett and flew back to L.A. […]

Matt Damon

Posted December 1, 2006

The Good Shepherd star on playing hard to get and still getting his due. In the realm of moments that movie stars should be embarrassed about, uttering one corny line in The Legend of Bagger Vance should not be something you wear like a hair shirt for the rest of your days. Drunkenly accusing the Jews of starting all wars? Yeah, that’s something you should probably regret. Getting arrested for pegging a bellhop in the head with a phone? Certainly shameworthy. But when Matt Damon describes the horror that overtakes him every time he thinks of the moment in Robert […]

George Clooney| Already a Classic

Posted November 24, 2006

The perennial bachelor prankster is also Hollywood’s silver-haired statesman, making movies and speaking out for a basic American decency. Yet, open as George Clooney may seem, he remains as elusive as Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, and other classic stars he calls to mind. That’s not unintentional, learns the author, who visits Casa Clooney for a chat about the producer-actor-director’s latest film, The Good German. America projects two kinds of power in the world: hard power, which is tanks, jets, and missiles, and soft power, which, at the moment, is George Clooney. He is dashing, and charming. He put David O. […]

In defense of Orlando Bloom

In defense of Orlando Bloom

Posted September 17, 2006

The Haven star can act but it’s not easy to tell. Sarah D. Bunting is co-creator of TelevisionWithoutPity.com Orlando Bloom is not a bad actor. He isn’t Olivier, but he isn’t Shatner, either. Why, then, does everyone assume he’s a bad actor? For starters, he’s pretty. Not ‘handsome,’ mind you: pretty. The bulk of Bloom’s fame derives from his role as Legolas in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and while he acquitted himself well with a bow and arrow in those films, he also had very long flaxen hair, the sort that usually belongs to mermaids and Disney heroines. […]

BayWatch

Posted September 1, 2006

In his Santa Monica headquarters, director Michael Bay is preceded down the hallway by two gigantic beasts. The flesh-colored English mastiff named Mason (after Sean Connery’s character in The Rock) is roughly the size of a Shetland pony. Grace (named after Liv Tyler’s character in Armageddon) is a year-old puppy, nearing the size where she too could be fitted for a saddle. As Bay steps into an office decorated with such props as the model for the space shuttle from Armageddon and a bomb from Pearl Harbor, he explains that his beloved canines recently forced him to trade in his […]