Category: Interview

Mr. Pitt & His Magical Mattress

Mr. Pitt & His Magical Mattress

Posted September 1, 2006

On a hot summer afternoon, the most glamorous birth father in America sits in a diner booth and tries to make sense of the world. A thunderous revving noise ruptures the quiet of the Spitfire Grill on a lazy afternoon in Santa Monica, California, accompanied by a series of subsonic reverberations that tinkle the ice cubes of my overfull water glass, breaking the surface tension, sending droplets down the side. Abruptly, all is still. The waitress resumes filling the saltshakers. Steely Dan harmonizes on the sound system overhead. The door opens, and he walks in–his helmet beneath his arm–like Achilles […]

Johnny Depp Plays it His Way

Posted June 24, 2006

The defiant one: Johnny Depp has had studio executives squirming over his interpretations of how characters should be played. But “you’ve got to do what you believe in,” the actor says. It is dangerous for a rebel to be loved too much. Defiance is the troublemaker’s oxygen, and the surprise of a great big bear hug from the mainstream powers-that-be can be enough to choke it right out. There’s a temptation to wriggle free. Johnny Depp, one of his generation’s most iconoclastic actors, is in that situation now with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the sequel to the […]

Troy Story

Posted June 17, 2006

A horse may just be a horse, but in Troy, it’s a lot more spectacular when paired with the likes of Orando Bloom, Brad Pitt, and Eric Bana. This epically expensive tale of passion, pride – and, of course, that face – might be one of the greatest stories ever sold. An exclusive from the Cabo San Lucas set of Troy. It isn’t pretty, what they’re doing to Orlando Bloom. He’s flung himself onto the hard-packed Mexican dirt several times now, enacting the turning point of a complex scene in which his character, Paris, has just taken a (terrible) battering […]

Leonardo DiCaprio| Fresh Blood

Posted June 1, 2006

Is this 20-year-old actor the next River Phoenix? If not, why do we like pretending he is? The boy with the most beautiful name in Hollywood was once told by an agent to change it to Lenny Williams. More recently, producers have advised him to star in movies about teenagers who strangle their girlfriends, or in tacky, fast-money Westerns like The Quick and the Dead, which opened Friday. In his short career — he just turned 20 — Leonardo DiCaprio has seen all the twisted ways people respond to a prodigy’s gift: change it, own it.  It’s not that DiCaprio […]

Johnny Depp| A Pirate’s Life

Posted June 1, 2006

He wasn’t looking for superstardom, so superstardom came looking for him. Johnny Depp on family, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and how he got a chest of gold without selling his soul. Fatherhood has a way of changing people, even iconoclasts. “When I became a dad for the first time, it was like a veil being lifted,” Johnny Depp says, as he leans forward, rolling loose tobacco into dark brown paper and using his knee as a table. “I’ve always loved the process of acting, but I didn’t find the occupational hazards particularly rewarding.” Occupational hazards like being stalked by […]

Brad Pitt| The Celebrity

Posted June 1, 2006

He lured the paparazzi to Africa, where people really needed the attention. If it wasn’t for Brad Pitt, most Americans would never have heard of Namibia. They might not know about AIDS orphans in South Africa, or the plight of children in Haiti, or what transpired at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Pitt, 42, has been a movie star for 15 years—and a paparazzi target for nearly as long. Celebrity mags have made millions reporting on his love life, and the obsession only intensified when he began romancing Angelina Jolie. So he started fighting back—but not by punching […]

Wentworth Miller Unlocked

Posted April 1, 2006

Far from his white-knuckled predicament inside the walls of Fox River State Penitentiary, Prison Break‘s hero Wentworth Miller, 33, kicks back in a Greenwich Village photo studio. When asked about your race, what do you tell people?I say I’m of mixed race, and if they ask for specifics, I rattle off the details: My mother is Russian, French, Syrian, Lebanese and Dutch; my father is African-American, Jamaican, English, German and part Cherokee. How difficult was it dealing with racism growing up and now trying to find roles in Hollywood?I’ll find myself standing in the company of someone who will make […]

The Epic Life of Orlando Bloom

Posted November 24, 2005

Don’t be fooled by his bohemian dress and freethinking ways (or by the fact that he’s very, very good in a very unperiod new movie): Orlando Bloom is the Errol Flynn of our time Orlando Bloom sits (eating unripe blueberries), having his morning tea on what could be the patio of a modest little house anywhere in the world. But little things everywhere hint that this is a partly fictional realm. Bloom is swathed in one of the long scarves he favors, covered in trinkets, and wearing combat-weight black boots, but because he has become so extraordinarily well-known for playing […]

Kiera Knightley| Women We Love

Posted October 1, 2005

Keira Knightley Does This Thing with Her Mouth… In her movies, she does this thing — her pout breaks into a precariously wide smile, retracts into what looks like a sob, and then somehow transforms into an adoring half laugh. It’s an endearing little quirk. The mouth thing can mean many things to many people, but what it usually signifies is that Keira no longer despises you. She has realized that her hatred was actually love all along. There’s little chance of that happening this morning, in a quiet café near Keira’s London home. Still, I’m dying to see that […]

Domestic Bliss

Domestic Bliss

Posted July 17, 2005

Sometime last year, Brad Pitt began giving a lot of thought to unhappy marriages. The actor was in Los Angeles filming Mr. and Mrs. Smith. While the movie uses domestic ennui as a backdrop for a series of high-style action sequences, Pitt wanted to tell a darker, truer tale, one that explored the “unidentifiable malaise” that so often haunts a seemingly happy couple. “You don’t know what’s wrong because the marriage is everything you signed up for.” That was the inspiration for this shoot, which Pitt created with photographer Steven Klein. Tired of celebrity portraiture and always up for an […]