The Corruption of Chris O’Donnell

Posted May 24, 1995

Suspecting that Chris O’Donnell is not the straight-laced preppy he has played in movies, our reporter asks the actor about his brushes with The Seven Deadly Sins. Sitting across from Chris O’Donnell in the lounge of The Argyle hotel, I can’t help thinking, ‘How goes the inevitable corruption of Chris O’Donnell? After all, it’s been a couple of years since he admitted on these pages to my esteemed colleague Martha Frankel, “I’m waiting to get corrupted. I know it’s going to happen sometime.” Certainly, he’s no less alluring to look at now that his pink-checked, vine-ripened frat boy sweet-ness is […]

River Phoenix| Lost in Hollywood

Posted April 24, 1995

This charismatic actor survived a bizarre childhood (was raised in a flaky cult, sent out to panhandle in the streets at age five) only to succumb to dark additions he fought to keep secret. In the summer of 1968, a twenty-three-year-old secretary named Arlyn Sharon Dunetz decided to drop out of her workaday life to pursue a hippie dream. She returned from her Manhattan office one day and told her husband that she was leaving him to find a more meaningful life. Stuffing some clothes into a backpack, Arlyn took a few dollars of savings and left the Bronx to […]

The Buzz On Johnny Depp

Posted April 24, 1995

What a week. You know, you’re staying at this hotel, the Mark. It’s not your regular place, but come on–you’re paying twenty-two hundred dollars a night for the presidential suite, you think at least they wouldn’t look at you funny every time you cross the lobby. Is that too much to ask? Every time … especially this one guy who works there. You can just tell he doesn’t like you, he doesn’t like you at all. And why? Because you didn’t change your jeans or wash your hair? So it’s five in the morning and a couple of million cups […]

Ethan Hawke| Renaissance Boy

Posted March 1, 1995

Two and a half years ago, this reporter met up with young Hawke, not far removed from a supporting role opposite a dog in White Fang and fresh off his turn as every vegan’s nightmare in Alive. Reaction from bystanders was universal: “Ethan Hawke … isn’t he the ‘Oh, captain, my captain’ guy from Dead Poets Society? He’s such a cute kid.” Fast forward to the present. Toss in one role as a cynical hipster asshole in the twenty-something comedy Reality Bites, a tabloid dance with Julia Roberts and reports that he has completed a short novel. Once again the […]

Leonardo DiCaprio| Boy Meets World

Posted March 1, 1995

He’s played misfits and half-wits, and scored an Oscar nomination at nineteen. This month, Leonardo DiCaprio is a junkie-poet in The Basketball Diaries and a gunslinger in The Quick and the Dead. But the most fearless actor in Hollywood still lives with his mom. Leonardo DiCaprio is throwing roundhouse karate kicks a few inches from my face. Whoosh. He hikes up his baggy jeans which instantly slide back down his nonexistent butt and kicks again. Whoosh. This one is a bit closer than the one before it. This f**ing great actor, this rising phenom, this valuable celluloid property, still lives […]

Brad Attitude

Posted February 1, 1995

The first time you meet Brad Pitt, you think, Brad Pitt is a knucklehead. “The thing about these articles, I sit down and give my life views, and it sounds like I’m walking around like a prophet,” Pitt says. “And that’s not true, ‘cause most of the time I’m out cutting up and laughing and speeding in my car and whatever, whatever, whatever. Yelling at the TV and cranking the tunes…It’s like ‘What’s your favorite color? I don’t know, I like a bunch of ‘em.” Under the druggie diction, beneath the bale of bleached-blond hair, Pitt is murderously handsome. As […]

Bard Pitt| The Tristan Night Away

Posted February 1, 1995

Free to emote as his vampire Louis could not, Brad Pitt ignites tears, strife and passion on the rain-plagued set of Legends of the Fall. Well, what else would you expect from an epic tragedy about three brothers who fall for the same woman? Tucked away behind a set of plywood walls, on a bed in the middle of a curling rink west of Calgary, Brad Pitt is making love. He’s got Toad The Wet Spocket’s Fear playing on the ghetto blaster, and Elizabethan beauty Julia Ormond in his arms. A hushed and diffident skeleton crew is looking on. Blue-gelled […]

The Woman in Winona

Posted December 24, 1994

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit and “fall into a vortex.” as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott Winona Ryder has grown up since the age of 14 in front of cameras. Now 23, she returns to adolescence to portray Jo March, the girl who wants to become a writer-the character who has been a role model for generations of women-in Gillian Armstrong’s film of Louisa May […]

Slippin’ Around On The Road With Brad Pitt

Slippin’ Around On The Road With Brad Pitt

Posted December 1, 1994

On the way to this particular London pub, no less than three young ladies have come skulking out of the shadows to solicit a favor from Brad Pitt. Each case is the same: A woman approaches demurely, flashes a smile and utters the question “Excuse me, are you Brad Pitt?” The answer is quite obviously yes. “Do you think I could get a kiss?” Then, being a polite Springfield, Mo., boy at heart, our hero complies. Brad Pitt is a cagey bastard-a good ol’ boy with brains. He is slippery, smart and extremely likable. These are qualities he uses to […]

Little Woman, Big Star

Posted December 1, 1994

Winona Ryder is the name above the title in Little Women. But she had to overcome a bizarre adolescence and the throes of depression to get there. In the scene being shot today [for Boys], Winona Ryder’s character has been knocked unconscious in a fall from a horse; she wakes up in a boarding-school boy’s dorm room. Winona’s worried, [writer-director] Stacy [Cochran] wants her to play the scene alert and focused, and Winona feels her character would be cloudier, disoriented. “Where’s my horse?” she says over and over, her voice just above whisper, as the cameras roll. She’s playing a […]