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player ready...So gorgeous. So talented. So mean!
We don’t know how, exactly, Michelle Pfeiffer became Hollywood’s biggest villainess this summer. Sure, she’s played ladies of questionable character in the past — “White Oleander’s” murdering mom, “Batman Returns’ ” whip-cracking Catwoman, “Scarface’s” trophy coke wife — but they all had, shall we say, their reasons for being bad.
Not the case with scheming Velma Von Tussle in the well-received musical version of “Hairspray.” Nor the ancient sorceress Lamia in this weekend’s release of “Stardust,” an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s best-selling fantasy book co-starring Robert De Niro, Claire Danes and Peter O’Toole. Lamia will stop at nothing to regain her long-lost loveliness — something the 49-year-old Pfeiffer appears in no danger of imminently misplacing.
There’s a romantic destiny theme in “Stardust.” Do you buy that stuff?
No. Because I think life is really about the choices that you make. I worked really hard to be the kind of person that I was when I met my husband (TV producer David E. Kelley), and if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been ready for him. I wouldn’t have appreciated it, I would have sabotaged it in some way. So I wouldn’t call it destiny, if you will. Maybe I would look at it more as facing different forks in the road. Sometimes you get your mind going in a certain direction, but other opportunities come along, and you just don’t see them. For me, it’s about recognizing that.
Are bad girls more fun to play than good ones?
They are, but I always approach them with a lot of hesitation because there are so many pitfalls in terms of underplaying it or overplaying it, or playing too much into it and not really finding her humanity. You don’t want to just get up and play evil.
In “Stardust,” we tried to find, at times, how sad it was for this character to have that moment of recovered youth; to move without pain and look beautiful, and then see that being stripped away.
“Stardust” is quirky and complicated for a fairy-tale movie. How would you describe it?
It’s this really interesting, action/mythic/romance/adventure movie. It’s just all these things rolled into one; it’s very hard to describe. It’s just charming, charming, charming.
And the special effects?
The movie is stunning. It is. I mean, I look hideous, but the movie is beautiful.
Not having to worry about looking beautiful all the time must’ve been fun.
Not. It’s not one bit. You know, the idea of it is really fun. But the reality of (wearing all those old crone appliances) is pretty uncomfortable. I don’t want to sound like a big whiner, but it’s four to five hours in makeup. And then it’s hot and sweaty, and it burns a little bit, and then it’s an hour to get off, and it’s literally like peeling a Band-Aid off your skin. Slowly. It’s like Chinese water torture. So, I’m glad I did it; I’m not sure how soon I’ll be getting back into the prosthetics world.
You really do have a remarkable body of work. Do you ever look at your filmography and go, “Wow”?
I don’t really think that way. I’m always charging ahead.
I’ve always been really afraid — and I don’t know why this is — to be a person who lives in the past. So I never actually save things like reviews and souvenirs. I don’t archive things. I just sort of shed it and move on.