You may already know James Spader. You may remember his sneer from any number of trashy films. He was always the bad guy, always memorable: the yuppie scum in Baby Boom, the corporaoid
lawyer in Wall Street, the dissolute preppy in Pretty in Pink, and the drug dealer Rip, in Less Than Zero. Taken together, Spader's roles form a chilling iconography of eighties self-loathing.
"I love playing bad guys," says Spader, twenty-nine, who is actually quite a nice guy. "I really do."
A Guy Makes Good
Spader, like a young troll under a bridge, has waited and watched while the brat-packers of those films--Sheen, McCarthy, Downey, Hall--have crashed and burned. This fall, however, Spader comes--quite literally--into
his own, as the onantic lead character in Sex, Lies and Videotape, the first feature film by Steven Soderbergh. Both the director and star have already been honored at Cannes--mass adulation and development deals to
follow. Spader's Graham is a sharing-caring kinda guy, a sex symbol for the Michael Steadson crowd. The movie is about communicating and not communicating, about how people will do anything to avoid touching each other. "Then again,
says Spader, it's a film." But with both Graham and the movie finally leaving the eighties behind, the film will make a chord with those suffering from an excess of brat-pack films.
