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Stud Wars. New York June 1999

This summer, Tom Cruise strips, Ewan McGregor swings a mean light saber
and Brad Pitt fights like a man. The films these stars are set to showcase
their talents at this summer's box office are discussed.
Copyright US Magazine Company Jun 1999

It's not heat, it's the masculinity. this summer, Tom Cruise strips, Ewan
McGregor swings a mean light saber, and Brrad Pitt fights like a man. BY
STEW HARDESTY

LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE guys, the squarejawed, slimhipped, baby Redifords
who haunt our dreams, who gaze at us smolderingly from a thousand magazine
coversnow is when they need us, thei8r public, more than ever. Not that
they'll go hungry, God forbid; they're set for life in any case. But now,
in the last summer of the century is their final chance to earn immortality
as the Sexiest Man of the Millennium. And the nominees are: Brad Pitt,
Tom Cruise, Ewan McGregor and...Lord Byron! With three of the four going
head to head with major releases, now is the time to whip ourselves into
a frenzy of appreciation for those wonderful qualities that make them so
special: McGregor's exuberance! Cruise's intensity Pitt's charm! That goes
also for all of you who are actually thinking about Cruise's chin, Pitt's
eyes and McGregor's... um... Well, if you were up against those guys, and
your biggest role until now had been as a scrawny, knob-headed Scottish
junkie, wouldn't you use everything you had to get people to notice you?

Of course, since we're talking about Hollywood here, the sexiest thing
about all three is, naturally, their career. And here, McGregor has apparently
lapped the field with his deal to play the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (the Alec
Guinness role) in the trilogy of Star Wars prequels. Episode IThe Phantom
Menace is due out any day now and is conservatively expected to gross more
money in its first week than all other movies in history put together.
At the age of 28, with a handful of independent films to his credit (Trainspotting
Velvet Goldmine), the Scottish-born actor with the refreshingly iconoclastic
attitude toward conventional Hollywood values - such as not showing your
penis onscreen - has essentially guaranteed his stardom well into the next
decade. And this with a part that, like most of the human roles in the
George Lucas oeuvre, is written and directed so as not to upstage the special
effects. Even twirling a Jedi light saber, larger, but apparently not by
much, than the saber he twirled in 1997's gay cult film The Pillow Book,
doesn't relieve the tedium of having to say many of his lines to a robot.
"There's no character discovery to be had," he complained to a reporter.
"It's just a lot of frowning, and that's it, really."

Yet even before most Americans knew his name, McGregor's friends worried
that he might actually become too famous too fast. "He's had such a quick
rise," said Mark Herman, his director on last year's cultish Little Voice,
"but I believe he's got his head screwed on right enough to prepare for
the huge amount of publicity he's going to get." McGregor himself isn't
so sure. "I'm a bit insecure," he admitted last year. "Being famous doesn't
make me think I'm any better than I am. It makes me panic."

His way of dealing with the panic is to pretend he isn't really a movie
star at all. This comes quite naturally to him, because he hates pretty
much everything about Hollywood: the parties, the products, the public-relations
drill - everything but the money, and he's not even so interested in that.
McGregor is notorious for denouncing the way Hollywood has corrupted innocent
souls like Minnie Driver. ("She's gone mad, mad. She goes to the opening
of an envelope; she wears those little dresses all the time. Why has she
bothered buying into all that rubbish?") Movie stars pick their roles carefully
to enhance their image. McGregor is now appearing as the voice of "the
Steward" in an animated safety video for Virgin Atlantic flights, a job
he probably did not have to beat out Tom Hanks for.

And movie stars never forget that their own career is bigger than any project.
Some years ago, McGregor had agreed to perform in a small London theater
company's production of a play called Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against
the Eunuchs, to be directed by his uncle, the actor Denis Lawson. (Lawson
is best known for Local Hero but, by coincidence, also appeared as the
space pilot Wedge in the original Star Wars trilogy) Partly because McGregor
was so busy, the play couldn't be scheduled until last year, but by then
he'd wrapped the Lucas film, and producers were throwing scripts at him.
The scripts came wrapped in $i,ooo bills. One studio was so eager to land
McGregor that the producers offered to buy out the entire eight-week run
of the play to free him up, according to Jenny Topper, artistic director
of the i74-seat Hampstead Theater. McGregor turned them down. After each
performance he would, following tradition, go have a drink in the lobby
with the audience, just as if he weren't becoming one of the most famous
people in the whole living, breathing universe. That was because his personal
integrity was more important than a few million dollars, because he liked
working near home to be with his wife and daughter, and because he hates
fookin' Hollywood anyway.

Which makes an interesting contrast to Pitt and Cruise, who certainly know
how to act like a star but are undergoing, if not a crisis, at least an
inflection point in their mathematically perfect career trajectory. Pitt
represents a classic case of an actor falling victim to the quest for a
role about which nobody could ever say, "Gee, that sounds like a perfect
part for someone like Brad Pitt." After the moderately successful thriller
Seven, a subsequent project, Seven ears in Tibet, suffered Hollywood's
curse of the Dalai Lama, which afflicts every movie made about this great
spiritual leader, driving away audiences with endless scenes of mournful
chanting against a background of poetically bleak mountain peaks. The project
was also hurt by the embarrassing discovery that the historical character
Pitt portrayed, an Austrian mountain climber, was a Nazi. Then, compounding
dullness with incomprehensibility, Pitt made the IRA drama The Devils Own,
before landing the much avoided role of Death in Meet Joe Black. "Pitt
is still a big movie star, but just because he's in a movie doesn't mean
it's going to be a big hit," admits one studio executive, who didn't want
to be named, in case he someday decides to make a movie with Pitt. "If
you're going to pay someone $IS million or $20 million, you want him in
a movie where he plays a character the way the audience wants to see him.
Meet Joe Black should have been that movie. The audience wants to see him
wearing a tuxedo, falling in love with the girl next door. Unfortunately,
it was a really bad movie."

Pitt is also still struggling against the legacy of the events of the day
in June I997, known to gossip columnists as Black Monday, when his press
agent announced the breakup of Pitt's two-year romance with Gwyneth Paltrow.
This was another unfortunate career move, even though, let's face it, for
Brad Pitt, it's not all that hard to replace one of the most desirable
women in the world with another one. "In all fairness, we're dealing with
an industry full of fascinating people, you know?" he once remarked.

Last year, Pitt put this proposition to the ultimate test by starting a
romance with Jennifer Aniston of Friends, and sure enough, he found her
fascinating. Although rumors of a marriage are apparently unfounded, Pitt
did throw her two parties for her 3oth birthday a few months ago. One,
at the hot LA. restaurant Barfly, came complete with mini pizzas and Adam
Sandler, but no presents or cake. The other, though, was at a seaside mansion
in Acapulco with a handful of friends, whom Pitt flew down for the weekend,
and a private fireworks display For Aniston, this was "the happiest time
of my life." For Pitt, it's a little harder to tell, because he won't even
confirm they're dating, and regularly enrages photographers by refusing
to be seen with Aniston at parties or restaurants, or even getting out
of a car.

But Pitt says he genuinely doesn't care what people write about him, which
may be fortuitous, because he's about to open in Fight Club, a big-budget
fantasy-drama co-starring Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter. No more Nazis,
terrorists or allegorical Grim Reapers for him! This time, Pitt plays a
miserable, alienated loser who is driven to join a cancer support group
for company, while Norton is a disturbed sadist who dreams of destroying
civilization. Together they find solace in an underground society of frustrated
yuppies whose hobby is to beat one another up in grimy basements. Remember,
if you heard the plot of the Star Wars films summarized like this, they'd
sound every bit as stupid and contrived, although maybe a little more cheerful.
(Pitt, who turned 36 in December, has cited a favorite line of dialogue
from Fight Club: "This is your life, and it's ending one day at a time.")
To add verisimilitude to his appearance, Pitt had his dentist intentionally
chip one of his front teeth. It has since been repaired, and Bonham Carter
found her co-star "as dreamy inside as he is outside."

Cruise, on the other hand, has avoided making any bad movies in recent
years, by making no movies at all. Like Pitt, he was at the peak of his
career in I996, after Mission: Impossible and Jerry Maguire. In the preceding
dozen years, according to a study of zoo top Hollywood stars by University
of California at Irvine economics professor Arthur De Vany, only Ig stars
had a statistically significant effect on a movie's chances of becoming
a hit; and of the I9, Cruise ranked third, behind Michelle Pfeiffer and
Sandra Bullock. (Pitt was sixth, following Jim Carrey and Jodie Foster.)
But then Cruise and his wife, Nicole Kidman, disappeared into the London
studios of the notoriously reclusive, perfectionist, monomaniacal director
Stanley Kubrick, spending all of I997 and a good part of last year filming
the steamy psychological thriller Eyes Wide Shut. At least, that's what
they said they were doing. Until a go-second teaser was shown to exhibitors
in late March, virtually no one knew what two of the biggest stars in the
world were up to for I8 months, except for a report in one British newspaper
that Kubrick shot 95 takes of Cruise walking through a door. "Cruise likes
to work with great directors," explains Brian Grazer, the producer of the
couple's Far and Away. "He will sacrifice anything for greatness."

The secrecy around the set also seemed to infect the pair's private life.
"You never really saw either Tom or Nicole," says Richard Young, one of
London's leading showbiz photographers. "Not at functions or out on the
town, not ever." They commuted to the studio by helicopter and apparently
went to only one restaurant, the Ivy, a celebrity hangout in the West End.
Except for a few very exclusive parties and the occasional royal funeral,
they evidently spent most of their time with their two adopted children,
Isabella, 6, and Connor, 3.They did, of course, show up at the opening-night
party for The Blue Room, the steamy two-person play Kidman did in London
last fall. But according to Rachel Cooke, an editor at London's Daily Telegraph,
"when Tom and Nicole arrived, people were too nervous to speak to them,
so they ended up speaking to each other for about Io minutes." When The
Blue Room opened for a sold-out run on Broadway last December, Cruise miraculously
appeared in an aisle seat just at curtain time and disappeared a second
before the lights went back up, but not before gossip columnist Liz Smith
caught a glimpse of him applauding, along with the rest of the audience,
the awe-inspiring sight of his wife's naked backside.

In any case, now we know what they were up to on the set, because the teaser
for Eyes Wide Shut consists of 9o seconds of Kidman admiring her naked
body in a mirror and Cruise fondling and kissing her. They have emphatically
denied tabloid reports that two sex therapists were paid $3,ooo a day to
get some erotic tension going on the set. On the contrary, Kidman told
a reporter, working with her husband made the sex scenes easier: "Kissing
on the screen is not as easy as it might seem, so it helps that you know
somebody for a long time before you have to do those intimate things before
the camera."

Vanessa Shaw, who has a part in Eyes Wide Shut, describes Cruise as "a
dream to work with" who complimented everyone around him and even had his
personal chef prepare a vegetarian lunch for her. For one scene when the
camera was on her, he voluntarily crouched down amid a tangle of lights
and equipment in the one place on the set where she could see him, to make
it easier for her to emote. But we don't know much more than that, because
Kubrick was compulsively secretive about the movie's plot. There is speculation
that the couple play married psychiatrists who become sexually involved
with their patients, and a report that Cruise appears in drag, singing
at a well-known London transvestite bar. It's likely that the critics will
swoon for the film even if it doesn't meet its great expectations, out
of respect for the memory of Kubrick, who died suddenly of a heart attack
on March 7. As far as Cruise's career is concerned, Grazer says, "He's
Tom Cruise, and it doesn't really matter that he's been out of the spotlight
for two years." But until it opens, no one can say if Eyes Wide Shut will
be a brilliant, touching evocation of sensuality, like Last Tango in Paris,
or a pretentious, windy bore, like Last Tango in Paris. It won't, in any
case, make nearly as much money as The Phantom Menace, and it's a safe
bet you won't be seeing any Eyes Wide Shut Happy Meals at McDonald's.

Meanwhile, of course, vast flotillas of ships are crossing the Pacific
loaded with Obi-Wan Kenobi action figures bearing the likeness of Ewan
McGregor. Lucas, only a little less obsessively secretive than Kubrick,
hasn't said what he saw in the young actor, although presumably it wasn't
the anatomical feature that McGregor fondly refers to as "the old chap."
Chap sightings have been a regular feature of his performances ever since
his work in The Pillow Book, which dwelled in luscious detail on his rather
large.. .um...chapstick. The script for Velvet Goldmine, in which he played
a '70s rocker supposedly modeled on Iggy Pop, called for him to drop his
pants and display his rear to a concert audience, but "I got carried away,"
he recalled. "I managed to get my penis in as well. Too good an opportunity
to miss." It happened again just this year as McGregor was sitting quietly
in his seat at the Versace show in Milan, although why that opportunity
was too good to miss is kind of a mystery. The fashion world, which has
seen just about everything else at shows, was mostly amused.

Of course, McGregor can act with his pants on, too, as he showed in Emma,
where he played opposite Gwyneth Paltrow. "He's really just a down-to-earth
bloke," says Mark Herman. Despite the utter conviction with which McGregor
played a junkie in Trainspotting he says he has never used heroin himself.
The main thing he did to prepare for that role was lose 30 pounds, which
he then promptly regained. If he had a reputation as a pub crawler in his
youth, he wants people to know, that's behind him, too: "By the fifth or
sixth glass, a warning light comes on and my system starts telling me,
no, Ewan. It's not as much fun to get completely plastered anymore."And
although he makes a point of going full tongue in all his screen kisses,
unlike some actors, who just open their mouth and squirm their lips around,
he hasn't been seen going around with Courtney Love or anyone like that,
and he's totally happy living with his wife, Eve, a French production designer,
and their 3-year-old daughter, Clara, in North London. "I completely believe
I will be with her forever," he says of his wife, "and that we'll go through
everything together. Otherwise I wouldn't be married."

Well, there you are: fabulously successful, rich, famous, loyal, drug-free
and...um... quite a chap. That ought to settle it. The sexiest man of the
millennium is not Tom Cruise. It's not Brad Pitt. When the votes are counted,
it will be between Ewan McGregor and...Lord Byron. And only one of them
has a movie coming out this year.

Reported by Genevieve Bracken, Staci Stukin and John Jurgenson.

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