Stars: They really aren’t just like us.
And that’s in part what makes Hollywood so much fun to follow. The entertainment industry is overflowing with anecdotes and wild tales, but pulling that information out of the stars is often as difficult as getting a great performance from Keanu Reeves.
Luckily, there’s “Random Roles,” a regular column at the A.V. Club, the nonsatirical entertainment site run by the Onion. The feature showcases an interviewer asking a well-known actor about parts, both large and very, very small, throughout his or her career, and the subject often dishes much more honestly than in other venues.
“When you interview any movie star during a press junket, they’re usually so guarded and cognizant of p.r. spin,” says the A.V. Club’s senior editor Sean O’Neal, who created the feature. “But in [‘Random Roles’], the stars are so far removed from something they did years ago that they can just say whatever they want about it.”
Here are a few of the more memorable stories from the show-biz trenches.
She’s got legs
Linda Gray played Sue Ellen Ewing on the soap opera “Dallas,” but Gray may be more famous from the waist down.
Turns out she’s featured in one of moviedom’s most famous images. Those are her gams on the poster for 1967’s “The Graduate,” in which Dustin Hoffman stares dumbfounded as a woman — most of her body out of frame — pulls on a pair of stockings.
“I was a model, I got paid $25, and the photographer called and said, ‘I need your legs,’ ” Gray says. “And we laughed and I said, ‘OK,’ and somebody said, ‘You get $25 for one leg?’ I said, ‘No, no, it’s a package deal. I’ve got two legs for $25′ . . . It was like another little modeling thing, it didn’t take long, and it was done.”
Scared straight
On 2004’s “Blade: Trinity,” “Wesley [Snipes] was just f – – king crazy in a hilarious way,” says his co-star Patton Oswalt. “He wouldn’t come out of his trailer, and he would smoke weed all day.”
Snipes also insisted on staying in character, introducing himself to Oswalt by saying, “I’m Blade.”
The trouble continued when director David S. Goyer allowed certain actors and extras to wear their own clothes on the set one day.
“There was one black actor who was also kind of a club kid, and he wore this shirt with the word ‘Garbage’ on it in big stylish letters. It was his shirt,” Oswalt says. “[Wesley] goes, ‘There’s only one other black guy in the movie, and you make him wear a shirt that says “Garbage”? You racist motherf – – ker!’ ”
Oswalt says Snipes then tried to strangle Goyer. The next day, Goyer asked Snipes to quit, telling the star, “We’ve got all your close-ups, and we could shoot the rest with your stand-in.”
“That freaked Wesley out so much that, for the rest of the production, he would only communicate with the director through Post-it notes,” Oswalt says. “And he would sign each Post-it note, ‘From Blade.’ ”
Snoop cashes in
“Snoop was always late, and would come out of his dressing room with a puff of smoke,” actress Missi Pyle recalls of working on 2004’s “Soul Plane” with the hip-hop impresario. “The producers were like, ‘We’ll give you $1,000’ — or I don’t know what it was — ‘if you get to set on time.’ ”
Snoop then took to holing up in his trailer, refusing to come out, until the cash was delivered. Pyle never had any scenes with the Dogg, but did meet him at the premiere.
“I just remember him being like, ‘You are a fine, fine, tall girl’ . . . I was oddly very flattered,” she says. “It wasn’t setting feminism forward, but I was like, ‘Oh, thank you, Snoop!’ ”
How ‘Shawshank’ was redeemed
Morgan Freeman offers insight that finally solves the mystery of how 1994’s “The Shawshank Redemption” could fizzle at the box office, only to later become a classic that runs almost continuously on cable TV.
“Nobody could say ‘Shawshank Redemption,’ ” Freeman says. “Marketing only really works with word of mouth . . . I tell my friend and you tell your friend, and you say, ‘I saw this movie, it was really terrific, it had so-and-so and so-and-so in it, and it was called . . . “Shank” . . . “Shad”. . . “Sham” . . . Well, it was something like that.’ That’s why it didn’t do well.”
Mini-mayhem
For his role in the TV series “24,” Kiefer Sutherland realized the dream of many actors: having an action figure made of him.
Before the toy was mass-produced, the manufacturer sent it to Sutherland for approval, and he decided to take his mini-me out on the town.
“[A friend and I] went to a bar, and we got a little drunk, and we took pictures of Jack Bauer — the little Jack Bauer doll — drinking and stuff like that,” Sutherland says. “We got a little lit . . . and then we decided to light him on fire.”
The two burned the figure until it had melted into a puddle in the parking lot. The next day, however, Sutherland got a call to return the doll.
“They said, ‘Yeah, no, it’s a prototype. We need it back. It took them eight months to do it.’ ”
It was another year before the figure hit store shelves.
Love on the run
“Orange Is the New Black” star Lori Petty got a peek into the private life of director Mike Nichols while filming the short-lived 1988 sitcom “The Thorns,” shot in New York.
One day, Petty entered her dressing room to find Nichols lying on the couch reading a magazine.
“He says, ‘I’m hiding,’ ” Petty says. “I said, ‘Well, why are you hiding?’ He goes, ‘I’m taking Diane Sawyer to St. Barts and we’re eloping tonight.’ ”
Nichols and Sawyer got hitched on April 29, 1988, although it was in Martha’s Vineyard. He passed away in 2014.
Keeping quiet
Janeane Garofalo dished on her experience working with Carl Reiner and Robert De Niro on 2000’s “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.”
“Mr. Reiner was very chatty and delightful, but I learned that if you want Robert De Niro to like you, don’t speak at all, and he’ll be friendly to you,” she says. “If you’re chatty and ask him dumb questions that he’s been asked a million times, he’ll be quiet. If you’re quiet, too, he’ll be conversant with you.”