Deathray | November, 2007
From UK
Interview with Michelle Pfeiffer
Preview: Stardust
Review: Stardust
Article: Costumes
Interview with Michelle Pfeiffer
THE WORST WITCH
After a few years doing mum things, Michelle Pfeiffer is back – as gorgeous as ever (underneath the prosthetics), but this time exhibiting an unexpected wicked streak in Matthew Vaughn’s glorious Stardust…
BY REESE ESPOSITO AND MATT BIELBY
Is Michelle Pfeiffer entering a new stage in her career? The gorgeous ex-Miss Orange County has been a big-screen staple for the last quarter of a century, earning good notices and many an admiring glance for classy turns in everything from Scarface to The Witches of Eastwick, Dangerous Liaisons to The Age of Innocence, Batman Returns to What Lies Beneath. She’s had Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes – but she’s never really played a full-on villain, until now.
Recently returning to the screen after a four-year gap, she’s thrown herself into two spectacularly nasty roles – as gorgeous middle-aged bitch Velma Von Tussle in the recent Hairspray, a film adaptation of a Broadway musical itself adapted from the 1988 John Waters film – and as Lamia, chief witch and all-round bad egg in Stardust, Matthew Vaughn’s loveable adaptation of the Neil Gaiman/Charles Vess fairy story. We caught up with a Pfeiffer very much in love with the finished Stardust film, but cursing the witchy prosthetic make-up she’d been forced to wear…
What with Stardust and Hairspray, it’s been one devil summer for you – but while Velma in Hairspray is pretty rotten, Lamia really is a properly nasty piece of work. How come, all of a sudden, it’s time to bring on the badguys?
“I don’t know – I like all kinds of characters, but I especially like playing damaged ones. The more flawed, the better. I think they’re more like real people – we’re all good and we re all evil. With Stardust I was excited about working with this cast, but what I really loved was hearing what Matthew Vaughn had to say about his vision for the film. Certainly, playing parts like Lamia are a challenge, and perhaps a little riskier than other parts. There are a lot of pitfalls – you can easily underplay it or overplay it. On Stardust I was walking a tightrope the whole time, which makes it a little more excitin.”
Why doyou think Matthew Vaughn wanted you? Was it something he’d seen in your work?
“Well, I don’t know. He didn’t really use any of my other roles as examples for me – there was no, ‘Oh, this is what I want you to do, like you did in so-and-so.’ Maybe he just thought I was evil!”
What was your take on Lamia: how old is she, and what’s she really after?
“Well, she’s been around for like 5,000 years. We didn’t really pin it down to an exact number; I mean, a lot of it we just made up. These witches are coming to the end of their life cycle; they can live to an incredibly old age, but there’s still an end date to them. So wanting to become young isn’t only a matter of vanity for them – it’s truly a matter o life or death. Maybe they might live another 200 years or something.”
In one scene towards the end you seem to be falling apart – you’re crying, and you’re about to give up. But then we see it was all an act, and you’re as evil as ever. You certainly fooled us.
“Well, Matthew was very specific about that scene. He wanted i to be, for a moment, completely convincing.”
Inevitably, you had to wear tons of make-up prosthetics when Lamia was in her crone phase. How was that?
“The first time we did it, it took all of six hours. And it was much more extreme, real monster make-up. Not that what I ended up with wasn’t, but this was bad. And I remember calling Matthew and saying, ‘Matthew, I look like a monster!’ I had big eyebrows, and a kind of Neanderthal look, like I was on steroids. So we toned it down, and then brought it down some more. We finally got it to about as hideous as we could while still looking human. But that wasn’t the end of it. I remember being encased in all that stuff, and it had just never occurred to me before what that would feel like. I immediately tried to go into some zen state to cope with it – and I don’t even know how to do that! I don’t meditate or anything. It’s just that I was really worried I wasn’t going to get through it. And just to make it worse, I had get in at four or five in the morning to put the make-up on. At one point I wanted to get a flight later that day, so I asked if I could come in at three in order to get the work done so I could go home early!”
I guess once you’re in all that clobber, though, it makes it pretty easy to get into character…
“In fact, it’s easier to overact when you’re in that much make-up. You have to rise to the level of what’s happening physically, so it’s not about being subtle, but you can’t go too far. With Stardust I’m the villain in a comic book story, so it’s my job to be truly scary, but at the same time you know it’s for kids, and you need to allow for humour. Sometimes with effects stuff you just have to do it the best that you can, and hope you don’t look like a total jerk, because you feel so foolish. The worst injury I got on the entire shoot was to my skin – it was a constant process of derm-abrasion. I’m sure I lost many layers, because every day they had to peel off this prosthetic and it literally took an hour, incrementally peeling, peeling, peeling.”
So it was pretty bad. Would it put you off taking another role like this again?
“Yeah, it would. You know what? It’s like childbirth. It’s sort of like you forget how bad it was afterwards. And then you get back in the make-up seat and you suddenly go, ‘Oh, yeah, remember.’ None of us had really done a prosthetics movie before so I think everyone was taken by surprise at how long it took, and the toll it took on us.”
Do you see Lamia as some sort of commentary on the female obsession with the way they look?
“That was most intriguing for me in my early conversations with Matthew. He really wanted to poke fun at that, and kind of shine a light on it – the degree that women will go to find eternal youth, and how we mutilate ourselves for it. lt shows a sort of desperation in society as a whole, this obsession with youth.”
Young girls are obsessed with witches too…
“I don’t think I was, actually. I wasn’t interested in fairies and witches; I was sort of the tomboy, out in the mud and beating up the boys. I had a baseball bat. It was one of the things my teachers used to write on my report cards: ‘Michelle is one of the biggest girls in class.’ I guess I grew really quickly, and then I just stopped. But all I really wanted to be was one of the petite little girls. There was nothing feminine about me. And I was kind of chatty. ‘She talks too much and she’s big,’ they’d write. That would have been when I decided to act. A friend of mine knew about a beauty pageant nearby where there was a judge who was a commercial agent. He’d been known to sign girls, and that was my ticket. That said, being a beauty queen was a very unlikely thing for me.”
What do you do well in real life, and what don’t you do well?
“I love math, but I’m really bad at balancing my checkbook. I’m bad at returning phone calls. I’m really good at… what am I good at? l’m good at building things. I took some light fixtures off the ceiling the other day, and the electrician carne in and he was really nervous -’You don’t have to do that!’ I built a playhouse for my kids too, and I enjoy knitting. I’m like a little arts and crafts girl, a Martha Stewart wannabe.”
DID YOU KNOW?
Michelle Pfeiffer has worked with her Stardust co-star Claire Danes before, hack in 1996 on the weepie To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday- Danes was 15, and Pfeiffer played her mum. “She seems exactly the same to me now as she was then,” Pfeiffer remembers. “She was such an impressive young woman. Even then she was intelligent and intuitiva – and I was really struck by how grounded she was. She had a real sophistication about her.”
Scanned and transcripted by Michelle Pfeiffer, The Face
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