Christian Slater
‘I wasn’t startled by the Weinstein scandal’
In a rehearsal room overlooking south London’s railway lines, Christian Slater is musing about how the film industry can tackle the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein revelations.
“I think it would be wise for movie studios to invest in psychotherapy,” the actor declares. “To have an office on every studio lot, where, whoever you are, you can go and get some perspective. It would be like the truth office, the get-real office: ‘We know we roll out red carpets for you and people take photos, but let’s look at who you really are, who you really stand for, who you really want to be. Do you really want to buy into this illusion that you’re someone special?’”
When we meet, he’s preparing to star in a new production of David Mamet’s classic 1983 play Glengarry Glen Ross, the lies, greed and corruption-filled tale of cut-throat Chicago real-estate agents. It’s his third time in the West End, and his London stage excursions are one of the more recent facets in the Hollywood star’s lengthy and varied career. The child of an actor father and agent mother, he has been “someone special” ever since he won his first stage role at the tender age of eight in a touring show with Dick Van Dyke. His big break came in 1988 with cult film Heathers, and since then he’s worked with everybody from Frank “Dracula” Langella to Sean Connery, to Harvey Weinstein’s friend Quentin Tarantino, to Weinstein himself when he produced Emilio Estevez’s 2006 film Bobby, in which Slater starred.
“Having Harvey in the editing room was challenging for everyone,” he says. “He’s always had the reputation for being a bully. So this news is not startling, but it is horrifying.”
He refuses, however, to jump on the bandwagon attacking Lars von Trier, the controversial Danish director who has been accused of sexual harassment by the singer Björk. “Going into Nymphomaniac
[Von Trier’s 2013 film, in which Slater starred], I knew of Lars’s reputation for saying inappropriate things. But my experience is that he was lovely, just adorable, very soft-spoken and gentle, so I have nothing but the utmost respect for him.”
Slater’s own past when it comes to the opposite sex is somewhat chequered. During his “bad boy” years in the Nineties and early Noughties, when he was arrested variously for drink-driving and carrying a loaded gun on to an aeroplane, he also served 59 days in prison for the assault of his girlfriend at the time and a police officer while under the influence of tequila and cocaine. In 2005, he was arrested again, for harassing a woman in the street, though the charges were later dropped. There was also a string of glamorous girlfriends that included co-stars Winona Ryder and Patricia Arquette, as well as Christy Turlington and Tamara Mellon, the co-founder of the fashion brand Jimmy Choo. He once described his younger self as a “walking hormone”.
“From a very early age, I was obsessed with the opposite sex, that was pretty much the only thing I could think of,” he says with his trademark diabolical grin. “It made it very distracting to concentrate on anything else – schoolwork didn’t seem very interesting, I was only paying attention to who else was in the classroom.”
Having dropped out of high school to pursue acting, Slater made his name playing mavericks, such as Heathers’ charismatic JD, who embarks on a killing spree of the school’s “popular” clique, and in 1990’s Pump up the
Volume he played a loner pirate DJ spreading sedition. “In those films, I was a guy taking on the system and trying to bring it down and expose the corruption of it all. I’ve always been attracted to the rebellious, anarchisttype characters.”
Off-screen, however, Slater says he felt pressured to live up to his onscreen hell-raising. “This business is tricky,” he says. “It takes a lot of work to maintain a certain amount of decorum and professionalism, and when you are younger and being indulged and people are giving you a lot of leeway and feeding your ego, you tend to lose perspective. How do you cope with things that are being thrown at you left and right? You’re being placed on some sort of pedestal for a performance you’ve done, but that’s not about you, it’s about the character, so how do you emulate that character? Where does the character end and you begin?”
Whatever one makes of that excuse, there’s no doubt that today, Slater appears to be a changed man. Trim, bespectacled, looking neither older nor suspiciously younger than his 48 years, he still has the high cheekbones and slightly manic exuberance that made his youthful performances so enthralling. But at the same time, maturity and – judging by some of his expressions – years of therapy make him affable and thoughtful company.
Long sober, for the past four years he’s been apparently blissfully married to his second wife, Brittany Lopez, and has regularly talked about the importance of equal pay and better respect for women in Hollywood. What changed his attitude?
“My wife! She definitely opened my eyes a lot to these kind of situations,” he says. “I remember one of our earliest dates when this successful guy at the head of the table made a derogatory remark about women, everyone laughed but she didn’t. He looked at her and said: ‘Did you not think that was funny?’ and she said: ‘No, it was rude and derogatory and inappropriate.’ I remember thinking: ‘I love this woman so much, I cannot believe how brave and courageous she is’.”
Slater’s career, which had also slumped into a pattern of making straight-to-video films and flop TV series, has also been transformed. Two years ago, he landed the eponymous role in the hit Amazon series Mr Robot, bringing him a whole new fan base, critical acclaim and a best-supportingactor Golden Globe. The show is filmed in his native New York, where he’s now based. “Los Angeles is fantasyland, New York’s re-energising for me. It has a grittiness that will slap you in the face if you start to think you’re something special,” he says.
In Glengarry Glen Ross, he plays the bullish and manipulative Ricky Roma, the character immortalised by Al Pacino in the 1992 film version. “It’s a very powerful play. I’ve always gone to see it when there’s a production – it’s required viewing for actors,” he says in his loud, unfaltering tones. “The writing is brilliant and the movie set the bar for performances.”
Glengarry is the story of an office of estate agents, desperate to outdo each other after learning that all but the top two will be fired at the end of the week. Actors, notoriously, engage in similar back-stabbing. “Yes,” Slater agrees. “The [play’s] world is very similar to ours. There’s the element of the new guy coming up behind you, looking over your shoulder all the time.”
How does Slater handle such selfdoubt? He shrugs. “I’ve been doing this for so long now, gone through so many different phases, and right now I’m in a good-natured environment. I appreciate the people I work with, like [Mr Robot’s up-and-coming star] Rami Malek, so I don’t have to be insecure or neurotic or nervous. I have a life outside the business which I love, so for now I’m finding a nice balance of more contentment and less resentment.”
It’s a far cry from his chequered past. “I was a kid, I was young and out of control,” he says. In contrast, he says, today: “I’ve learned you’ve got to build something outside this business which is only based on reality, because so much of it is false. I love what I do, but it is no longer entirely who I am.”
Glengarry Glen Ross is at the Playhouse Theatre, London WC2, until Feb 3 2018. Tickets: 0844 871 7631; playhousetheatrelondon.com