20 Questions: Jennifer Tilly

Twenty-eight-year-old Jennifer Tilly is by nature distracting. It's more than her perfect figure and the squeaky voice and ditzy character she trotted out for us in "The Fabulous Baker Boys," playing a tone-deaf aspiring singer. It's not even the striking resemblance to her sister, actress Meg Tilly. According to Contributing Editor David Rensin, who interviewed Jennifer in Los Angeles, "It has to do with the way she couldn't sit still on the couch while we talked. That same refreshing energy has made her one of the town's hardest workers, completing eleven films in only three years." They include "Rented Lips," "Let It Ride," "High Spirits" and "He's My Girl." Tilly also created Henry Goldblume's unforgettable Mafia-widow girlfriend for six episodes of "Hill Street Blues." In fact, she is so devoted to work that she said if she died and, as in the movies, could still walk the earth, "I'd probably just hang around movie sets, eat the bagels and watch people film."

1.

[Q] Playboy: You have defined on screen today's version of the adorably sexy, good-hearted love toy--a sort of Judy Holliday in a skintight miniskirt. Describe the ditzy babe.

[A] Tilly: Somebody who doesn't have an idea of the big picture. She just sort of rushes into things, not aware of the consequences. She speaks before she thinks, but even if she thought before she spoke, she probably wouldn't come up with anything better. A lot of things strike her funny. Everything is always happy, and it's hard for her to comprehend that really awful things can happen. Often, she doesn't even get it when people are mean to her, because she doesn't comprehend that people can be mean. I like these characters a lot.

2.

[Q] Playboy: What's tougher--playing characters smarter than you or dumber than you?

[A] Tilly: Dumber is really, really easy for me. It's very relaxing. You don't have to do a whole lot of research, because the character has a very limited vision of the world. You just react to people like you're a step or two behind. You have to get back into that childlike place, where everything is sort of amazing. But I also love playing characters who are smarter, because it's nice to play someone I'd like to be [laughs]. The parts that are really hard for me are people who have gone through a whole lot of trauma--like, their mother's been murdered. When I'm doing comedy, I can sit around on the set, make jokes and go right into the scene. But when I'm doing tragedy or drama, I really have to concentrate. My head gets really compressed, like I have a headache. I'm on an emotional edge. I think that's why dramatic actresses get reputations as being divas. They have all these emotions about an inch away from the surface. Then suddenly, the wardrobe girl can't find one of the actress' earrings, and she gets all this emotion that's meant for the part.

3.

[Q] Playboy: What could you have done with the role of Scarlett O'Hara?

[A] Tilly: If I were playing Scarlett, I would play her with a lot more grit. You never stopped being aware that Vivien Leigh was a movie star. If they redid Gone with the Wind today, maybe it wouldn't be so pretty. Maybe it would be a little more grounded. Even when Scarlett is digging in the dirt for the turnips and starving, there are too many shots where she looks up with this radiant face, the tears glistening in her eyes. But you never really feel like she has callused hands or dirt under her fingernails.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Would you have been as candid and as comfortable with the nude scenes as your sister Meg was in The Girl in a Swing?

[A] Tilly: I never saw that film. Meg asked me not to. And I have no idea if I would have been as comfortable, because I've never done a nude scene. But I imagine that I would have been. Nudity frightens me a little. When you're an actress, you get into another person's skin and are capable of doing anything. You just have to trust the director and the material. There's a difference between doing a nude scene for Martin Scorsese, where I'm naked and a fellow actor is touching me all over, and doing the same scene for Hardbodies 2. Suddenly, it's not art. Suddenly, it's soft porn or exploitation. I've worn really skimpy outfits in movies and not even noticed it. In Let It Ride, my outfit was very skimpy and it was always sliding down and coming up and whatever, and I couldn't wear any underwear--except when I did the somersault. [Smiles] I want to set that straight. For the record: I was wearing black underwear.

5.

[Q] Playboy: How far will you go to get into a character?

[A] Tilly: I know I've already used Scorsese as an example, but when they slapped around Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull, it took four takes to make her cry, and she got an Oscar nomination. I was so offended when I heard that and I thought, How dare they? Don't they have any trust in this woman as an actress? That's not acting; that's psychodrama. But now, sometimes when I'm on a set, I would appreciate somebody slapping my face to get me going.

6.

[Q] Playboy: As an actress, how important is it for everyone to really like you?

[A] Tilly: One of my main problems is that I want everybody to like me. And it doesn't matter if they're really creepy and they wouldn't even like their own grandmother. That Sally Field thing [when she won the Best Actress Oscar] was awful. I was watching and was very embarrassed for her. But the reason it was awful was that I thought, Geez, that could be me. What if I won an Oscar and I blurted out, "You like me! You like me!"? Later, I read a critic who wrote--and I thought this was really telling--that that was the difference between someone like Sally Field and Vanessa Redgrave. Sally Field is an actress because she wants people to like her; Vanessa Redgrave is an actress because she has to express the art in herself.

7.

[Q] Playboy: You come from a big family. Were you popular or did you have to amuse yourself as a child?

[A] Tilly: I was the most popular person in my family. I was like a celebrity. All my sisters would fight over who got to sleep with me. I was always thinking up all the games, telling all the stories and had the best clothes. I was the entertainment. We didn't have television and we didn't have movies, and I was always the boss. I'd write these plays and I'd make everybody be in them. Once, I had this idea that we'd put all the beds on top of one another so (continued on page 158) Jennifer Tilly (continued from page 139) there would be only one bed, but it would be a really big, tall bed. Then we'd take turns sleeping on that bed while everybody else slept on the floor. Like, for a month. Everyone thought that was a great idea. I don't know why. I guess because we grew up way, way out in the country and we never had any neighbors.

8.

[Q] Playboy: If you could be a cartoon character for a day, who would that be?

[A] Tilly: I always liked Mary Jane in the Spider-Man comic books. She's a party kind of girl. She has red hair, wears miniskirts and stiletto heels and says, "Let the good times roll." She has a really good time, and she's a model and a jet setter. She's married to Peter [Spider-Man] Parker. Actually, I liked her better before she got married. [Pauses] See, she was always a peripheral character. Gwen was Peter Parker's girlfriend and she was always really boring. Then Gwen got killed. Mary Jane was just the girl who was out partying, having a good time and hitting on Peter. She was very liberated. And she sort of rattled him because she always called him Tiger. And then, when [the writers] decided to have them married--I don't want it to sound like I read Spider-Man comic books constantly, but my brother gave me a subscription last year--they decided she had to be more of a person, or else why would he marry her? So all of a sudden, it turned out that she'd had this terrible childhood and had been an orphan, and that's why she's a party girl. She's really quite vulnerable and insecure. And that kind of spoiled it for me, because I liked it better when she was just going out.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Describe your courtship and the final straw that made you say yes to marriage.

[A] Tilly: It was very short. Sam [Simon] made up his mind that I was the person for him, and I made up my mind that he was the person for me, and we just sort of fell into each other's arms. It was, like, "Move in with me." Oh, OK. "Hey, let's get married." All right. [Pauses] I don't know why this happened, because I never wanted to get married.

We did it on the spur of the moment. We went off to Hawaii thinking, Well, maybe we'll get married in Hawaii, so I took a white dress just in case. We'd wake up every morning and say, "Well, should we get married today? Nah, let's go snorkeling instead." Then we moved to a hotel on Maui, and one day, we woke up and said, "Hey, today's a good day to get married." So we found a priest through the Yellow Pages.

10.

[Q] Playboy: What are the toughest words to believe from a man?

[A] Tilly: When they say that they love you or that you're special. I used to date this guy and I knew where he was coming from--this was before AIDS and he was dating everybody and their dog. But I didn't mind, because he was lots of fun to be around. I'd go over to his house. He had this roommate. He told me it was like Three's Company: "She's my Platonic roommate." And my sister and I thought she was such a bitch, because whenever she'd come out to dinner, she would just glare at me and be really sullen and nasty. She'd slam the doors. My boyfriend would say, "Ooo, what's gotten into her?" One day, he called up the theater where I was rehearsing and he said, "This casting director wanted me to go away with her for the weekend, but I thought of you." I laughed, because he was acting like we had this great big relationship, but to me, he was just a casual date. Another day, he came to the theater and wanted me to move in with him--his roommate had moved out--because I was "so special." But I said, "No, no, no. I'm very happy living with my sister." The next day, I found out he had gotten married. I thought it was a joke.

11.

[Q] Playboy: He married the ex-roommate?

[A] Tilly: No. And the ex-roommate was actually his girlfriend. He'd been taking me over to his girlfriend's house to spend the night and stuff, which was why his girlfriend was slamming doors. This guy was the biggest liar I ever met.

Men are powered by their libido a lot more than women are. Women sleep with somebody, and then they have to make this big case, like, "Oh, I'm in love; that's why I slept with this person." They create romantic relationships in their head, whereas men are like, "Well, that was fun." It's like going to a hockey game. Men say, "Oh, you're so special to me; ooo, I've never felt this way before; mmm, I think I'm in love." Women believe it, but for men, I think it's like part of the hockey game: It's one of the things you say before you score. When guys act like I'm really special, I think, Well, maybe I'm really special at nine on a Saturday night, but the next day, it was last night.

12.

[Q] Playboy: While we're on the subject, is it in his kiss?

[A] Tilly: Yes, it is. That's one of my favorite things to do. You can tell a lot about a person by the way he kisses. A lot of people think of sex as a destination, not as a journey. Their object is to get off, right? So the sooner you do it, the sooner you've done it. But people who kiss for a really long time, or who are really good, are probably going to be really good lovers, too.

13.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever practiced kissing with your co-star before a kissing scene?

[A] Tilly: No. No. You're not in character. I once auditioned with a well-known actor, who was sort of repulsive. He wanted to sit in his car to rehearse this sex scene. He said, "This is supposed to be a sexy scene. You seem very tense." Well, I was tense sitting in this car with this stranger. The windows were all steamed up and we'd just met. He said, "We should make the director really hot," and I'm like, "I don't think so." He said, "Kiss me" and I said, "What?" And he said, "Kiss me" and I went [puckers, tight-lipped]. He said, "No, no, no. You weren't relaxed. Kiss me again. Just give me a really long, sexy kiss." I said, "Excuse me. When we get in there and we're doing it, I'll be relaxed. But I don't think that this is something that we need to rehearse. I think we should work on the lines."

14.

[Q] Playboy: You've done love scenes with younger and older men. What's the difference?

[A] Tilly: I play younger than myself a lot of times, so I've done a lot of movies with guys who have never acted before. Usually, I'm more comfortable with the older men. The young guys are very nervous. If they have to kiss you, they don't know how they should. I did a scene with one guy and we were supposed to be kissing and falling on the ground and rolling all around à la From Here to Eternity. You know how when a horse is really nervous, it shows its teeth? His teeth were like that. It wasn't because he thought I was repulsive, because I knew from the wardrobe people that he had this really big crush on me. He was just so scared. I couldn't get in--not that I wanted to--because there was this wall of teeth. We fell down and rolled around and his teeth went right through my lip.

When older men do a sex scene, they channel their sexuality through the scene, whereas younger men are sort of fighting it. Older men have been around a lot and they know that it's just a scene and that you may be attracted in the scene, but that doesn't mean that you're attracted in real life. So they channel it.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Define your style.

[A] Tilly: I approach life with a lot of gusto. Life is very short. People shouldn't look like everybody else; they shouldn't talk like everybody else. And whatever you do, you should do from the heart. Sometimes I dress very oddly; sometimes I dress to blend in. I used to wear whatever I wanted to when I went to auditions, but I found out that people thought the way I dressed was distracting. Once, a director got the costume designer and said, "Look how Jennifer's dressed. That is how the character should dress." I didn't get the part.

16.

[Q] Playboy: What item of clothing do you and your sister Meg share the most?

[A] Tilly: People must think we borrow each other's clothes, but we don't. She sees me wearing something and she'll buy the same thing, because she doesn't like to shop. Then we'll have to call each other and say, "Are you wearing your black checked dress today? Oh, good; I'll wear it." But generally, we have very different styles of dressing. She likes to wear long, loose things and I like to wear tight, short things. I lent her an outfit for a press junket in Europe, but I told her I didn't want her to wear it on TV in America, because I was going to be on TV and people would say, "Oh, look, she's wearing her sister's outfit."

17.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do if you could become invisible at will?

[A] Tilly: A magazine did a survey that asked men and women which they would prefer: to be invisible or to fly. The men wanted to fly and the women wanted to become invisible. I don't think I'd really like that, because I'm always afraid I'm going to eavesdrop on people and they'll be saying bad things about me. I never go into my husband's office and pull out the little drawers and look through things, because what if I find something I don't like?

18.

[Q] Playboy: What did you want for Christmas that you never got?

[A] Tilly: When I was little, I always wanted an Easy Bake oven. We were very poor and we were really hungry. I thought if I had it, there would be this stream of cakes coming out. It never occurred to me that you had to go out and buy the real expensive little Easy Bake mixes. But now that I'm married, Sam always gets whatever I want.

19.

[Q] Playboy: When is shopping the best remedy?

[A] Tilly: After I have a really bad audition, I shop. But I also shop when I have a really good audition. I reward myself. I usually buy underwear when I'm depressed, because from the inside out, you can have all new things. I usually buy black underwear, because I wear a lot of black. That way, if your bra strap shows, it's black.

20.

[Q] Playboy: What's always in your medicine cabinet?

[A] Tilly: I'm an Excedrin addict. Sam thinks that my body manufactures a headache so I can have some more of that good Excedrin. When I'm at neighbors' houses and they offer me Tylenol or Advil or something like that, I won't take it, because it doesn't do anything for me. Just Excedrin. [Smiles] After this, I'll be on stage and people will be throwing bottles of Excedrin instead of underwear.

meg's sister enjoys putting on the ditz but draws the line at over-rehearsing the kissing scenes