Dressing up as Sonny Bono proved to be quite a shock for Tea Leoni, she tells Steve Pratt, but not quite as bad as seeing fellow film star Jim Carrey dressed in drag for the remake of Fun With Dick And Jane.
THIS is a strange, and some might say private, matter but Hollywood actress Tea Leoni reveals how good her husband looks dressed as a woman. As her other half is former X Files star David Duchovny, the idea is all the more shocking.
Her thoughts are prompted by a scene in the new comedy film Fun With Dick And Jane in which she and co-star Jim Carrey dress up as singing duo Sonny and Cher for a robbery.
She wasn't amused by the sight of Carrey in drag. "It was absolutely horrific," says Leoni. "It was so grotesque and I feel I'm in an educated position to speak about this because my husband has dressed as a woman in many films. David is a beautiful woman. When he shaves his legs, I'm jealous. They're shapely and beautiful. Jim is absolutely grotesque. I didn't think it could get much worse but when he put the panty hose on... urrggh! That about did it for me."
"His hair was getting stuck in his lip gloss. He had no real experience of how to work with hair in the wind with gloss. I think what he has really exposed is where Cher's moves came from she does that thing with her head and really I guess she's getting her hair out of her lip gloss."
The vision of Carrey in drag has stayed with her. "The sheer dress and the hair on the chest poking through, the walk, everything. I hadn't seen him until the beginning of this scene. I almost turned round and fled," she admits.
Carrey himself says that his daughter was freaked out by seeing him as Cher. "She had seen some horrifying things over the years and said, 'this is going to scar me for years'," he says.
The original plan had been for Carrey to be Sonny and Leoni to be Cher, but as Carrey was the taller the roles were switched round. What she found embarrassing was that Sonny's suit they got from Bob Mackie, who designed many of the singing duo's outfits, fitted her like a glove.
"Do you know how embarrassing that is?," asks Leoni. "Most woman would say I'm 36-24-36 but no, not me, I'm Sonny Bono. That's my size. I wore his suit in the film without any alteration."
In Fun With Dick And Jane, she and Carrey play a married couple who turn to crime and armed robbery to pay off their debts. The balance between Dick and Jane's work and home life is off-kilter, whereas Leoni and Duchovny reckon to have got it about right.
"Some people have asked me about being a mother and that balance. I have to say as an actor I'm afforded quite a bit of time off whether I like it or not. I would think it would be much more difficult to go away to an office and work 9-to-5, five days a week. I will do some crazy hours and intense work for a couple of months, then I'm off the other ten months of the year. It works out quite well. I can follow David a little bit, which is great, and stay with him when he works."
She had no concerns at spending some of the film with her face swollen, a result of Jane having Botox treatment. Her only concern on designing the make-up was that her eyes were left untouched. "I wanted to be able to relay a sadness because it's so sad and she's so vulnerable," she explains.
"I wanted to look like a pig to represent that gluttony. So I had the make-up artist design a prosthetic piece for my upper lip that, from the side, is remarkably swine-like. I had a lot of fun with that and could still be able to cry with that make-up on.
"The only thing I don't enjoy about prosthetics is when they are designing pieces they wrap your face in plastic and give you straws out your nostrils so you can breath. If you are claustrophobic, this is on a whole other level. "My six-year-old daughter was with me and I think the only way I could ever do this was that she very gently and sweetly started stroking my forearm. I kept just focusing on that.
"I'm claustrophobic. I think it's for everyone to have a really strong phobic somewhere in their repertoire. Mine came to a head, and taught me a little bit how to combat it, on the New York subway in rush hour or Tokyo."
She recalls shooting a scene in Jurassic Park 3 in which she and other actors were in a cage going underwater. "It was all very well coordinated the cage was on a track, the water wasn't freezing cold and there were men with scuba tanks all around ready to rush in at a moment's notice," she says.
"But I was in this cage with four other actors and we had to be terrified, and I learnt that if you act terrified you will provoke a physical response of panic in your body.
"So the cage is being dragged down the track into the water and I'm freaking out , screaming and fighting for my breath. I gave the universal sign of 'I'm drowning' and immediately had a regulator shoved in my mouth and the cage was pulled back.
"There was a guy there helping us who used to be in the Israeli Seals and he sat me down at the side of the pool and said I had to find a way to act panicked without triggering this response. So while I'm screaming and drowning, I'm thinking of a beautiful pristine beach with calm waters, lots of sun and a nice drink with an umbrella in it. It didn't work."
* Fun With Dick And Jane (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow and is reviewed on page 10
Published: 19/01/2006
