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Dec 18,2005 - Dec 25,2005 |
A taste for the weird and wonderful
Actor James Spader stars in Steven Shainberg's sado-masochistic Secretary
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2002-09-22
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James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary
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Innocent-looking and attractive, James Spader is that strange cat who strives on swarmy, nearly creepy roles, yet still manages to retain that leading-man image. Hardly a box-office sensation because of his predilection for offbeat characters, Spader nevertheless remains a household name.
"It's weird, isn't it?," he agrees while in Toronto recently to promote Steven Shainberg's Secretary. "I'm always amazed when people recognize me, but it's never a 'star' thing. It always startles me in the way that I think it always seems to startle them. And that is when you find yourself in a rather remote locale, and you are in a gas station or convenience store, and I walk in there and it's in the middle of nowhere and that person last night will look at me with a look of befuddlement mixed with shock and confusion, and say 'Are you Jim Spader?', and I'll say 'Yes,' and they'll say 'I just saw you in a movie last night.' And that always strikes me as strange."
Spader cites an experience he had recently while driving to visit a friend in Virginia. "This teeny little coffee shop off the side of the highway in this postage stamp sized town, literally just a gas station with a coffee shop, and I was in this place, and I was eating a sandwich and it was raining out. I was wearing a raincoat and I hadn't shaved in a week or something," recounts the actor. "So I got up out of my seat, and I'm walking towards the door and there's a woman standing there with her kids and she's looking at me with this look of shock in her face. And I walk by her and she says 'I just saw you in a movie last night!' She looked so shocked and startled and sort of afraid. That I found strange."
Indeed, especially considering what film the poor woman had seen the night before. Perhaps it was Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape where Spader played the sexually impotent outsider who disrupts the life of a young Southern lawyer, his wife and her sister; or Less Than Zero where he plays the lowlife rich kid who forces Robert Downey, Jr., to prostitute himself for drugs; or White Palace where's he's a yuppie widower who falls for an older woman; or perhaps David Cronenberg's sexually charged Crash where he plays a man obsessed with death. The list can go on, but you get the picture.
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