Sometimes villainy pays.
Take the case of Michael Rooker, who plays Rowdy Burns in ”Days of Thunder.”
He is the stock-car racing champion challenged by the new kid on the track, in the person of Tom Cruise as Cole Trickle.
Rooker has an unsavory past-in terms of roles, that is.
Before ”Days of Thunder,” he played the title role in ”Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.”
He was Ellen Barkin`s homicidal ex-husband in ”Sea of Love.”
He was a Ku Klux Klan member in ”Mississippi Burning.”
In ”Eight Men Out,” he played Chick Gandil, who was banned from organized baseball for helping to fix the 1919 World Series.
Perhaps Rooker`s most benign character was Karcy Lazlow, who was simply unkempt as the brother of Jessica Lange in ”Music Box.”
So perhaps it was only natural that Rooker should wind up in ”Days of Thunder” with the part of Burns, who gives Trickle a near-fatal run for the money before they become friends.
Rooker acknowledged that the role called for him to tread carefully between being hissable and likable.
”Yeah, he is likable,” he said of Rowdy. ”That was very important for the role and very important for the script itself.”
The 35-year-old Rooker, who was born in Alabama and grew up in Chicago, acknowledged that real life helped screen life. ”Tom is a very competitive fellow,” Rooker said. ”I`m competitive as well. And we hit it off when we first met. It was that kind of relationship all the way through the movie.”
Despite his history of villainy, Rooker said: ”I don`t approach the role by saying I`ll be unsavory or unlikable. I think all the roles I`ve done have been very passionate people who go to absolute extremes to make their point.” – JoBeth Williams has been suffering from an image problem.
For years, she has been trying to rid herself of being everybody`s idea of Mom in movies such as ”Poltergeist” and ”Poltergeist II” and television films such as ”Adam” and ”Baby M.”
Now she thinks she may have torpedoed her motherly image once and for all.
The medium of destruction is a rich widow named Margo, whom Williams recently finished portraying in a Blake Edwards comedy titled ”Switch,” with Ellen Barkin, Jimmy Smits and Perry King.
”The story is about a guy played by Perry King, a 36-year-old bachelor, a complete womanizer who treats women terribly,” Williams said.
”At the beginning of the movie, three of his ex-girlfriends, me being the ringleader, get together and try to kill him because he`s treated them all so badly that they decide he deserves to die.”
Discussing Margo`s characteristics, Williams said: ”I call her overdressed for every occasion. She wears couture clothes, lots of jewelry. It`s a funny, sort of glamorous, sexy part. Let`s just say at the end she winds up going to bed with the devil. Literally.”
Williams said that while she enjoyed playing mother roles, which have brought her no little acclaim, it had been a long time since she had an opportunity to play comedy-not, she reckoned, since ”American Dreamer,” with Tom Conti, in 1984.
So when Edwards came along with an offer to play Margo, Williams jumped at it. ”The thing that attracted me to the role is that I would like very much to blow my mother image out of the water,” she said.
Next month, she will take on another role: the real-life role of executive producer of ”Bump in the Night,” a television movie for CBS.
”It`s a story about a woman, an ex-reporter now an alcoholic,” Williams said. ”And she wakes up one morning, and her 8-year-old son has not shown up at school. He`s disappeared. She`s going to have to stay sober for the next 48 hours and use her old reporter instincts and contacts to try to locate him.” Williams explained her debut as an executive producer by noting that
”Bump in the Night” was originally developed for her to star in.
But instead, she said, she decided to participate in another way: ”I liked the project. I`ve always wanted to get involved in the production side because I would like to be in a position of having more control than an actor might have, and I`ve always been very interested in how a project comes together through the collaboration of so many people.”
– If you`re the sort of person who likes to make your New Year`s Eve plans well in advance, it might be well to reconsider any intentions of spending Dec. 31, 1991, in New York City.
That`s the sort of thought that comes to mind after talking to Jeff Daniels, who is now visible on screens around the country in ”Arachnophobia” as the newly arrived small-town doctor who finds himself in the midst of an infestation of a new strain of deadly spiders.
But in recent weeks, Daniels, who made his film debut in ”Ragtime” and went on to play Debra Winger`s philandering husband in ”Terms of Endearment” and the film star Tom Baxter in Woody Allen`s ”Purple Rose of Cairo,” has been in Eugene, Ore., starring in ”Grand Tour.”
The film, written and directed by David Twohy, is set in a small town in Ohio, where a man named Ben Wilson, whose wife died in a car accident a few years earlier, is working with his 12-year-old daughter to renovate an inn.
”We`re three months away from finishing when a busload of tourists show up and demand to stay at my inn,” Daniels said. ”It`s sawdust and holes in the wall, and they offer me an ungodly amount of money to do so. So they do.” But, Daniels explained, these visitors aren`t ordinary tourists. ”They are basically time travelers, and they jump around to observe various disasters,” he said, explaining that they usually turn up about three days before tragedy strikes.
On their tour, they have already dropped in on San Francisco for the April 18, 1906, earthquake that killed more than 500 people; they`ve been present when the zeppelin Hindenburg went down in flames on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, N.J., with the loss of 36 lives; and on the night of April 14, 1912, when the White Star liner Titanic sank with the loss of 1,503 lives.
”The basic story,” Daniels said, ”is who they are and why they are here and what we can do to stop this event from happening.”
