Sean Young can spin four plates with her hands and feet during a love scene. She can exhale enough cigarette smoke to alert a firetruck. Over-the-top or subtle, as long as it’s acting, she can deliver.
“Acting’s the easy part,” says Young. “Hollywood is the difficult part, the perception and the reputation and struggling to get seen for parts and things like that.”
For Young, who stars in “Fatal Instinct,” perception has become a stumbling block. At 33, she has a reputation for being difficult, demanding and just plain daffy, even though the roots of those rumors have been exposed as untrue. She thinks people still have those preconceptions about her, however, and she still has to deal with that.
“The only reason I feel that way is ’cause everywhere I go I’m always asked about my reputation,” says Young. “So I guess I’m assuming something that may not be true, but yeah, I think I still have to work with my public image.”
On the set, she says, things are different.
“Once I get a part, I become the most favorite person there,” Young asserts. “Everybody rallies big-time.
“I’m very proud of the way that I work with crews and with other actors and directors and the whole process of being on the location. That’s my home. When I’m on a location, I’m completely at home. It’s the stuff that surrounds it that I have to work a lot harder at.”
In “Fatal Instinct,” Young plays Lola Cain, a mysterious woman in red-and other drop-dead colors-who turns up and tries to turn on cop/lawyer Ned Ravine, played by Armand Assante. Ned is too busy apprehending criminals, then defending them to notice that his wife, Lana (Kate Nelligan), is having an affair with her mechanic, Frank (Christopher McDonald), or that his faithful secretary, Laura Lincolnberry (Sherilyn Fenn), has a crush on him.
So it’s not surprising that Ned is blind to Lola’s deadly obsession with him in this multi-pronged parody by director Carl Reiner. A number of films are spoofed-primarily “Double Indemnity,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Basic Instinct” and “Cape Fear”-but the script by David O’Malley shows only one aspect of the director’s sense of humor. He also did some tongue-in-cheek casting, with “Twin Peaks” bad girl Fenn as Girl Scoutish Laura and Young spoofing herself as the gorgeous but unbalanced Lola.
Lola is a dead ringer for the portrait once painted of Young by James Woods, her co-star in “The Boost.”
“I enjoyed playing Lola very much-that blond wig and the high heels up to here and that whole manipulative thing that Lola was about. Making fun of that was a good time for me,” says Young.
In a 1988 lawsuit that was settled out of court and is now considered highly dubious, Woods accused Young of being obsessed with him after a love affair and harassing him with bizarre presents. But that was only one of Young’s “sins.”
Cast as Vicki Vale in Tim Burton’s “Batman,” she lost the role when she fractured her arm in an accident while riding a horse on the set, then developed a policy of refusing to do stunts she thought might be dangerous.
Young raised another ruckus when, cast as Tess Trueheart in Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy,” she accused Beatty of sexual harassment and was fired after a week of shooting in 1989.
Young, who characterizes herself as honest and farsighted, speaks candidly about these travails. With talk-show hosts such as Joan Rivers and David Letterman, she even has fun with her image.
“I try to make it look light,” says Young, who moved to Arizona in 1989 to get away from the hype. “It has (hurt) in the past. I mean, ’89 and ’88 were rough years. Let’s face it, they were pretty rough years.
“I look real calm on the surface, but beneath the surface my feet are paddling pretty hard.”
While her “Fatal Instinct” role addresses shades of her real-life misadventures, it’s not meant to be the life and times of Sean Young, she says.
“I did not walk in and say, `I’m vindicating my image,’ because I don’t walk around thinking of myself as, like, somebody who’s difficult or somebody who’s dangerous or somebody who’s crazy,” says Young, whose repertoire includes science fiction (“Blade Runner,” “Dune”), thrillers (“No Way Out” and “A Kiss Before Dying”), drama (“Wall Street” and “Cousins”) and comedy (“Stripes” and “Young Doctors in Love”). “I don’t perceive myself that way. And the people that I work with don’t perceive me that way.”
Young is trying to broaden her professional horizons by starting to direct. She recently completed a television movie, “Witness to the Execution,” in which she starred and served as second-unit director. The movie is to air early next year on NBC.
“Witness to the Execution” tells the story of a woman who runs a pay-per-view company who decides to broadcast the first-ever live execution. She selects a handsome death-row inmate who’ll appeal to the masses, then realizes that she doesn’t want to broadcast his death because she has come to see him as a person.
Young says she took on the directing task because it paid well, allowed her to get a Directors Guild of America card and “I really wanted to be able to talk to the press about the fact that I think the death penalty is just a continuation of the sickness,” she says.
Young is prepared to keep surviving show business arrows.
“It doesn’t matter what your reputation is, ultimately, in Hollywood, if you’re talented. And it is a double-edged sword. I know actresses who’d really like to have my reputation, in a way. Because at least there’s interest there.”
