As a visiting Hollywood actor currently starring as Lee Harvey Oswald in “Libra,” Alexis Arquette wanted to do something special for Steppenwolf Theatre’s $500-a-plate gala benefit, the company’s most posh fund-raiser of the year.
So, Arquette being Arquette, he showed up in full drag, in his cabaret persona, Eva Destruction.
“I hate tuxedos,” he says by way of explanation. Did he warn anybody? “Absolutely not.”
His acting colleagues, at least, were amused. “He looked fabulous,” reports Steppenwolf ensemble member Martha Lavey.
“I felt it was appropriate,” adds Arquette. “The idea wasn’t just shock for shock’s sake. Eva is a device to explore the phobias and fears of modern sexuality. In other words, once everything’s on the table, then nothing is taboo or to be feared.”
How does Eva dress? “Leaving as little as possible to the imagination. She’s a busty babe, elegant with hints of trash. She’s 38, I’d say, but she looks great for her age, which we don’t say to her face.”
Arquette himself is 24. Already he’s making a name for himself, and not just for his string of small film roles, from the tragic drag queen Georgette in “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (he was 18 at the time) to a gay desk clerk in “Threesome” and a role in Quentin Tarantino’s Cannes award winner, “Pulp Fiction.”
He’s also a budding icon for the gay community, a rare young actor open about his bisexuality-“Buy me something and I’ll get sexual,” he likes to say-and upfront about drag, as at Steppenwolf’s benefit.
Meanwhile, in street attire or as a straight character like Oswald, Arquette is handsome and wholesome-a far cry from Divine or Harvey Fierstein and something of a Generation X gay sex symbol.
“I don’t want to bear anyone’s flag,” he cautions. “But being a gay icon isn’t a bad thing. Certainly it would be worse to be one for drugs or suicide. The fact is, if people in Hollywood don’t want to work with me because I’ve been with men, then I don’t want to work with them, either.”
At the same time, he thinks sexuality is only a big deal because we’re somewhat afraid to talk about it. “My only concern is that people get too involved in talk of my sex life instead of my work. I don’t want anyone to feel he can’t address sexuality. I consider sex more a state of mind than anything else. There’s no problem getting sex in this society. Even people in the closet can find it. It’s talking about it that always seems the problem.”
He is getting some media attention for doing just that. The current issue of Premiere magazine focuses on his sexual frankness and quotes him on his role in “Threesome” employing a derogatory expletive for gays.
“That was supposed to be off the record,” he says. “But the real thing about the article was the focus, exclusively, on sex. Premiere isn’t a magazine about sex; it’s a magazine about the work. In my case, sex was all they talked about.”
Which is why he sums up his openness as a matter of “demystifying sexual issues and at the same time heralding them. Eva, for instance, aims to bring it all to a level that you might experience in church-a spirituality. Drag is like life. You can have fun with it, but you mustn’t disrespect it, either.”
Sibling to actresses Rosanna and Patricia, Arquette landed the Oswald role in part because he and director John Malkovich are neighbors in L.A.
“He mentioned he was doing it, asked me if I was interested and of course I leaped at the chance. I’m playing him as an Everyman, focusing not on a physical imitation, but on the idea that all of us have the potential for being an assassin. I’m taking it classically, using the idea of Oedipus and Kennedy as a kind of perfect father of our nation whom Oswald wanted to blaspheme.
“The hard thing is to find a humanity and not just tell the same story over again,” Arquette adds. “I don’t think the fact that he shot Kennedy is any worse, say, than killing someone else. Murder is murder. He’s a killer. Though we’re buying the conspiracy theory of our story as a theatrical choice, he acted alone, in many ways, not unlike a lot of corporate businessmen who stab and plunder to get ahead.”
Say what? Business greed, it’s pointed out, is ludicrously incomparable to presidential assassination, an observation that startles Arquette into a suddenly humorous awareness of his own exaggeration. Soft-spoken, gentlemanly and beguiling in conversation, he quickly switches to the flamboyant, gravel-voiced Eva to joke: “Oh, well, a gun or a business telephone, darling-what’s the difference?”
Laurie Metcalf, who does drag herself as gay conspirator David Ferrie in “Libra,” violently attempting to seduce Oswald in one of the more explosive scenes in the show, finds her young co-star a delight. “He’s great,” she says. “He’s loose, and he thinks fast on stage.”
His background may have something to do with that. His parents were both stage actors who abandoned their careers for a time in the early ’70s to take the family to live on a Virginia commune. “I remember a lot about it, though we left when I was 5. It was great, growing up in nature, and I remember, though maybe I imagined it, images of Confederate ghosts haunting the Shenandoah Valley, near where we lived.”
Though his parents, Lewis and Mardi, mildly discouraged acting as a profession, all five children ended up in movies. (Two brothers, Richmond and David, are also budding film actors). “They’re proud of us, but they know what a rough living it is,” says Alexis. “And they’re getting up there and thinking about their old age, I suspect.” Shifting to the wryness that’s a trademark: “They’ll be needing support.”
Arquette will be doing Eva in public in Chicago at an AIDS benefit June 6 at Crobar, 1543 N. Kingsbury St. (“She comes in at the end, as a bride, as part of a fashion show”), and he hopes to entertain the cast of “Libra” at a kind of stage version of moviedom’s wrap parties, planning to rent an as-yet-unselected cabaret space for the affair.
As for his movie career, he’s a cowboy in the coming “Frank and Jesse” and he has the lead in “Jack Be Nimble,” a movie with an incest theme.
He may get the most attention, however, for “Pulp Fiction,” honored last week with Cannes’ Golden Palm despite, ironically, charges of homophobia.
“There’s a scene toward the end, where Bruce Willis runs to hide in a basement that turns out to house John Wayne Gacy-like leather queens,” Arquette says. “I suppose it raises the question, `If you present gays in a bad light, does it suggest all are bad?’ That’s why Sandra Bernhard’s (sympathetic) character on `Roseanne’ is so important.
“But as for Quentin, as a director, he is gratuitous by nature, and I mean that in a complimentary way,” Arquette continues. “Look, if you want to see `Pulp Fiction,’ see it. If you want `The Secret Garden,’ go see `The Secret Garden.’ “
