Marguerite Moreau is recovering from a hot night on the town.
“Uh, yes, mmm-hmmm, bad,” she says, eagerly awaiting her first cup of coffee. “I woke up this morning. I left my car on the other side of town. We had to do the early-morning crawl across the town to get the car. There was no traffic, it was cool, but it’s when you wake up, and you’re like, ‘Ohhh, I had fun last night.’
“But it was great, I had a great time. It’s just that, this morning, I could use a little more sleep.”
Currently on the big screen in the Anne Rice vampire epic “Queen of the Damned,” with Stuart Townsend and the late Aaliyah, Moreau (“The Mighty Ducks,” “Wet Hot American Summer”) hopes to light up the small screen in the new Sci-Fi Channel miniseries “Firestarter: Rekindled.”
Airing Sunday and Monday, March 10 and 11 (8 p.m.), the widescreen production, filmed in the now-familiar mountains of Utah, is based on the 1980 Stephen King novel “Firestarter,” which became a 1984 movie starring George C. Scott, David Keith and Drew Barrymore in the lead role of Charlie McGee.
In the book and the film, Charlie is a little girl whose parents participated in government experiments that left them with psychic powers. When they marry and produce a child, she is born with the ability to set fires using only her mind. The whole family winds up on the run from shadowy government forces that want to use Charlie’s abilities for destructive ends.
In the end, Charlie unleashes her fury on her pursuers, including sociopathic agent John Rainbird.
Written by Philip Eisner, “Firestarter: Rekindled” picks up the story more than a decade later, when Charlie (Moreau), now a young woman, is trying to find more information about the experiments that cost her parents their lives and left her with uncontrollable abilities.
“She just walked out of that fire at the end and didn’t stop, just kept on going,” Moreau says of the original tale.” I’m telling you, she doesn’t want to (start fires), but she wants to desperately — that’s the crux.
“It’s like every young girl, she wants it, but she doesn’t want it.”
Apparently the heat of sexual desire is more than enough to trigger fiery explosions, which makes intimacy impossible.
“She’s got issues,” Moreau says. “She really wants to have an intimate relationship, you know what I’m saying? She can’t get close to anybody … between a man and a woman, she wishes she wouldn’t have to make somebody toast.
“It’s that unresolved part of her. I don’t want to use the word evil, but it’s forbidden, it’s dark, it’s bad. It’s everything that you’re not supposed to want to have cravings for, but she does. What do you do?”
Danny Nucci (“Titanic,” “Some of My Best Friends”) co-stars as Vincent Sforza, who thinks he is tracking down people connected to the experiments for an insurance company that wants to give them awards from a class-action lawsuit. In reality, he’s tracking them for Rainbird (Malcolm McDowell) — scarred but still alive after Charlie’s fiery holocaust — and his cohorts.
Along the way, Vincent finds Charlie and begins to fall for her, oblivious to the dangers.
“Yeah,” says Moreau, “but if you explain it … ‘OK, honey, I sometimes get so excited around you that your arm hair might smoke. You should really look at it like, if you still have hair on your head, then maybe I just don’t love you enough.'”
