By Tim Nasson
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Every boy wants to be like him. Every straight girl (and most gay boys) want to be with him. At the moment, Ryan Phillippe has greater sex appeal than last year’s heart throb, Leonardo DiCaprio.
The sexually alluring and completely endearing Phillippe is now wooing audiences in a game of sexual cat-and-mouse in yet another remake of “Dangerous Liaisons,” Columbia Picture’s “Cruel Intentions.”
In the latest incarnation of the oft-told tale, 24-year-old Phillippe plays Sebastian Valmont, a character that lacks civility and revels in duplicitous behavior.
Phillippe, born in Philadelphia, has recently been seen in a number of films.
In “54,” the semi-autobiographical tale of the renowned club’s owner, Steve Rubell, Phillippe played the sexy customer cum starry-eyed Studio 54 barback.
In “Playing By Heart,” he played the HIV-positive lover of the Angelina Jolie character.
In “Cruel Intentions” Phillippe gets to play bad to the bone, at least for a portion of the brilliantly witty and sardonic film. There is a redemptive quality to his seemingly evil character.
“Cruel Intentions” marks the fourth screen adaptation of “Les Liaisons,” the classic and scandalous Pierre Laclos novel of sexual manipulation and romantic war games first published in 1782. In 1959, nearly 200 years after the novel, Roger Vadim directed the French-language film of the same name, an updated version of the novel starring Gerard Philipe and Jeane Moreau. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage production, which won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award as best foreign play, was written by Christopher Hampton, who also penned British director Stephen Frears’ 1987, three-time Oscar winner “Dangerous Liaisons” starring John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer and Uma Thurman. “Valmont,” was brought to the screen by Milos Forman in 1988 and starred Colin Firth, Annette Bening, Meg Tilly and Fairuza Balk.
The updated, 1999 version, set in New York City’s Upper East Side, takes the tale to heights probably never imagined by the creator’s imagination.
First of all, “Cruel Intentions” stars two of today’s hottest and most promising actors. In addition to Phillippe, television’s hottest actress, “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer’s” Sarah Michelle Gellar costars, as his coke snorting, plotting, step-sister. (Of course, he, one of Manhattan’s most promiscuous boys, is determined to get in her panties).
Ironically, the first girl Phillipe fell in love with was Reese Witherspoon, another co-star of his in “Cruel Intentions.” (They have been together for a couple of years.) Witherspoon plays the virginal teen Annette Hargrove who has written a diatribe on virginity in Seventeen magazine — she’s also the character in “Cruel Intentions” that Valmont is determined to seduce, mainly because she is a virgin and vows to remain one until married.
Former Soap Star
Ryan Phillippe began his career seven years ago on television’s “One Life to Live.” On the daytime soap, he played America’s first gay television teen. “One of the best things that ever happened while I was on that show,” says Phillippe, “was that fathers who may have been home from work and watched the show, wrote to me and said that they had reconciled with their gay sons or daughters because of what they had seen on the show. I got at least a dozen letters from fathers who had been absent and distant from their gay teen sons.
“Sexuality doesn’t scare me,” says Phillippe, sitting in a suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, wearing a simple blue T-shirt and a pair of khakis. “I am all-accepting.”
His role in “Cruel Intentions ” required him to ask for a blow job from another kid, “but it was cut out of this version,” says director Roger Kumble. “It will be in the DVD version, for sure. The line comes when Ryan walks in on Jonathan Jackson and Eric Mabius having sex.”
Mabius’ character is a closeted high school football player who is in bed with “Dawson’s Creek”‘s Joshua ‘Pacey’ Jackson. “Of course, Sebastian set the whole situation up so that he could blackmail Mabius’ character,” Kumble continues. “When Mabius asks what he can do so that Phillippe will keep quiet, he says, ‘Well, this whole situation has gotten me hot and bothered and you do have great lips, so, why don’t you blow me?’ Mabius’ character then says, ‘Do you really want me to?’ Then Phillippe says, ‘Well, come to think of it, you’ve had enough for one night. You don’t deserve me.’ We all thought that it made Phillippe’s Valmont seem like too much of an asshole, so we decided to edit it out — until the DVD.”
While no one will deny that Valmont (who chronicles his conquests in a diary) is, for the most part, an evil and duplicitous character, Phillippe relished the chance to dive into the role. “It would be one thing if he was a completely unredeeming character,” says Phillippe, “But, his character makes a 180-degree turn.
“Also, it would have been one thing if the movie had something other than the comic book/cartoonish feel to it than it had, also,” adds Phillippe. “But how many kids actually drive around Manhattan in a 1956 Jaguar, plotting, and living the life of Reilly, dressed in Armani 24/7?”
Ryan the individual is not one without secrets to share. “I had my share of causing trouble as a teen,” he says. “When I came to LA, I hung out with a group of kids who, one day, broke into a Robinsons/May [department store]. We hung out there all night smoking cigarettes and laying in the bedroom and living room displays taking pictures of each other,” he recalls, laughing.
Phillippe who made his big screen debut opposite another TV star (“Party of Five”‘s Scott Wolf) in Ridley Scott’s “White Squall,” has come a long way in only six years.
He is settled into what he and girlfriend separately confirm is a great, long-term relationship. He also has the beginnings of a meteoric career and seems to be grounded.
Phillippe explains why he thinks he has been able to make it thus far in Hollywood, without incident. “If you’re a shithead, it’s gonna be tough. But, if you’re not, it’s easy,” he says.
Next up for Hollywood’s boy of the hour? The title role in an upcoming film about gay dancer Rudolph Nureyev.
Ryan Phillippe Interview with Tim Nasson for Cruel Intentions
