US Magazine
HE DROVE OUT FROM DELAWARE WITH BIG
DREAMS, LITTLE EXPERIENCE AND A BEAT-UP '86 CHEVY. NOW, [Ryan
Phillippe] HAS HIMSELF A MOVIE-STAR GIRLFRIEND AND A MEATY ROLE IN
'54.'
You show up at the West Hollywood
mini-mall expecting the usual actorly evasions, but Ryan Phillippe is too
young, too ardent, too smitten to play that game. Fidgeting as he
runs a hand through blond curls that have been dyed into dull blue spikes,
he can't wait to tell you about the screening he just saw of the upcoming
teen comedy, 'Election.' "It's masterful, so nuanced, and
very smart," says Phillippe. Not incidentally, it also starts his
girlfriend, Reese Witherspoon. "Have you heard of her?" he asks.
We have. She's the 22-year-old
actress from Fear, Return to Lonesome Dove and the soon--to-be-released
drama Cruel Inventions, in which she co-stars with the 23-year-old
Phillippe. We're starting to hear a lot about him too, especially
since he played the loutish, doomed jock in 1997's surprise hit I Know
What You Did Last Summer. This month, he plays a bartender and
resident object of desire in 54, a film about the glory days and
downfall of Manhattan's hedonistic late-70's nightspot Studio 54.
The cast of 54 may include
some more-stellar names (Mike Myers, Neve Campbell, Salma Hayek), but Phillippe
has the lead role - and these days, the heat. "He has a really appealing,
sympathetic quality to him, in addition to looking like he does," says
54's writer and director, Mark Christopher, who cast Phillippe after
seeing several hundred other actors. "He really looks like a Studio
54 bartender, and they were the hottest men in New York. But he also
seems very vulnerable. He definitely has the qualities of a movie
star."
This afternoon, sitting at one of
the mall's courtyard tables and polishing off and iced tea and a blueberry
muffin, Phillippe looks more like a mall rat than a movie star. Later
he'll be heading for the parking garage downstairs, where he'll shoot scenes
for Dancing About Architecture, an ensemble comedy in which he co-stars
with the formidable likes of Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands and Dennis Quaid.
Phillippe plays a kid hooked on techno music, which would explain his dyed
hair. His own closet supplied his chic wardrobe: black boots, gray
wool slacks, blue windbreaker and deep red dress shirt unbuttoned to show
a pale, hairless chest. He looks like a young Adonis onscreen, but
in person he's striking without being imposing. "He's a real sweetheart,"
says Paul Feldsher, the executive producer of Dancing About Architecture.
"I thought he was going to be one of those kids who just uses his looks,
but it hasn't been that way at all."
Maybe that's because, at heart, Phillippe
isn't really Hollywood. He hails, in fact, from New Castle, Del.
- a town, he says, "about as far removed from this business as possible."
Phillippe grew up with his three sisters - Kirsten, 29; Lindsey, 21; and
Katelyn, 19 - in a stable family that's still together, still close.
His father, Richard, is a chemist for Du Pont; his mother, Susan, works
in pre-and postnatal care for the government agency AmeriCorps. They
are, says Phillippe, "good, real, normal people with very real problems."
Partly in response to his own problems,
Phillippe, in his early teens, developed an interest in acting. "I
didn't find myself that interesting," he says. "And I wasn't the
most outgoing person. Acting, for me, in a lot of ways is really
cathartic."
In high school, Phillippe was, he
says, a kind of outsider who acquired and abiding distance for the most
popular students, "kids who pull up at school in a brand-new car with a
swager." His portrayal of the smug quarterback in I Know What
You Did Last Summer was, he says, "a way to have those people realize
how ridiculous they are." His high school didn't offer drama classes
or school plays, but through a friend he got an agent and moved to New
York after graduating in 1992. A month later, he landed a part as
a gay teen on One Life to Live. When the character was written
out of the show in early 1993, Phillippe moved to Los Angeles. He
got a few jobs - a failed pilot here, a TV movie about killer bees there
- but felt that he wasn't in control of his career.
Phillippe's family supported his
decision to pursue acting, for reasons, he says, "I still don't understand."
And from his tiny Los Angeles apartment he'd send back happy reports: "I
would tell them how great it was, and then hang up the phone and cry because
I had no friends and no money." For the first couple of years, Phillippe
says, he hated L.A. Then he got a few more movies under his belt
(1996's White Squall, with Jeff Bridges, being the crucial one)
and decided the town wasn't so bad after all. "It wastes too much
energy to hate the place you live," he says.
Making friends was a key to the transition.
"We had our share of problems to get through, but we supported each other,"
says the actor Breckin Meyer (Clueless, The Craft), who four
years ago gave Phillippe a ride home after an audition and became one of
his closest pals. "We're goofy as hell - I mean, we still go out
on Halloween dressed as Power Rangers. But we take our work incredibly
seriously." Meyer also appears in 54, and enjoys his first
on-screen kiss - with Phillippe. Both men clain to be blase about
the lip lock. "He's good," says Meyer, evaluating his buddy's technique.
"Not as good as my girlfriend is, though."
Phillippe would no doubt issue a
similar disclaimer - especially since March 22, 1997 ("a pretty fortunate
day in the history of my life"), when a mutual friend invited him to Witherspoon's
21st-birthday party. "I don't think there was any intent to my invite,"
say Phillippe, who nevertheless spent the entire evening talking to Witherspoon.
The next day, he left for North Carolina to shoot I Know What You Did
Last Summer, but he kept in touch with Witherspoon over the phone.
When he returned to L.A. a few months later, they began seeing each other.
Earlier this year, they moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills with
their two dogs (his bulldog named Frankie, hers a Chihuahua called Cheech).
Now, he says, "we definitely do our share of talking" about marriage.
There's only one aspect of his old life that Phillippe seems to miss: his
battered, baby blue '68 Chevy pickup truck with malfunctioning locks that
would routinely trap valet-parking attendents inside. "My truck had
the most character of any vehicle on the road," says Phillippe, who recently
bought a Volvo.
So, now he has a good (if somewhat
overly sensible) car, a beautiful girlfriend, a flourishing career - and
at this particular moment, an appointment with a hairdresser to retouch
his blue spikes. "My girlfriend is convinced that people think she's
always with a different guy," he says with a laugh. "I have this
propensity to make myself look different. It does something to my
personality, and I hope it does something for the characters I play."
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