Sean Young: Young at Heart

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/10/05/sean-young-young-at-heart/

Sean Young is still a working actress. So it is inaccurate to say that her career ended. However, the once-promising movie star’s career cooled of in the early nineties and never recovered. In this interview from the February 2001 issue of Movieline magazine, Young had recently returned to Hollywood after several years spent starting a family in the desert. It had been over a decade since she last spoke to writer Stephen Rebello and she said their last conversation helped destroy her career.

Sean Young sparked a minor Hollywood meltdown when she was last interviewed for Movieline, back in 1990. Sounding by turns vulnerable, withering and suicidally rash, she weighed in on all manner of subjects, but particularly her leading men, and most particularly James Woods, who’d made ugly public allegations about her behavior toward him and his fiancée. Young says today that the 1990 interview caused her a lot of problems, but in truth, trouble had been looming in her career for a couple of years. Having emerged as one of the most beautiful and promising new talents in Hollywood in the early ’80s with her unforgettably sexy, haunted performance opposite Harrison Ford in Ridley Scott’s masterwork Blade Runner, Young hit the big time opposite Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman in the 1987 political thriller No Way Out. But unpleasantness cropped up on the set of Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street, where her role as Michael Douglas’s wife seemed to shrink amid stories of hostile goings-on involving Charlie Sheen. And during the making of The Boost, which turned out to be a box-office failure, Young’s relationship with costar James Woods got complicated in ways of which the two have given quite different accounts. Woods claimed Young left a disfigured doll on his doorstep and made scary phone calls to his then-fiancée. Young denied everything. Young got more bad press when she lobbied publicly and rather overdramatically for Tim Burton to cast her as Catwoman in his 1992 sequel to Batman.

Young had originally piqued everyone’s curiosity because she was gorgeous, exciting and unpredictable. But was she, people now worried, also a self-infatuated nut-job? Before long, she was turning up looking diminished and uncertain in movies most people never saw or don’t remember. Sure, there was Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, but that hit seemed almost like a fluke, and one that had little to do with her. Off the A-list, she spent most of her time in Sedona, Arizona, where she lived with her husband, actor/singer Robert Lujan. Over the years she had two children and appeared in occasional direct-to-video, TV and minor big-screen movies. But now, with three new movies due out this year–the dramedy The Amati Girls, the edgy comedy Sugar & Spice and the caper Night Class— Young is back in Hollywood. Back with a vengeance? Read on and see.

STEPHEN REBELLO: Let’s talk about the fallout from our last Movieline interview.

SEAN YOUNG: I completely regret having ever done it. It had such a negative effect, it helped destroy my career–through no fault of yours, in the sense that you just reported what I said. This interview won’t be like that one.

Q: As I remember it, you called things exactly as you saw them, a radical act in this town.

A: Oh, I told the truth, but what I said freaked out a lot of people I worked with. You caught me at a point where I had just been completely devastated by people who were shits.

Q: Do you attribute your career troubles to trusting too much?

A: I’m such a decent person. It’s one of my flaws to think that because I wouldn’t do something, neither would someone else. When people behaved without integrity, it was truly completely shocking to me. That whole James Woods stuff was not good for my career and it angered me deeply. For a few years, I was just sore over the fact that my career had been kind of pulled out from underneath me for nothing I’d done. The whole experience left me jaded. I finally realized, “My God, if I don’t forgive this and let it go, if I don’t take a different path, I’ll just carry it around with me forever.” I’m much more aware now and accepting of the fact that there are people who don’t have integrity, but I don’t have to spend my time hating them. I’m just going to avoid them.

Q: James Woods still discusses you fondly in interviews.

A: Good for him. He’s still got to wake up and be him, so that’s the sad ending right there [laughing].

Q: Were your troubles with Woods partly why you moved with your husband to Sedona, Arizona?

A: I was shit on badly and I had a very bad reaction to being shit on.