The Safe House - Expositions

“I’ve got a two-week part where I’ve got eight costumes and three wigs,” MICHAEL CAINE says of his latest role, in FRED SCHEPISI’S Last Orders. “Every time I go in, I’m a different age.” In the film, based on Graham Swift’s Booker Prize–winning novel, Caine plays a recently deceased man whose longtime friends (BOB HOSKINS, TOM COURTENAY, and DAVID HEMMINGS) and son (RAY WINSTONE) carry his ashes from London to a seaside town. The story unfolds in flashbacks spanning 40 years, with Caine’s younger self played by newcomer JJ Field. “He’s better-looking than me, which is marvelous,” Caine laughs. “And he’s a very good actor, which is more important.” Caine, newly knighted Sir Maurice Micklewhite (his real name), has the British gangster movie Shiner in the can and is currently in Vietnam, starring opposite BRENDAN FRASER in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, directed by Phillip Noyce. (He has also landed the title role in the legal drama Boswell for the Defence.) Gone are the days of “scrapping around, trying to find a good script, getting one off of JACK NICHOLSON [who helped cast him in 1997’s Blood and Wine] and one off of HARVEY WEINSTEIN,” says Caine, who won his second Oscar in 1999 for The Cider House Rules. “Now I’m swamped with good scripts, which is great.”

“You’ve got to learn something on every film,” says HUGH JACKMAN, who’s picking up a few skills during his full post–X-Men schedule. As a computer hacker who helps JOHN TRAVOLTA steal some government cash in Swordfish, Jackman’s been getting a crash course in stunt driving. “I’m living out my boyhood fantasies. I spent the weekend going 130 miles per hour down runways,” he says. Next the Australian actor will trade his sports car for a horse to play a chivalrous 19th-century duke who falls for a jaded 21st-century New Yorker (MEG RYAN) in the time-traveling romantic comedy Kate and Leopold. Jackman’s other romantic comedy, Animal Husbandry, hits theaters in March, and then there’s the hotly anticipated X-Men sequel. “I’m really looking forward to donning my mutton chops and claws again,” he says, “and slicing and dicing a little more.”

In One Hour Photo, a picture’s worth . . . a lot of trouble. CONNIE NIELSEN (Gladiator) plays a suburbanite who becomes an object of obsession for the lonely photo shop employee (ROBIN WILLIAMS) who develops her pictures. Says Nielsen, “He sees what looks like the perfect life, and then one day he finds out that things are not as perfect [for her] as they should’ve been. And he gets angry.” How angry? “I don’t think I should tell,” she says. Nielsen enjoyed playing both the ideal woman that Williams’s character sees and the real woman struggling with a rocky marriage. “We take all these snapshots of our lives, and everybody’s always smiling in them. But you don’t see what’s really going on.”

He may play a jackass on TV, but JOHNNY KNOXVILLE doesn’t plan to take his act to the big screen. The 29-year-old star of MTV’s gross-out stunt show Jackass has at least three films in the works, and thankfully none require him to swim in sewage, get shot out of a cannon, or be shaken up in a “poo cocktail.” He’ll play a dim-witted vagrant opposite TOM SIZEMORE and RENE RUSSO in BARRY SONNENFELD’s nuclear weapons comedy Big Trouble, a Brooklyn tough guy (with BALTHAZAR GETTY and BRAD RENFRO) in the ’50s drama Deuces Wild, and a truck driver hired to chauffeur the presidential Christmas tree to Washington, D.C., in the comedy The Tree. “I want to mix it up a little. I want to stick around for a while," says Knoxville (whose MTV show, interestingly enough, is coproduced by director SPIKE JONZE). “Jackass can only go so far and last so long, and if you’re one-note, it’s gonna get old real fast.”

Back To One Hour Photo Articles