Sad Song Night

of-love between Jon’s character Michael and Charlie (played by the movie’s writer/director Ed Burns). While Holly and Burns are shooting a one-on-one scene, Jon can break for lunch. Workaholic that he is, Jon has decided to spend his lunch hour talking to Kerrang!

His trailer is comfy, if a bit on the poky side. There’s a toilet, a sofa, a dressing table with a huge mirror, lit by a dozen bulbs, a fridge stocked with bottled water, a microwave which appears unused, a CD player, a workdesk, a bowl of apples, bananas and Oreo cookies and, well, that’s about all.

“You hungry bud?” Jon asks settling into a chair. “Wanna share a salad?”

Nice of him to offer but Jon looks like he could use a proper meal. As those recent shirt-off pictures for Fashion guru Gianni Versace prove, Jon is as thin as a cigarette right now. He also looks very tired. This year, just like last year and the year before that, Jon is on a hectic schedule. “Oh man,” he groans, “It’s un-f**king believable.”

The last time Kerrang! spoke to Jon was in December. He was speaking from a mobile phone while speeding through the streets of New York in a limo, en route from one movie casting meeting to another. “I was doing a little Christmas shopping too,” he smiles.

But isn’t your life a little too busy? Shouldn’t you be reading your lines now, instead of talking to us?

“Well,” he shrugs, “I think it’s good that I don’t sit here for an hour brooding over the next scene. It’s a bit more natural to just go in there.”

’Long Time, Nothing New’ is Jon’s fifth movie role. To date, only his first, ‘Moonlight and Valentino’ has gone on general cinema release. A happy-sad chick-flick starring Whoopie Goldberg, Elizabeth Perkins and Brad Pitt’s missus, Gwyneth Paltrow (??), it saw Jon playing a hunky house painter who brings a little happiness back into the life of widow Perkins.

The other flicks he has completed over the past year are a ‘Friends’-style romantic comedy called ‘Little City’ in which he plays a promiscuous bloke who learns all about true love; ‘Homegrown’, a black comedy about dope racketeers in which he has a bit part; and ‘The Leading Man’ which was filmed in London last year and features his biggest role to date as Robin Grange, an actor who delights in messing up people’s lives. Jon relished the opportunity to play the bad guy, although in ‘Long Time, Nothing New’, it’s Jon who ends up getting screwed over. Putting aside his half-eaten dinner, Jon outlines the plot.

“Lauren and I are living together and Eddie and her were together as kids. If you can imagine the old high school pecking order, it was Eddie and her and I was the second guy. He left town and comes back 3 years later to find that we’re living together and we’re planning to get married. So he decides he’s gonna throw a wrench in that. It’s a dark film and it’s an interesting script for me. I knew it wasn’t necessarily a hit movie, but it was a hip movie. Ed’s an excellent writer.”

“With each movie, you get a little more comfortable,” Jon muses, “On ‘Moonlight and Valentino’ I was blind. On ‘The Leading Man’ the first day’s shoot had to be done over again. I was nervous. But now, I’ve done the third and forth movies and I’m on the fifth. I can do interviews in the lunch break and walk in and be as good as anyone else.”

Do you get nervous around a film set?

“No. Couldn’t care less,” he shrugs, “It’s just like doing a show now. You wanna do good, but when I drive home tonight, I’ll think of 3 other things I could have or should have done.

I’ll go on the set this afternoon and I’ll try to think of those things, but I’m not a method actor. I like that old joke by Lawrence Olivier when he was making ‘Marathon Man’ with Dustin Hoffman and Hoffman had stayed up all night, just so he’d look dog-tired. Olivier said to him, ‘Try acting’. My whole thing is more about being in the moment.”

How about a nude scene? Would that make you nervous?

“Nah,” he sniffs. “I’m hung like a second-grader and everyone else knows it ‘cos I’ve told ‘em. So, you know, it’s no big deal. Thandie (Newton, Jon’s co-star in ‘The Leading Man’), God bless her, she got pretty crazy in that movie. They cut some pretty aggressive shots, but she was a real trooper.

I read a book when I was in London and got very excited when I knew they were making a movie out of it. I thought, ‘God, I should pursue this’. It was called ‘Touch’. Anyhow, the film was no good. And they had these obvious scenes of this poor guy completely nude - for no reason.”

On the whole, Jon has made a smooth transition from rock star to movie star. And his experience in the movies has inspired a fresh approach to making the videos for his forthcoming solo album, ‘Destination Anywhere’. He’s filmed a mini-movie incorporating 4 songs from the album. Shot in New York and described as ‘an urban musical’, it stars Jon and Hollywood superstars Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Whoopie Goldberg and Kevin Bacon.

’Destination Anywhere: The Movie will be screened sometime this year on MTV and VH1, after which, Jon says, it will be made available as a retail video.

“Now that I’m making films and this is my ninth album, the last thing I wanted to do was make another video,” Jon explains. “It’s always been the worst part of record-making and half of our videos aren’t watchable. So I wanted to do something new. At first I thought I’d just take four videos and tie them together. But then we got into a half-hour story and when we started shooting it, we realised we could make it an hour. So I called up all these huge movie stars and said to myself, ‘Well, all they can do is say no’. And they all said yes!”

Surely even you couldn’t afford to pay them?

“F**k no!” he chuckles. “It would take a couple of albums to pay those guys. God, their combined salaries have gotta be, f**k, 25 million bucks.”

Are you more at ease around people like Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, people who understand the pressures of fame?

“I think they have more pressure than I do,” he reasons. “I’m not the kind of guy who needs an entourage of security guards. Bruce and Demi have to, or they choose to. A van came to my house today, picked me up, took me to the movie set. Okay, I’m in. I’m pretty low maintenance. As you can tell by this luxurious trailer,” he laughs.

Are you close friends with Bruce and Demi?

“No. Big misconception. You see each other at some kind of function and you say hi, so people get the impression that we’re best buddies. But it’s not like I even call the guy.”

Who is your best friend?

“My wife and my band. And Obie, my engineer, he’s my best friend outside of my family. I don’t have a lot of close friends.”

And what about Tom Cruise? The papers say you’re a mate of his.

“Again, not really. I’ve met the guy on a couple of occasions but that’s it.”

When you’re having dinner with Tom Cruise or you’re having a chat with Bruce and Demi, do you pick their brains about acting?

“Yeah,” he grins, “About the whole process. Because I’m really learning as I go along.”

So does Jon Bon Jovi ever get starstruck when he’s schmoozing with the elite of Hollywood?

“Oh f**k, yeah!” he confesses, “I’m still a fan, especially if I’m around somebody who moved me as a kid. What I wouldn’t give to do a movie with Sean Penn or De Niro or Pacino. I’d be falling over myself. I was thinking about something the other day, actually, how I blew the opportunity to ever be a friend of Jack Nicholson. I went up to him one day and said, ‘Hey, I hear you have a hit movie on your hands!‘ And his movie had bombed miserably. I was just trying to make small talk.

What a dope,” he sighs, “I was saying to myself, ‘Just say, ‘Hey, how’s everything going?‘.... But I was just gushing like a kid.”

If Jack Nicholson was pissed off when one of his movies died on its arse, so was Jon when ‘The Leading Man’ went straight to video in the US.

“Yeah, it isn’t coming out here,” he sighs. “That was a heartbreaker but it was a good lesson and I’m moving on.”

And this is not the first disappointment Jon has suffered in his movie career.

“There have been bummer f**king days when I’ve kissed every ring in Hollywood trying to get a shot,” he spits, “And I’m still not getting the shots. But it’s exciting when you can smell that something’s gonna happen. I relate where I’m at in my movie career to where the band were with the ‘7800 Fahrenheit’ album,” he says with a chuckle.

’7800 Fahrenheit’ was the poor-selling second album which preceded Bon Jovi’s multi-platinum blockbuster ‘Slippery When Wet’.

“I’m waiting for ‘Slippery’ to come. Come on baby!” he yells, “But it’s character building, sure. And I have no problems doing a smaller film. I don’t need to do movies to pay my rent. I need it for creative reasons. I’d like to make a big movie cos I’d like to go by the multiplex and see the f**king thing playing, cos you put a lot of energy into it. But I don’t wanna be in ‘Speed II’ It doesn’t appeal to me. So, if that’s the price, no thanks. I don’t need to be in ‘Anaconda’,” he continues, waving a hand dismissively, “I don’t need to be in ‘The Saint’. I’d rather be in the smaller, hipper script, dialogue-driven kind of film because those are the ones I’d pay $7.50 to go see.”

Which is a pretty philosophical approach but, having enjoyed incredible success as a rock singer, would Jon feel like he’d failed as an actor if he never made a hit movie?

“If I’d done ‘Moonlight and Valentino’ and failed miserably, hey man they’re not gonna shoot my wife and kids for it, so f**k it, try it,” he replies. “I happen to be enjoying this. My film career is actually still improving. The world’s only ever seen one of them, even though this is the fifth one now. People might think that my movie career is bullshit, that it’s not rock ‘n’ roll. I love rock ‘n’ roll, it’s my first love. If I had to choose between the two, I would choose to make records. But give the guy some room. This is fun. I don’t garden. I don’t race cars. I don’t know how to do anything else...”

As he says this, Jon’s PR girl pokes her head around the door of the trailer and tells him he’s wanted ‘in wardrobe’. A quick piss and Jon Bon Jovi is heading out of his trailer. Let’s go to work..........

(Kerrang! 17.5.97)

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