Sean Young Talks 'Blade Runner,' Career Bumps
In the early '80s, Sean Young's big-screen career rise was meteoric, jumping from a bit role opposite Bill Murray in the army comedy Stripes to starring with Harrison Ford in the sci-fi classic Blade Runner -- and then raising pulses with a steamy back-seat sex scene with Kevin Costner in a limo in No Way Out. But after a career lull in the '90s and various off-screen antics that turned her into a tabloid target, Young is back on the big screen and ready to show that she's here to stay in the haunting backwoods supernatural drama Jug Face.
Exclusive Trailer: Scary Thrills in 'Jug Face'
The story of a pregnant teen (Lauren Ashley Carter) looking to escape her small town because she fears she'll be sacrificed to a mysterious pit that kills in exchange for keeping the community safe, Jug Face casts Young as Loriss, the girl's mother who is intent on keeping her a virgin so that her naughty behavior doesn't upset the balance.
"I don't ever watch any horror pictures, but I'm a fan of this picture," the 53-year-old Young tells ETonline. "It's almost like The Village by M. Night Shyamalan. But it's a lot less like a horror picture in a sense than some horror pictures, because [the horror here is] implied a lot of time."
Loriss pretty much has her own catch phrase – "the pit wants what it wants" – and Young points out that although her character is definitely not the most pleasant or glamorous, "I like playing characters that nobody would suspect me to play, and I think I'm pretty versatile that way." She adds, "I did tell [director Chad Crawford Kinkle] that I wasn’t thrilled with the fact that the makeup people made me look so old and ugly."
While keeping busy in a number of indie films over the years, Young decided to jump-start her career in the last decade with the reality TV route, appearing on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, Skating with the Stars, and even appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman to declare her willingness to work, going so far as to spoof her "crazy Catwoman" persona (she was meant to star in 1989's Batman as Vicki Vale until a broken arm derailed her opportunity; Kim Basinger ended up with the role and Young later made headlines when she tried to crash director Tim Burton's office to audition as Catwoman in full regalia for 1992's Batman Returns).
"I think the Baby Boomers are still holding something against me, and I don't think it's fair, but that's what it is," confesses Young. "I just rubbed them the wrong way at the wrong time in my career, and obviously I didn't mean to, but then again I don't suffer fools real easy either. I guess in a sense, they might have thought the David Letterman interview was me having hubris, you know? But I think it was just me saying, 'Hey, I want to work, you know? C'mon! Lighten up!" … And so the Generation X, I think they in a sense are a generation that's very inclusive, whereas I think the Baby Boomers are a generation that's very exclusive. And so people who really want to work together and are willing to make those sacrifices, I think those are people who are always going to appreciate me."
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Looking back on her time filming Blade Runner, in which Young plays Rachel, the beautiful Replicant who does not realize she is a robot, she recalls, "I thought we were doing something pretty unusual. I wasn't really anything more than a newcomer at that time, so I had a lot of learning I was doing, so I didn't know necessarily how unusual what we were doing was, but I did know it was a big deal because just the sets alone were like, 'Holy cow!' … It's not likely you'll ever see a movie of that scale again, unless you have somebody who just wants to spend their money on making movies and not worrying about the money, and that's pretty much nobody. All the people that might have that kind of money, I don't think they're interested in the art of it, you know?"
Young's co-star Ford was returning to the sci-fi genre after Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark made him an international superstar. Asked whether he had his guard up or was very approachable while making the movie, she reminisces, "Harry's like a guy's guy. I think he has his guard up when it suits him, and at that time anyway he would be one of the guys with the drivers. … Harry was a big, tall, strong-guy manly man, and when he didn't like something you knew it, and if he did like it you knew that as well. He had a great sense of humor, and he'd been in the business for quite a long time by then. He started in his twenties and he was 42 when we made [Blade Runner]. He's a professional, he knows his stuff."
She adds, "I never had the opportunity to become warm and fuzzy with Harry on the movie -- I do remember when I first met him, I went into his trailer and there was an IV that had a little bag hanging down from it that Steven Spielberg had sent over as a joke."
Of course, director Ridley Scott has announced that he's now working on a new Blade Runner movie, and Young says, "I'd love to do that, and I've left several messages at his office, but I don't know – everybody's got their opinion."
She adds of Scott's controversial return to Alien territory with Prometheus, "I am going to say this on the record: Why in the hell does Ridley Scott have Charlize Theron in that part instead of me? … It's like she was bored out of her mind, you can see it, and it's like oh my god! That would have been really good for me, right? It would have been a nod to people who like Blade Runner, it would have been like, 'See, I'm using Sean again,' right? Nah."
Moving on to David Lynch's 1984 adaption Dune, in which Young played the Fremen love interest Chani opposite Kyle MachLachlan, Patrick Stewart and Sting, Young recalls that the deserts and Mexico City location were definitely a challenge: "It's poor, it's dirty and it's rough, but it was a very unique experience, and we all stayed in the Zona Rosa Hotel there and it was just fantastic, and I think we were there for four months," she says. "There were challenging aspects of course, like that Stillsuit -- we would die in that thing -- it was in the summer. Especially if you played a Fremen, every time they rolled the camera they would get a fan and throw dirt in your face. You would get home at night and it would take you an hour just to clean out your nose and ears. … It was very gross work. But what was great was that we would go out to eat after taking hours to clean up -- we were all so exhausted that we would go out to eat and drink, you know, and that's pretty much what everyone would do for four months. It was great. … My little YouTube [home movies] give you a feeling of what we were really doing."
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Reflecting on the various films on her resume, Young singles out the 1989 American remake of the French film Cousins, co-starring Ted Danson, William Petersen and Isabella Rossellini, as her personal favorite.
"It was very heart-warming picture, and I think the reason that it's my favorite is because everybody had the best time making that movie in Vancouver," she says. "Because I started at an early age when I was 18 or 19, what's meaningful to me on a picture is … how well we honor each other. I really like it when actors treat each other well and with respect, and when directors treat me well. … In show business the highs are high and the lows are low, and I think that it's been like that since the very beginning. … You can also apply that to life too -- when you're treated well it works and you enjoy going to work, and when you're not, it's not as fun. It's not brain surgery or rocket science."
Sean Young's latest project, Jug Face, is in limited release in theaters this weekend.