Actor Bronson Pinchot gave an interview to A.V. Club about his experiences making such films as Risky Business, Beverly Hills Cop, Courage Under Fire, True Romance, and The First Wives’ Club.

He is about as candid as I’ve ever seen a star be about his fellow actors. He says Bette Midler was “a total bitch” to their director on First Wives and says Courage star Denzel Washington “was really abusive to me and everybody on that movie, and his official explanation was that his character didn’t like me, but it was a dreadful experience. … He was so vile.”

But it is Tom Cruise who really gets taken to task for his behavior on the set of Risky Business, the movie that made Cruise a superstar.

“We didn’t know it was going to be a big hit, Bronson said. “We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth. He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn—we were all very young at the time, Tom was 20, I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names. He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, “You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?” I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, “It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.” Very, very strange. Years and years later when people started to torment him with that, I used to think “God, that’s really fitting, because he tormented a lot of people as a 20-year-old.” He made such a big deal about it. Same thing with Eddie Murphy—I remember somebody calling and saying, “You’ll never guess who was just caught with a transvestite!” [Laughs.] And I remember thinking that seemed fitting, because there are certain people in showbiz who make it an agenda, every third sentence has to have something knocking that life choice, and you think, “What are you doing?” … I just thought it was very funny that years later, that became his bugaboo.”

Cruise’s rep responded today, telling EW, “Obviously, this is so far removed from who Tom Cruise is as a person, this must have been said in jest.”

Comments

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2 Remarks

1. October 22nd, 2009 at 11:32 am
   Silver Fang says:

   Unlike most megastars, Bronson can form a coherent sentence and pronounce words with more than three syllables. In my opinion, that alone gives him the right to slam those over-praised divas.

2. October 22nd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
   Pablo Escobar says:

   I guess if you’re a jerk, sooner or later someone will talk about it to others.

   Denzel Washington candid interview

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApGgmgw_4ew