In the mid-’90s, Kim Basinger was newly married to actor Alec Baldwin and had just given birth to their daughter, Ireland, when her William Morris agent sent her the script for “L.A. Confidential.” She was tired of playing the siren roles that had defined her — from a Bond girl in “Never Say Never Again” to a New York gallery owner in the erotic classic “9½ Weeks” to a barefoot Vicki Vale running through the streets of Gotham City in Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman.”
“I said, ‘Well, I’m not interested in playing a whore. Not doing it. I’m a mom, so I’m not going to play that,’” she recalls.
But her agent persisted, and she agreed to take a 3 p.m. meeting with the late director Curtis Hanson at the Formosa in West Hollywood. The lot was empty, and she drove around mulling the parking spaces named after Hollywood legends before selecting the Humphrey Bogart spot. As she greeted Hanson, he pulled out several giant posters from noir films of the ’40s starring Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck. Basinger left the meeting still unconvinced.
Then she read the script, which was written by Hanson and Brian Helgeland, first from end to beginning to see the reverse arc of femme fatale Lynn Bracken and then again in proper order.
“There are just those times in your life when a script will come and you’ll close the last page and go, ‘I want to say these words,’” she says. “So I said yes to the role, and I found myself bringing my baby to work and putting her on a picnic blanket next to Russell Crowe rolling around in the grass.”
Basinger recounts these memories to me in two phone calls, totaling three hours, from her home nestled in the mountains between Malibu and the San Fernando Valley. She hasn’t appeared on-screen since 2017’s “Fifty Shades Darker,” where she played a seductress who preyed on Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) when he was a teen and, thus, earned the nickname Mrs. Robinson. But she’s not retired, just “very picky” and reads “a lot of bad material.”
Kim Basinger and Guy Pearce in “L.A. Confidential”;
©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett C
In the meantime, she’s kept busy advocating for stronger animal protections worldwide. On this February afternoon, the house she shares with her longtime partner and hairstylist Mitch Stone is quiet except for her two barking rescue dogs. Ireland and her 18-month-old daughter, Holland, just left to drive back to their home in Oregon after a 10-day stay with Grandma.
“I’m a little melancholy. That’s my little tiny, tiny, little angel,” she says of her granddaughter.
Twenty-seven years ago at the 70th Academy Awards, held on March 23, 1998, Basinger was named best supporting actress, beating out sentimental favorite Gloria Stuart from “Titanic” and upending the age-old paradigm of the bombshell never being taken seriously as an actress. Like Marilyn Monroe before her and Demi Moore and Pamela Anderson after, Basinger — who grew up in Georgia — shed the expectations of her looks and her tabloid-friendly personal life (in addition to Baldwin, former lovers included Prince, “Batman” producer Jon Peters and Richard Gere) and proved that she deserved a crack at the meaty roles.
“When you’re extraordinarily beautiful — not beautiful, but extraordinarily beautiful — like Kim, Hollywood doesn’t want to give you your due,” says Peters.
Michael Keaton, who starred opposite Basinger in “Batman,” echoes that sentiment, saying that her performances have been “sometimes underrated” simply because of her looks.
“If you’re known for your beauty, then they don’t pay attention to your talent,” he says. “But people who know, they know how good she is.”
It took nearly two decades for the actress to break free from those trappings. “You come into this town, and you’re an ingenue,” she says. “But you’re basically put in a box. We all are.”
Later, she talks to me about one of the pressures of making sexy R-rated movies, a genre she helped pioneer that’s nearly become extinct.
“It’s a very hard thing to shoot a beautiful love scene,” Basinger says. “You think it’s just lay down with a bunch of baby oil. It’s not. It can really work your nerves.”
Though 1983’s “Never Say Never Again” wasn’t Basinger’s first feature film — that distinction goes to the small Western “Hard Country” — the spy franchise put her on the map in a way few films could. As with “L.A. Confidential,” she initially turned down the role opposite Sean Connery in his final outing as 007.
“I didn’t ever think of myself as a sexual Bond thing,” she says. “I saw those women and I thought, ‘Jesus, I don’t have that!’ I grew up a tomboy.”
Still, she leaned into the archetype and posed nude for Playboy after the film’s release. And thus, the perception of Kim Basinger as the ultimate pinup was born.
“Directors called me and said, ‘Oh, I saw your pictures in Vogue.’ And I thought to myself, ‘No, you didn’t. You saw my picture in Playboy,’” she says with a wicked laugh.
The filmmakers suddenly pursuing her included some of the industry’s best, such as Barry Levinson, who cast her opposite Robert Redford in the baseball drama “The Natural,” and Adrian Lyne, who begged her to star in the sexually charged “9½ Weeks.”
She describes the relationship with Lyne as “love-hate,” but ultimately “I was very crazy about him.” She adds, “Talk about out of the box and unafraid. He’s fought censorship his whole life, which is a bad war to fight all the time.”
Tackling the role of a woman who embarks on a dangerous BDSM-style affair frightened her, not because of the sexual content but because of the emotional toll it would take. She agreed to star only if Lyne would shoot chronologically, and he agreed.
“I wanted to meet Mickey Rourke in that grocery store [depicted in the film],” Basinger says. “I did not want to say hello to him before. I didn’t want to talk to him on the set. It had nothing to do with all the stuff you read on the internet about he and I hating each other. I loved him. He’s a brilliant actor too. But when I met him for the first time, it was on film. And I never saw him any other time.”
She doesn’t believe the 1986 film could be made — or remade — now. But Basinger, who describes her attitudes about sex in film as “more European” than “stuffy” American, harbors zero regrets.
“I have found that I have some of the most loyal fans in the world because of ‘9½ Weeks,’” she says. (Dutch director Halina Reijn has said last year’s “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman, was partly inspired by the film.)
One subplot playing out this awards season involves intimacy coordinators — and whether directors should be obligated to use them. “Anora” star Mikey Madison sparked controversy when she revealed that she opted not to have one while filming Sean Baker’s explicit film. Basinger finds the idea to be extraneous.
“I can’t imagine having somebody come up to me and say, ‘Do you mind if they put their hand here?’ That’s just another person in the room. Either we work it out or we don’t,” she says. “I don’t see all of this need for supervised visits.”
That’s not to say Hollywood wasn’t full of creeps when she was making movies. The behind-the-scenes production of “L.A. Confidential” has made headlines in the run-up to this year’s Oscars. “The Brutalist”’s Guy Pearce, who played a detective in Hanson’s film, recently spoke out about how he was “targeted” by Kevin Spacey on set. (Spacey has denied any wrongdoing, responding in a self-made video that Pearce should “grow up.”)
For her part, Basinger says she can neither corroborate nor deny Pearce’s account.
“I would not have known about any kind of activity [like that] in any way, shape or form,” she says. “I shot very closely with Russell Crowe. I shot very close to closely with Guy Pearce. So I really don’t have, honestly, any recollection of even seeing Kevin and Guy. But Guy is a lovely human being. I’ve been out to dinner with Kevin years and years ago with someone else that was very famous in the music business, a woman. But other than that, I really don’t know Kevin Spacey.”
There’s a reason that Basinger wasn’t privy to the “L.A. Confidential” goings-on.
“The truth is that it was a boys club,” she says. “My pal, my dearest friend on the movie and outside the movie was Curtis.”
Hanson, who died of natural causes in 2016 at the age of 71, had found a muse in Basinger. He tried to persuade her to play the female lead opposite Michael Douglas in his 2000 comedy-drama “Wonder Boys,” a role that eventually went to Frances McDormand.
“I couldn’t do it. I was exhausted. I was mentally… It took a lot of mental and emotional healing after “I Dreamed of Africa” to come back after living in the bush for as long as we did,” she says of the critically panned drama that shot in 1998. “It was really just a shock to my system.”
But Hanson tried again in 2001, this time asking her to play the mother of Eminem in the rapper’s semi-autobiographical film debut “8 Mile.” Basinger and Baldwin had recently split, and she was ready to begin anew, both personally and professionally. She was living in New York at the time, and Hanson sent her the script for the film, which was known as “Untitled Detroit Project.”
“I remember reading one line where the mother says, ‘Do you want some fucking cereal or some fucking eggs.’ And I called Curtis. He picked up the phone, and I didn’t even say hello. I just said, ‘If you’ll change the line to ‘fucking pancakes,’ I’ll do the movie,” she says with a giggle.
As for working with a novice actor who happened to be at the height of his global stardom, she says Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers III, more than rose to the challenge.
“When Marshall and I started doing these really heavy tough scenes, I remember saying, ‘This is only a movie. We’re only pretending, but we have to go for it. Let’s just go for it. I’m going to say some things and it’s going to be horrible and I’m going to keep saying them and they’re going to come out of my mouth.’ I think we were kind of like two fighters in a ring,” she says of playing the abusive single mother. “To have someone that talented and to have someone that you would have thought had a huge ego, would puff up himself and have an entourage and everything around him, he had some of the nicest people surrounding him that I’ve ever known. There’s nobody in the world like him.”
During our conversations, Basinger is careful with her words and remains extremely private about her personal life. This is the first interview she has given in years. She dodges questions about Prince when discussing “Batman.” (He did the soundtrack.) “I don’t like to talk about anyone, and especially him being gone,” she says quietly. “He could be very funny. He got the humor of the film.”
Basinger with Alec Baldwin in 1991
WireImage
With regard to Baldwin, she is more forthcoming. It comes as a surprise given that the former couple, who starred together in “The Marrying Man” and “The Getaway,” made tabloid headlines for their rocky marriage. (Baldwin, who shared custody of Ireland with Basinger, has seven other kids with his wife Hilaria Baldwin.)
“Alec and I have a great relationship,” Basinger insists. “I have great respect for where he is today, and his family. You know, we don’t spend Christmases and holidays or see each other very much. But we talk. He’ll pick up the phone and call me, and we have a very genuinely cordial and I think loving relationship in a lot of ways, just because we share a daughter, and I don’t wish him anything but everything good. He’s been through a lot lately,” she says, obliquely referencing his trial for involuntary manslaughter after a fatal accident on the set of “Rust.” (The case was thrown out.) “But Hilaria seems to have a great handle on that. So more power to her.”
While Baldwin is putting his home life on display via the new TLC reality show “The Baldwins,” Basinger is intent on staying out of the spotlight.
“Your anonymity is like a helium balloon. It slips out of your hand, and that’s it,” she says. “I found that out pretty young. Getting off airplanes all over the world and having people stalk your hotel rooms and bodyguards and police and this and that and thinking, ‘What?’ You’re just dumbfounded.”
After all, the press often reveled in her misfortunes. In the late ’80s, she famously bought a town in Georgia for $20 million in a bid to create a tourist attraction and production hub. The enterprise went belly up and created a rift with some family members who were part of the venture. That financial misstep partly inspired the hit series “Schitt’s Creek,” according to star Eugene Levy. Basinger had no idea.
“Who knew? I love that show. So, hey, made for good material,” she says, poking fun at her own foibles. “That would be lovely to have those royalty checks.”
Self-deprecating humor aside, she would rather be known for her body of work, including such timeless comedies as “Blind Date” with Bruce Willis and “Wayne’s World 2.”
To her, acting is more than a job. It’s therapy.
“It’s the only thing that’s kept me above water — emotionally, physically, in every sense of the word,” she says. “It just keeps me going. I love that space between ‘Action’ and ‘Cut.’”
