Wednesday, June 9, 2004

'I don't feel competitive'

Like his role in Stepford Wives, Broderick lives with more famous wife

By Jay Stone, CanWest

NEW YORK CITY -- By three in the afternoon, Matthew Broderick has pretty well had it with talking about the battle of the sexes.

He's been at it all day, as part of the promotional campaign for The Stepford Wives, the comedy-thriller that opens Friday. Broderick stars as Walter Eberhart, husband of TV executive Joanna (Nicole Kidman). The couple moves to Stepford, Conn., and finds a community of husbands who -- threatened by their successful wives -- turn them into non-thinking automatons.

The coincidence that Broderick, a successful stage and film actor, is married to Sarah Jessica Parker, an even more famous TV actor, has everyone asking the same questions. And Broderick, who has a considerable wellspring of boyish charm, has tackled them with good humour for most of the day.

"I don't think Joanna and my wife are alike at all," he told a questioner that morning. "She's extremely successful and megapowerful. She could destroy this whole hotel just by looking at it. But so far I feel perfectly safe around her."

Then a German journalist asked Broderick if there was anything at all Stepford-like about Parker. Does she like to make cupcakes, for instance? Would Broderick like it if she brought him his slippers, like the vapid Stepford robots do?

"She enjoys some of those things," Broderick answers carefully. "She makes cupcakes, if that's literally your question. She's not very Stepford-like but she's old-fashioned in some ways. She likes cooking and homemaking, so when she has time for it, that's something that she does, that she likes. And there's nothing I would change about her."

And now, this afternoon, Broderick is again addressing the issue of feminism and the reaction to it in the 21st century. He says that although things have changed since the original Stepford Wives movie in 1975, much is the same: he and other men of his generation (he's 42) still like to feel they are providing for the women in their lives.

Beyond his connections to Sarah Jessica Parker, Broderick does as well. His career moves easily between films and stage work, and sometimes back again: he starred in the original Broadway production of Mel Brooks' The Producers with Nathan Lane, and now he is going to make the film version of that musical comedy, which itself was based on a film.

"The way I do the math it might cancel itself out and just disappear," Broderick says. "Mel said: 'Now that we're going to do it I guess we have to figure out how to do it'."

It was stage work that gave Broderick his big break. The son of actor James and playwright Patricia -- he made his stage debut at 17 opposite his father -- he got his break when he was cast as the homosexual son of a transvestite in the hit play Torch Song Trilogy. Suddenly, when he went to auditions, he was "the guy from Torch Song Trilogy." Neil Simon cast him in Brighton Beach Memoirs, for which he won a Tony Award, and the sequel Biloxi Blues. His starring role in Ferris Bueller's Day Off made him a cultural hero to a generation of students. At the same time, he could go back to the stage and win a second Tony in the Broadway revival of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.

"So theatre gave me a movie career. I don't know why I still have a theatre career. I'm very glad I do," he says. "I like that, for good or bad, the performance is in my hands. At some point in a play it's the actors. And in a movie you really finally hand it over to other people and pray."

The Stepford Wives role came his way when John Cusack -- who was originally cast as Walter -- and his sister Joan, who had the Bette Midler role in the film as the best friend, had to drop out when their father became ill. Broderick stepped in, and in what he calls a "crazy, ugly coincidence between me and John Cusack," his mother became ill during the filming.

"I don't want to get into that, but I probably shouldn't have been in this either," he says. Patricia died, at age 78, while he was shooting the film.

Broderick and Parker live in Greenwich Village, five blocks from where he grew up. They have a son, 18-month-old James, whose outings with his parents at the park have excited the local paparazzi to a degree that Broderick says he never expected. It's part of the heat from Parker's fame, which he says resulted in a whole new level of "privacy-losing."

That's the pressure of celebrity and, one way or another, Broderick has to deal with the questions. At the end of a long day, it isn't easy.

"I'm not a superman. I'm . . . I see all the. . I'm sorry to stutter. My wife and I from the beginning have been, I mean she was a very successful actress when I first met her, so I always knew that. And I've always liked that about her. Of course, now it's taken another dimension of fame that is just crazy, that I didn't know about too much. But I don't feel competitive. I don't feel that it makes me little or anything.

"And maybe that's partly because I . . . one of the foreign press association women was like, 'But don't you feel belittled or something like that?' And she kept on me about it, and I said, 'Well, I was in The Producers, you know, this year.' And she's was like, 'Well, but that's a play. This is a phenomenon,' about Sex and the City. And I said -- and I don't usually think this -- 'It was the most successful play in Broadway, really, in history. So don't toss it off. That means something to some people.'

"But that's a losing battle if I start trying to . . . I don't even like that argument. I saw my father be out of work and have good times and bad times, and that's how careers go.

"I mean the short answer is I don't feel competitive with my wife about my career."