Sunday, May 24, 1998

Matt Goes Into Action

How a normal 'Guy' became hero of monster hit

By Sherryl Connolly, New York Daily News Online

We've kind of gotten used to having Matthew Broderick around, haven't we? It does seem he's always been there either onstage or onscreen, a star with no celebrity quotient. Years of exposure and he can take the subway to work unrecognized, even when the job that day is starring in the $120 million event movie of the summer shooting around New York. You know, "Godzilla."

Matthew Broderick, action hero? It may seem incongruous, but the plastic toy modeled on Broderick's character, Dr. Nick Tatopoulos, is already in stores. It comes with torpedoes.

"It's an odd thing to look at yourself in a box," Broderick muses. "To know that dogs will be chewing your head off pretty soon and kids will be pouring kerosene on you and setting you on fire."

What? For a good time, torch Matthew Broderick?

"It's what I used to do," he says with a laugh, referring to his childhood. "I say, go for it, if you use proper precautions."

Gee, that's so Matthew Broderick. Go for it, using proper precautions. There's a speed bump built into his persona making him just so-not-'90s. Which could be a good thing, given the decade is coming to a close. And if in the next century, the call goes out for a new kind of action hero, or romantic lead, well, we've had Matthew Broderick in training all these years.

"Let's see, is it 15 or 16 years I've been famous-ish?," he wonders out loud. "Maybe it's 30. I don't know."

Famous-ish is a good way to put it. If celebrity were divided into neighborhoods, Broderick would be living next door to, say, Dennis Quaid or Kevin Bacon — men we know can excite or interest us onscreen, but who confront the same shortage of compelling roles actresses complain of. John Cusack used to live there, but he moved out.

Yes, Broderick has had big parts in major studio releases of late, but it was the same part — the romantically hapless really white guy. And the movies, "The Cable Guy" and "Addicted to Love," weren't swell.

Even so, Broderick says he doesn't agonize the way he used to when deciding who he'll play next.

"I've relaxed some and it's probably because I no longer think I know anything," the 35-year-old veteran explains. "But it's still my least favorite thing . . . readings lots of scripts and choosing. I hate saying no to people and I've always been afraid that I'll let something good go."

"Godzilla" came looking for him.

"I was minding my own business, going about my daily routine, when my agent called and said the guys who did 'Independence Day' are doing 'Godzilla' and they want you to star in it."

"I said; 'Wow. Okay.' I always kind of liked monster movies."

Actually, "the guys" — Roland Emmmerich and Dean Devlin, who seized the summer of '96 with the mega-hit "Independence Day" — have long wanted to put Broderick in touch with the masses. "We've tried to get him into every movie we've done," says Devlin. "For 'Independence Day,' we wanted to write a part for him. For 'Stargate,' we wanted him to be the lead."

The fact is, it was a summer event movie, "War Games" in 1983, that first introduced Broderick, playing a hacker who taps into the national security system, to a broad audience. It made him, at 21, a star, but he already was plagued by a generational confusion that still messes with his image.

It was the Neil Simon connection, there from early in his career, that thinned his appeal as it widened it. Still in his teens, he was playing the young would-be writer Eugene Jerome in "Brighton Beach Memoirs," and his first movie role was in Simon's "Max Dugan Returns." So while "War Games" and then, definitively, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986), in which he played the too-cool-for-school Chicago senior, put him in good with the prime movie demographic — males in their teens and '20s — the Simon thing, furthered by his 1988 outing in "Biloxi Blues" playing Jerome as an Army recruit, made him attractive to their mothers, too.

Moms even liked Ferris Bueller. Everyone liked Ferris Bueller. They still do.

"I go to a lot of Yankee games and all I hear is: 'Yo, Ferris. Yo, Ferris. You got the day off?'," he says wearily. "And I always have to react like: Oh, yeah. I get it . . . a day off."

In the roles that followed, Broderick strove to create a post-Bueller oeuvre. He was the son of Dustin Hoffman and the grandson of Sean Connery in "Family Business" (1989). All three gave great performances, but the Sidney Lumet movie never quite made sense. He was compelling in "Glory," the story of a Civil War unit of black soldiers and their white commander, and delightful in "The Freshman," something of a "Godfather" spoof in which Marlon Brando co-starred. He was even suavely credible as Charlie McArthur, the newspaperman who betrays Dorothy's love in "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle."

In other words, if he was crassly chasing stardom during those years no one caught him at it. In fact, Broderick and his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, another enjoyable screen presence, seemed privileged with a sense of having enough already. Or at least, there's no evidence they feel the need to grasp at everything that can be had in a business where's there so much to be had.

They pointedly live in New York, keeping close to their families. Broderick is the son of the late actor James Broderick, who was for years a staple of New York theater and then a familiar face on the TV series "Family" before he died in 1982. His mother, Patricia, is an an artist and scriptwriter who worked with her son to make "Infinity," the story of atomic scientist Richard Feynman, which Broderick directed and starred in last year.

Parker and Broderick, together since the early '90s, did have a persona problem as a couple for a time after she told an interviewer for "W" in 1994 that though Broderick knew she wanted to marry and have children: "He's very undecided. So I can't talk about it with him anymore."

She really didn't have to after that. In every subsequent interview, he was asked if he was ready to make her a happy woman. By the next year when they were starring together on Broadway in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" things had gotten stupid-silly, with Broderick being persistently portrayed as the too-reluctant suitor and Parker as increasingly desperate.

Who knows what, if anything, it had to do with the reality of their relationship, as they have long since stopped commenting on it. But last year they made it legal in a ceremony held in a Greenwich Village townhouse and officiated by Broderick's sister, an Episcopal priest. Drolly, the bride wore black.

There was no honeymoon because she was starring on Broadway in "Once Upon a Mattress" and he had to get back to work on "Godzilla."

"Godzilla," who first destroyed Tokyo in 1954, has starred in 23 films not counting this summer's movie, on which everyone involved is relying to be a box-office phenomenon. The marketing blitz started early — the "Size Does Matter" posters have been up for months — culminating in Tuesday's premiere for 12,000 at Madison Square Garden.

As Tatopoulos, Matthew Broderick plays an owl-eyed young scientist with a special understanding of what's behind the monster's rampage. "Godzilla" has nested and somewhere in New York, the eggs are hatching. The hatchlings will take Manhattan if Tatopoulous and the mysterious French guy, Philippe Roache (Jean Reno), don't do the male movie star thing and kill the mutant-lizard babies.

The '90s "Godzilla" definitely has got moves. He's a freaking fast lizard who spends much of the movie personally threatening Broderick's well-being. Broderick says his stunt work amounted to a lot of running "even if it is running away." And the running wasn't as easy as it looks. "There was rough stuff," he says a little defensively. "I mean we were running in the rain. Debris and wind and stuff, you know."

He never even met the star. "There were only pieces when we were filming," he explains. "A foot here. An eyebrow there."

When it comes to promoting a huge-budget action adventure movie, Broderick is in some ways as sweetly inept as the scientist he plays. Asked by David Letterman if he will be doing more "Godzilla" movies, he blurts: "If required." (He's signed a three-picture deal.) In person, he wishes out loud "I hope Godzilla isn't the success everyone says it will be" when it suddenly occurs to him he may no longer be "famous-ish" but famous outright.

"I like being part of the city," he grouses. "The idea of having to be driven around in a van with dark windows is ridiculous."

The truth is he finished work on the movie a year ago, and he says: "I have to tell you I feel a kind of distance from it. Even left out in a weird sort of way. It's about marketing now. It's not me anymore."

Well, it is and it isn't. Sure, Matthew Broderick as an action-adventure hero is a departure. Depending on where his career goes, it may in time even seem an aberration. But the proof that it's him all right is there in plastic, a little Army-clad figure, and, look, it's got Ferris Bueller's face.