At 18, Acting Is Still a Game for Veteran Christian Slater

By STEVE WEINSTEIN

July 26, 1988 12 AM PT

To hear Christian Slater talk about his acting career, you’d think he’s living one big, wonderful dream that is sure to evanesce into thin air the second he opens his eyes and says: “Hey, look at me. I’m going to be a star.”

One journalist found him so obnoxiously modest that she called him “the prize pupil of the Jimmy Stewart Gee-Whiz School of Etiquette.”

And listening to him “ah, shucks” his way through an interview about how fast he’s climbing up Hollywood’s list of hot properties, it became clear that this 18-year-old really is telling the truth when he said that he makes movies simply because “it’s the most fun thing to do in the whole world.”

“I’m no star or anything,” Slater insisted, despite a list of film credits that includes Sean Connery’s apprentice monk in “The Name of the Rose,” the loyal son of a maverick auto maker in Francis Coppola’s “Tucker” (due out next month), starring roles in the upcoming “Gleaming the Cube” and “Heathers” and the central part alongside Martin Sheen in “Personal Choice,” which is currently shooting in Vancouver.

“I don’t even care to be a big star,” Slater said. “Sure I’d like to have all that money, but I’d rather be respected for what I do rather than get involved in all that celebrity malarkey. I’d rather not do any more Teen Beat interviews. I did one and they used a picture of me in my monk’s outfit from ‘Name of the Rose.’ Now how’s that for sexy? I mean, what girl is going to want to hang a picture of a monk in her locker?”

Slater described himself as a regular teen-ager, who lives alone in an apartment in the Hollywood Hills, hangs out with his friends and watches TV late into the night. But when it comes to picking movie roles, Slater is far from the run-of-the-mill Teen Beat star.

“I’m not too good with comedy,” Slater said. “I wouldn’t even want to try one of those typical, slapstick teen-age movies.”

Instead, he’s “lucked into” supporting roles in “The Name of the Rose” and “Tucker” with veteran big name actors and directors. And when he did get the chance to star on his own, he chose the rather unglamorous role of an maniacal teen-age killer in “Heathers,” a part, he said, he “could just go crazy in, like Jack Nicholson.”

Working alongside the likes of Connery and Coppola have been the most humbling and yet at the same time the most confidence-boosting experiences he could ever imagine, Slater said.

“It’s overwhelming. I just don’t know what to say because I feel like I’m talking to some kind of god, and I don’t want to say something stupid like, ‘I want to learn from you.’

“On ‘Name of the Rose,’ I was a nervous wreck working with F. Murray Abraham and Sean Connery. But after that movie--after I did this wild love scene and survived next to these great actors--I felt that if I could do that, I could do anything. For me it was an unbelievable thing I accomplished. It shocked the hell out of me.”

Slater’s show-business experience began at age 7 when his mother, a casting director, accidentally launched his career by giving him a small role in the soap opera “One Life to Live.” When the crew applauded his performance, Slater said he was hooked.

His child acting career took off a year later when he appeared with his mother on a late-night New York talk show. Michael Kidd happened to be watching that night and cast him in the national touring company of “The Music Man” with Dick Van Dyke.

“At first I had no idea what I was doing,” Slater remembered. “I was up on stage and I’d be waving at my mother in the audience. But as the tour went on, I started to grasp the idea that I had to be a whole different character and not myself when I was on stage.”

Now, becoming different characters has become an obsession. Though he speaks only a few lines in “Tucker,” Slater’s wide-eyed, I’d-follow-you-anywhere-pop expression fills the screen as he helps his father Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) pursue a David and Goliath auto-making fantasy.

With many teen-age actors the newly acquired success can go to their heads. One young Tiger Beat movie celebrity recently bragged that one advantage of being an actor is that “you can go into any nightclub, say ‘Let’s go, baby’ to any girl in the place, and she’ll go with you.”

But with Slater, who blushes at the mere suggestion of that kind of egomaniacal behavior, it’s almost impossible to get him to even accede to the possibility that he’s on the verge of becoming a star.

“I’d love to be Sean Connery,” Slater said, raving about his mentor’s Academy Award-winning performance in “The Untouchables.” “Maybe when I can do something like that and be respected like he is, maybe then I’d let the fame and all that go to my head a little.

“But now, people don’t even know my name. Sometimes they’ll come up to me and say, ‘Aren’t you an actor?’ ”