Rebecca De Mornay Reflects on 40 Years of ‘Risky Business’ and Being a Hollywood Sex Symbol
12.07.2023 - 15:39
/ thewrap.com
need to be an actress.’ And that turned out to be true,” De Mornay said. From that moment, De Mornay’s career seems bound by intuition, fate or good timing. Case in point, getting the role in “Risky Business.” Despite never having acted before, prior to reading the script De Mornay had gotten the lead in a film set to be directed by Tony Scott only to see it fall apart.
Then she was offered a supporting part in another film which she lost to another actress. “As fate would have it, if I’d gotten that movie I would have been unavailable for ‘Risky Business,'” she said. It wasn’t until friend Harry Dean Stanton was reading the script (he was initially considering the part of Guido, “the killer pimp,” who would be played in the movie by Joe Pantoliano) that De Mornay gave it a look.“I understood the part of Lana so well,” she said.
“I’ve lived by myself as a young, young, 19-year-old in London, fending for myself. [I’ve] gone through a lot in my life in terms of upheaval and family stuff, and suddenly there was a part that just fit me like a glove, that I knew.” Lana was the “soul of the movie,” according to De Mornay and that’s true. In a film all about capitalism, and one privileged man’s attempt to make his own way — De Mornay’s Lana is the one actually struggling through the Reagan-era ’80s.
“I wanted to maintain her dignity, regardless if she’s having sex for money. She maintained some source of integrity and soul,” she said. “I wanted to present the underdog who was reduced to having to be a prostitute, exploited in our capitalist system, trying to get by as best she could without the cushion of having a family of money and connections.” Director Paul Brickman auditioned 400 women throughout America and Europe, and
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