Feeding Ashley Judd

A brief, bracing encounter with one very hungry actress

LIKE MOST OF YOU, THE FIRST thing I think of when I rise to greet each new day is how much I really love actresses. Ashley Judd, up in her hotel room fifteen floors above me, is nearly an hour late, and it's almost as if she's done me a great service. Just look at Bemelmans' bar! The atmosphere here could tease the Cary Grant out of anyone, even a wretch like me. And when Ashley finally appears, I truly feel like a leading man, something like Matthew McConaughey must have felt opposite her in A lime to Kill. Raven curls, virginal complexion, and tall in the saddle--she is stayin'-alive gorgeous, her smile cocked with enough sexual firepower to wipe out a busload of high school wrestlers. And Lordy, what a handshake! She leads me into a sitting room for lunch.

Daughter of Naomi sister of Wynonna, girlfriend Michael Bolton, Ashley seems to know more people than the three of them combined--everyone from guests to hotel employees--and to a select few, she speaks in confidential French. When we take our seat at a very well-positioned table (think of us as the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center), I am privately happy. Ashley wants to know the source of my joy, and I oblige her: For just a moment there, I feared she might not show, leaving me to piece together the mystery of Ashley Judd without her. The idea intrigues her.

"Ooooooooh . . . It would've been a nice psychological profile that I could've taken to my new therapist," she says, gesturing for a waiter. "I could say to her, `Look I,m not an integrated person. This is my public persona. Integrate this with the reality you have in front of you!'"

There are laugh lines, but there's also an undercurrent of distress. She affects this mood well in film, maybe even better than any young actress around, if you consider her searing performance in Heat as Val Kilmer's muse. She assures me that nothing is wrong, but more than anything I want to ease her mind. I have come to her, I tell her, without a list of questions, without a stilted game plan--I am her open slate.

"That gives me soooo much confidence," she grumbles. "That gives me so much assurance about our upcoming discuter." Something has her in a knot, so rankled it seems to have affected even her French. What is it?

"Well, I've been fasting all week," Ashley confesses, "and they've been so helpful here at the hotel. You never know if you're going to have a healing crisis or get really sick and you might need something. They prepared this really delicious, like, millet--they had it on twenty-four-hour standby for me."

Perhaps she's a little hungry, then. But that can't be the whole story. It's this whole interview business, isn't it? Yes! Once she is confronted, there is an incredible release in her.

"I think we are most vulnerable when we express ourselves. We're not sure how it's going to be perceived--even though one of my nicknames is Fearless. Also, I get irritated when people have demands on my time. I get really bent out of shape."

Throughout her fast, Ashley has been ingesting purifying herbs, powdered vitamin C, and trace minerals, bringing a sparkle to her ginger-colored eyes. She has a sweet way about her, which could almost be used as a weapon if she were so inclined. When I mention this, she laughs.

"I think when you're intense, you can go pretty far in either direction," she says, "so consider yourself forewarned. But really, I think I've cultivated tact. Waiter! What's the soup of the day?"

We finally dig in. I'm hopeful that some food will help her. A bite from the salad, however, sends Ashley into a deeper funk. Pushing it aside, she attacks the french fries on my plate, which I am now thankful she ordered for me.

"What I don't like about interviews," she says, "is that I'm a very candid, verbal person. And that, to me, makes for relatively interesting conversation, but it can sometimes come back and bite you in the butt."

"Just . . . be you" is my suggestion.

"Well, I was going to try and be Helen Gurley Brown," she joshes. "I bring her up because I did Cosmo recently. It's about beauty, and in it, of course, I'm talking about my inspirational books and how you have to come from the inside out in your approach to beauty. I had that conversation, by the way, in a red silk push-up bra." The french fries seem to be working--maybe even a little too well. "This week has really been uneven in terms of the quality of the people with whom I've worked in photo sessions. Actually, your magazine's was the worst. They were nice people, but I didn't have a lot of confidence in them. The photographer kept asking his assistant to check focus because he seemed to be relatively blind. They turned out great, but it was a bit of a process." Clearly, Fearless Ashley Judd isn't afraid of conflict.

Then we are discussing her two recently completed films--Kiss the Girls, with Morgan Freeman, and The Locusts, by the talented J. P. Kelley, costarring Vince Vaughn.

"Oh, yes, Locusts. It's such old-fashioned cinema. It's David Lean. It's Giant It's beautiful composition, gorgeous acting. It's the proudest I've ever been of my work." Ashley gushes on until she remembers that her hairdresser is waiting for her up in the hotel room. The plan now is for me to finish my hamburger while she showers; then we can reconvene up in the suite. As she's leaving, she flags down another hotel employee.

"David! Wasn't I supposed to get something from catering? Some lovely dessert party tray? Could you take it up to Mister Herr's room?"

MICHAEL BOLTON, REGISTERED under the name Ben Herr, is hunched behind a table in the living room of their double suite, eating hash browns and listening to opera. All around him are signs of an alien female presence: frilly pillows, doilies, stuffed animals. Michael points me toward the other room.

In the bedroom, a makeup-and-hair person hovers around Ashley's erect body, preparing her for a fashion show. I'm still ruminating on the inspirational-reading-in-the-push-up-bra thing, this naughty girl who quotes the Scriptures, the game dame who jumps into a pond in her skivvies with Matthew McConaughey for a photo shoot but who also refers to herself as a WASP--a White Anglo-Saxon Pentecostal.

"You mean, balancing my faith and my sexuality? I thank God for sex every day," she proclaims without moving a muscle. "I am a very active Christian, yes. I know that conjures certain ideas about political affiliations, predilections for proselytizing. But that's not what it's all about for me. It's the paradigm through which I access my spirituality. As far as my acting, I have a responsibility to play my character with the full width and breadth of my own capacity of feeling--that's the only currency I have to invest in my characters. So, if I feel something to here in my real life, I'm looking when I'm playing something to resonate down to that same spot of depth. And eventually, like a Redgrave, I'll act from my toenails.

"Look at the kind of robe they give you in this hotel," she grouses, showing off a gaping hole.

"They're just trying to make you feel at home," I offer. "They really want you to be happy."

"Well, I'm not," she jokes, then hollers out to Michael, "I'm not happy at all, am I, Chief?"

Michael mumbles something from the other room, and for a moment I feel sorry for him.

"Poor Michael. I mean, doesn't he feel emasculated with the stuffed animals, the flowers, the makeup everywhere?"

"Oh, please," Ashley snorts, "he's next in here. He wears more than me. Now, could I ask you to do a housekeeping chore for me? Could you open those blinds? They're acting like a diffuser and spoiling the light on my face."

All right, then. She has the world by the short hairs, money in the bank as a rising film actress, and a rock-star boyfriend. Does it get any better than this? Could she possibly accomplish anything more? She considers the question for a spell as I draw the blinds, then responds with a squint:

"Do you have trouble getting chicks?"

"Oh, you kidder. Come on, now. Answer the question."

"Hmmm . . . What do I want to be?" Ashley, ready for her close-up now, levels her gaze. "What do I want to be? Me--just more so."

Esquire - 1997

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