Christian Slater is having a bad hair day. He is also having a low self-esteem day. The two are not connected, except that both occur on or about the head.
The bad hair - short black spikes - is left over from his most recent role. Slater plays a loner who reads Sgt. Fury comic books and worships Elvis Presley."It's a real bizarre movie," Slater says of "True Romance," "with a very, very hard edge."
"True Romance" was written by Quentin Tarantino and "all you have to say is `Reservoir Dogs,' and you know this is not your typical, run-of-the-mill love story," says Slater. "Violence? Yeah, there's violence. I'm, uh, hoping that the violence will be taken lightly, because it is comical."
Slater says it's hard to talk about "True Romance" because shooting just ended, and he hasn't seen it yet.
It is easier to talk about his current movie, "Untamed Heart," that opened recently. He plays a shy dishwasher in a Minneapolis diner who has fallen in love with a luscious waitress, played by Marisa Tomei. The movie, timed to Valentine's Day, also stars Rosie Perez. Slater was reluctant to take the role.
"He's so sweet and vulnerable, and these are all characteristics that I've tried to put away, to hide from people," he explains.
There's more to his discomfort.
"I'm just havin' a hard time look-in' at myself on screen lately," he confesses, scratching at his cheek in embarrassment.
You almost begin to feel sorry for this uneasy 23-year-old cornered on the couch like some young stallion in a corral.
Almost.
Then you remember that in the movie "Poison Ivy," one of the high school girls admits that what she'd really like for a birthday pres-ent is Christian Slater. And Slater isn't even in "Poison Ivy."
You remember that it is Christian Slater, sighing over there in emotional disarray, who is the glittering treasure of the pubescent female market.
It is Christian Slater who was once - and correctly in terms of his screen persona - described by "Pump Up the Volume" director Allan Moyle as "witty and sexy and mysterious."
"Witty, sexy and mysterious?" he repeats, uneasily, scratching the back of his neck. "Mmmm, I don't know."
Pause. Then apologetically, "I didn't try to be witty, sexy and mysterious. That's just, ah, somebody's interpretation."
Pause. Then with bravado, "But sure, why not? They're beautiful adjectives. Now if they were . . . scumbag and jerk. . . ."
He laughs uncomfortably. Because the latter would be more accurate?
"Nah, not today. Maybe if I were having a really low self-esteem day. . . ."
He is encouraged to pick a few adjectives for himself. He thinks for a while. "Well, no," he says finally. "I don't want to make myself sound bad. I do have a few adjectives I could use to describe myself, how I'm feeling today, but they're not the most positive ones.
"Like I said, I'm in the middle of something here. It's scary. Whatever it is, I can't even put my finger on it. It's just life. It's just life."
His parents, stage actor Michael Gainsborough, and casting executive Mary Jo Slater, divorced when he was 5, and he grew up with his mother. Of his father, Slater says only, "He's out in Los Angeles. He's sort of doing his own thing. So am I."
His mother he refers to often. "We've had our ups and downs. I went through changes with my mother, and that was scary, and it took us a long time to actually have the relationship she and I have today."
Christian started working at the age of 7, appearing on the soap opera "One Life to Live." At 8, he toured in "The Music Man." By his midteens, he was performing on Broadway in "Macbeth" and in the movies in "The Legend of Billie Jean."
When he was 15, he made the movie that made him a star, playing Sean Connery's young sidekick in "The Name of the Rose," initiated into sex in an erotic scene. The actress was 7 years older than Slater. He cites "The Name" and "Pump" as the two movies he's most proud of.
He is not proud of his jail sentence for drunken driving and says he has cleaned up his act. "It had nothing to do with public image," he says bluntly. "It had to do with saving my own ass, actually."
Nor is he especially proud of having once said he expected to die young. "Really, did I say that?" he asks, abashedly. "Dramatic fool!"
After some highly public liaisons with high profile co-stars, including Samantha Mathis and Winona Ryder, he refuses to talk about the acting student he's living with now, though he will say their beagle, Clarence, who was his birthday present last August, is "the dumbest thing in the world, but he's cute."
Slater himself never went to college but says he's "gotta go - in a movie, 'cause I'm not doing it in real life."
Hastily, he adds, mindful of his role as teen idol, "Not that I advise that. College is a good thing. But, you know. . . ."
He has homes both in New York and in Los Angeles, where he keeps his '61 Cadillac, "really the coolest car."
He won't move to Los Angeles permanently because he likes being around the theater community in New York, and he likes the cold weather.
For Slater, filming "Untamed Heart" in the Minneapolis winter of '91 and "True Romance" for a week in the Detroit winter of '92 was no hardship.
"I feel more alive in cold weather," he says. "I have really warm blood. I can't sleep at night unless my feet are out of the covers."
One of the other actors in "True Romance" is Gary Oldman, and Slater had some long discussions about vampires with Oldman, who recently played Dracula. Slater has long wanted to be in a movie based on Anne Rice's "Interview with a Vampire" and he's also been wanting to star in a film biography of Bobby Darin.
His pals include Robert Downey Jr., who once said of Slater, "He's, like, very Nicholson with some serious Spencer Tracy happening."
In fact, Slater has mixed feelings now that his infamous Jack Nicholson shtick in "Heathers" has been superseded. "Do you believe Tom Cruise did Jack Nicholson in `A Few Good Men?' " he says, chuckling.
Does that mean Slater can finally get out from under the burden of his imitation of Nicholson? "Thanks to Tom Cruise," he says, in mock disgruntlement. "It definitely was a wonderful, special thing, but it's a bit of a relief. I miss it, too, of course. It's a safe thing, I suppose."
That mixed feeling also applies to his fans. Do the teenage girls still hang around him and hang out at his house?
"Yeah!" he says.
And yes, he still frequents toy stores and treasures his collection of Star Trek figures and tapes.
And so it becomes clear that the boy who at the age of 19 told People magazine that he didn't want to grow up is scared, because at 23, he's finding he doesn't have a choice.
"You know when you're in the middle of changing somehow? Or you feel like you're changing, and you know how scary that is, going through some kind of change?
"Change can be a very scary thing, so if you see it beginning to happen in you, and like, vulnerability and all these things start to emerge, it can be horrifying.
"Particularly with vulnerability. Because you leave yourself open to be . . . vulnerable. You know?"
Nobody ever said there wasn't a big difference between growing up and growing out a bad haircut.