It isn't easy being a saint. Just ask Leelee Sobieski, the 16-year-old who plays the title role in May's best television miniseries, "Joan of Arc."
Just like it wasn't easy when, as Joan, she led the French army to victory over the English at Orleans in a re-creation of the 1429 battle."The armor was 60 pounds, and it was cold and snowing a lot of the time. And you feel like a sardine in a tin can," Sobieski said. "And you're riding on a horse, which is normally a very pleasant experience, but the armor makes it slightly unpleasant. And then you're carrying this banner. Imagine a sail on a sailboat, and you're charging, except the sail is going in the opposite direction behind you.
"You're holding the banner with your right hand and the reins with your left hand, and you're sort of a mess and you're just hoping that the horse will go straight."
Well, it did. And Sobieski turns in what is arguably the finest Joan ever, which is saying something given that the role has also been essayed by Ingrid Bergman (in 1948).
"It was just something so exciting," Sobieski said in a telephone interview with TV critics. "It was like, OK -- this is Joan of Arc, you're 16, this is the chance of a lifetime. Just jump and take it. And everything turned out amazingly well."
"Joan of Arc," which airs tonight and Tuesday at 8 p.m. on CBS/Ch. 2, is epic in scale. Filmed on location in the Czech Republic, it features great sets, costumes, effects and an impressive cast, including Jacqueline Bisset, Powers Boothe, Olympic Dukakis, Neil Patrick Harris, Robert Loggia, Maximilian Schell and Peter Strauss.
Peter O'Toole plays a prominent part as Bishop Cauchhon, and Shirley MacLaine appears briefly as Madame de Beaurevoir.
But it's young Sobieski who makes "Joan" work. She's simply great in the role (and she's the first age-appropriate actress to play Joan in a major production).
"Her contributions to the soul of Joan are enormous," said executive producer Ed Gernon.
"Oh, yes. I'm sure they're huge," Sobieski said drily. (An amazing thing -- a young star who doesn't take herself too seriously.)
The actress is obviously highly intelligent, but she's still a teenager. And she is convinced that other teens can relate to Joan, who began hearing voices from God as a child, led the French to victory over the English at the age of 17 and was burned at the stake as a heretic at the age of 19. (That decision was later rescinded and she was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1920.)
"I think in this version we tried to portray her very real," Sobieski said. "Even though she's a saint, she became a little bit corrupted. So we tried to show that even the best and purest of people have faults. Nobody's perfect.
"There's many things to relate to. A teenager's still a teenager, and it doesn't matter what time period or what decade in history you're in. There's still the normal problems of self-discovery and looking around you and seeing the way the world works and why everything is maybe politically disturbing. And why does everybody play sick games all the time, and why don't they just stick to the truth. All teenagers have gone through commotions like that."
As for Sobieski, she said she relates to Joan quite well. And not just because she's a teenager -- and a half-French one at that.
"She's very strong, and I think I'm a strong person," she said. "She tries to pursue what she thinks is right, even if everybody laughs at her or says, 'Oh, you don't even know what you're talking about.' . . . And I think I'm very strong on certain points. No matter how much people laugh at me or make fun of it or agree with it, I always stick to those points -- I guess, morals.
"And I'm a virgin and she's a virgin, too. Whatever," she added. "I've embarrassed myself, but I'll say it again because it's true."
In what is a difficult role, Sobieski is nothing short of amazing. She carries the weight of not only a four-hour TV movie but a historical and religious icon on her shoulders and makes it look effortless.
"She is so intuitive," Gernon said. "Something that even Leelee probably couldn't articulate happens when she disappears inside a character. She embodies that person in a very subtle and quiet way.
"Day by day, you could just watch her changing. And she just sort of became that part. And for the duration of the show, that's who she was."
"That makes me feel really good," Sobieski interjected, "because now I'm a corrupted saint."
But the 16-year-old was more than a bit caught up in her role.
"While I was working on it, I really felt like I was Joan of Arc. I really did. It was really strange," Sobieski said. "You don't think, when you go home to bed, 'Oh, I'm Joan of Arc.' But you really feel like you've been through all these experiences, emotionally and physically, that she had because you have to put yourself through that. She's going through these emotional experiences and you do, too.
"And then you come home and it's almost like, she's been through so much. It's almost as if you want to cry in your real life and you can't anymore because she's taken it all away. It's like -- she took all of my tears and I don't have anything left for me. So while I was working, it was really like her life was my life."
All of which left the movie's executive producer both pleased and proud.
"Anybody who could be charging on a muddy field toward a building that is not there with cameras and microphones and armor and all the wardrobe people standing not 10 feet away from you and still believe that they are Joan of Arc, they lend a reality to the show that's very hard to get," Gernon said.
Of course, Sobieski had not only to deal with Joan's personal, religious and political struggles but with the elements -- including the thick mud on the mock battlefield in the Czech Republic.
"It wasn't riding on the horse (that was hard), it was getting to the horse and off of the horse," she said. "Because the mud was so thick if you're wearing 60 pounds of armor you just sink straight into it. It was up to your knees. So two people had to help you.
"And then if you had to use the ladies' room that was another catastrophe because it took 15 minutes to get everything on and another 10 minutes to get it off."
In another scene (that has been trimmed from the American version of the movie because of time constraints), Joan visits plague victims and cleanses herself by dipping her hands in an alcohol solution and setting them ablaze.
"My hands were on fire. They were burning in front of me," Sobieski said. "And then you wrap them in a towel really quickly, but it was very strange. I was freaking out so much in the beginning. But it didn't really burn my skin."
Nor was she harmed when they filmed Joan being burned at the stake. As a matter of fact, Sobieski said she was actually looking forward to the flames in that one.
"I couldn't wait for them to be turned on because it was snowing and I was barefoot and I was really cold," she said. "And the wind was blowing really strong.
"There was this one take where it was so strange, and there's a little bit of it in the film -- the wind, literally, when she's screaming to God, it howls up. And there's this gush like whips me in the face with the snow and the flames were going crazy. It was really amazing."
As is Sobieski in "Joan of Arc."