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Christian Slater's second act

Christian virtue: a man in the prime of his second act

Matthew d'Ancona

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

A Hollywood actor on the London stage

Born in New York in 1969, the son of a casting executive and an actor, he made his Broadway debut opposite Dick Van Dyke in 1980 and landed his first big screen role five years later in The Legend of Billie Jean. But it was his performance as Sean Connery’s young Franciscan novice, Adso, in The Name of the Rose (‘Every day I would have to shave the top of my head’) that propelled him towards Hollywood stardom.

‘I was like 15 — 15 or 16, something like that — and that was particularly crazy. I was a kid growing up in Manhattan, going to a regular school, about as uncultured as you could possibly be. I just wanted to go to movies, and go to arcades, and goof around, hang out with chicks and do my thing. I mean it was insane, working with these actors and going to Germany and staying in this lovely hotel on the Rhine. It was about as culturally shocking an experience as you possibly could get.’

There were, he says, absolutely no guard-rails thereafter. As a hot property, he was offered — and took — everything: booze, drugs, women. The Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel became his ‘office’. His dark features and intense acting style made it all but inevitable that he would be labelled ‘the second Jack Nicholson’.

In time, it all went badly wrong. ‘You end up getting a lot more voices in your head than you need to have,’ he recalls. The partying became self-destructive. In 1997, he was charged with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of battery, and spent more than 50 days behind bars. His marriage to Ryan Haddon, with whom he has two children, finally ended in divorce in 2006.

But he is two years sober now, physically very fit and (it seems to me) more creatively ambitious than ever. ‘To survive is really phenomenal — and not a lot do it. Amen! It is really, really something. There is no question this is a crazy, crazy business, really crazy. I had no idea how crazy it was. I was nine years old when I got my first legitimate role. I had fun, great times. But I did come to a point where I thought, “Why am I doing this? What am I? I’ve been getting away with murder for a long time, I don’t know what I’m doing.”’

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