SPECIES 2: MARG HELGENBERGER
Femme Fatales
July 1998
By Dan Scapperotti
The award-winning actress, a veteran of Stephen King and the ‘Crypt,‘ kicks alien butt in sequel.
As a youth, she was raised in a mid-American milieu. By the time Marg Helgenberger turned 37, her neighbors adhered to provincial values: marriage, kids, picket fences. Helgenberger opted to haul butt in L.A. storm drains and bag herself her a sexually addictive alien. Cast in Species (1995) as molecular biologist Dr. Laura Baker, the actress found herself in a sleeper. The critics, as usual, were nuts about her though one reviewer grieved Helgenberger was ‘little more than an extra!’ A scribe for Moving Ramblings prophetically rambled, “If this film does well at the box office, chances are we’ll see a sequel.” Produced for a relatively low-budget, Species‘ domestic gross was $60 million. The alien is back, and so is Dr. Baker.
Born and raised in a rustic locale, Helgenberger rationalized that acting couldn’t be equated with a viable future. Sure, she appeared in a couple of high school plays and was active in the band…but buy a ticket to Hollywood? No way. She dug the Mayberry scene. “I come from a small Nebraska town where nobody locks their doors and nobody takes the keys out of their cars,” grins Helgenberger. “I had a great childhood. I don’t know that I’d want to go back to that small town environment, but I loved it at the time. Every summer that was farm activity to raise spending money.”
But by the time Helgenberger enrolled at Northwestern University, she “took acting a little more seriously. I was more committed and I realized that if I could make some headway at Northwestern, maybe I’d go on.”
Her first professional gig was Ryan’s Hope: cast as Siobhan Ryan, she gauges the grind of a soap opera as “not a very glorified way to act because it’s tough. There’s a new script every day. You have very little rehearsal and the material isn’t terribly inspired. But you have to make it work, and people do. You’ll have a week or so off every once in a while, while they focus on other characters. It’s a good training field – in a certain way, I guess-because you get to learn how to work really fast. There’s also a lot of melodrama on the soap operas, so you’re usually involved with a lot of emotion and crying and that sort of stuff. You get the opportunity to work out your emotional muscles. It also helped me to get comfortable with the camera.”
fter three years on the tearjerker, Helgenberger graduated to prime time, appearing in the likes of Matlock and Spenser: For Hire. She co-starred with Margot Kidder in Shell Game, an ’87 series that tanked after one season. But Helgenberger quickly recouped her losses, less than one year later, with a role as Karen Charlene Koloski – abbreviated to K.C. – on the critically lauded China Beach. “It was a good series,” recounts Helgenberger. “The cast was terrific, the writing was great. Every day was an adventure on that show. It took place in Vietnam during the war and China Beach was an actual place that still exists. It’s a beach that was considered an R&R center for the soldiers when they had a couple of weeks off. Instead of going to the Philippines or whatever, they’d go to China Beach. It was like a weekend resort.”
“I was a civilian, I wasn’t a part of the military. I kind of went over as a secretary to a colonel or something. That was my cover, but essentially I was a business woman with all kinds of interests. And one of my interests was that I was a ‘high end call girl’ for mostly upper echelon personnel, not the grunts. Because of my high-end connections on a sexual level. I was able to convince a lot of these guys of other business dealings that I had. Some of them involved selling cars and another one was financing a beauty parlor on the base and that kind of stuff. I was always given something fun to do.”
“Fans of that show – and there are fans of that show – tell me how unusual the character I played was, and how they had never seen that on television before. She was someone who was so frank about what she did, and didn’t play it as a victim, and was in full knowledge of what she was doing and had no apologies about it. It’s kind of nice to know that other people recognize that. I did and the writers did, but it’s nice to be recognized by other people.”
September 16, 1990: Helgenberger attended that year’s Emmy award ceremony not as a guest, but a nominee. Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (China Beach). She had wished the presenters, Richard Mulligan and Blair Brown, would knock off the cute banter and get down to reading the winner. “I happened to be eight months pregnant,” Helgenberger recalls. “One of my biggest concerns, once they announced my name, was getting up the stairs because I had this huge belly and I had heels on. Anyway, But I made it up. I had given my acceptance speech and they escorted me backstage, and through this maze of reporters and photographers and stuff. Even if you wanted to go back to your seat, you couldn’t because someone has your arm and is taking you out. I remember having this feeling that I’m putting my trust in these people, and wondered what would happen if someone were to kidnap me. I don’t know why. I guess it was because I was feeling exceptionally maternal with child and wanted to make sure he was taken care of.”
The Emmy, says Helgenberger, “was definitely a boost for my television career in network as well as cable. I don’t know that it translates that much into feature work, but it gets your name out there – especially on press releases when it will say, Emmy Award winning actress, so it’s always a tag they can add on. “There are so many people, and the competition is so stiff, that it does help.”
Helgenberger made her film debut in director Steven Spielberg’s Always (1989), a remake of A Guy Named Joe. Spielberg cast the actress as Rache in the story of a dead pilot whose ghost governs the love life of his fiancée. “I only worked on it for two weeks,” says Helgenberger. “It was shot in a very remote areas of the country called Moses Lake, Washington not that far from the Grand Coulee Dam. The [1943] original was a very romantic story, so it had a kind of old fashioned feel to it which was refreshing. Steven was very supportive and open to me trying to do things. I was very nervous at first, because this was my first big feature and to have someone like Steven Spielberg as your director…you know, it was a little intimidating. I was in awe of him. I played an airplane mechanic. A young pilot shows up for pilot’s school and catches my eye. I had a bit of a crush on him but, unbeknownst to me, he has a crush on another woman, played by Holly Hunter. It’s a little love triangle; I get dumped by him. But he’s kind of a dufus.”
Following the footsteps of high profile actresses (Isabella Rossellini, Teri Hatcher, Brooke Shields, Traci Lords, Demi Moore), Helgenberger performed in a Tales from the Crypt episode. Cast in ‘Deadline’ (1991), she spent a week playing Vicki, a philandering housewife who picks up the wrong guy in a sleazy bar. “Walter Hill was the director on that and also one of the producers,” explains Helgenberger. “He is a lovely guy, very supportive. It kind of had a ‘40s noir feel to it which is always a great period and a great style. It was a great cast including the late Richard Jordan, John Polito and myself. Richard played a down-and-out skid row drunk, a reporter who needed a break. He kills me off to actually get a story.”
Helgenberger’s ties with the genre also include The Tommyknockers (’93), a TV miniseries adapted from Stephen King’s novel. “I played a woman who is a writer,” smiles the actress. “Stephen King writes a lot about writers. I’m hiking in the Maine woods with my dog when I come across something that is glowing. I start to dig and become passionate about unearthing this thing that’s in the ground. It turns out to be a big spaceship that has crashed and been buried for many years. It has this effect on me, and other people from the town, that’s akin to like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We become consumed with this thing. Jimmy Smits plays my boyfriend: he doesn’t succumb to this and ends up saving the day.”
New Zealand’s countryside stood in for the Maine exteriors. “And I loved working in New Zealand,” says Helgenberger. “I was there for three months. It’s a beautiful country and the people are really great. The one thing that impressed me most was that the English people, and the indigenous people called the Maori, get along beautifully: there doesn’t appear to be any prejudice or racial tension. The country is so far removed from the rest of the world that it was even hard to get CNN International over there. I had to get a couple of cable companies or else you ended up with two stations that were broadcasting local news…and, in New Zealand, there’s not that much that is newsworthy. Stephen King didn’t come down, unfortunately.”
I ask Helgenberger to comment on After Midnight, an MGM release which featured herself and her spouse, actor Alan Rosenberg. Produced in 1989, the horror anthology was slipped into cold storage – and consequently denied theatrical distribution – during a turnover in the mother company’s regime: “I played a switchboard operator working on the graveyard shift. Alan played a disturbed guy who keeps leaving more and more messages for one of our clients, who happens to be a soap opera star. It gets a little freaky and eventually you find out that he ends up killing her and then he comes after me. It’s scary.”
Critics have observed that Helgenberger is better than the films which have squandered her talent. (Fire Down Below, The Cowboy Way, The Last Time I Committed Suicide). Though reviews for Species were mixed, the movie spawned not only a sexually-parasitic alien but a sequel. Helgenberger reprised her role in Part II: “My character has changed from the first to the second. She’s a lot wiser, a lot more sophisticated. In the first film, I was hired to be a part of the group of people to track the Species. I didn’t have a whole lot to do but occasionally make a contribution as to what would be the next step we take.”
“In Species II, my character is actually hired by the National Security Council to perform a study, and recreate the Sil monster by cloning her via a frozen lab embryo. I was hired to create an environment for her, and then to administer toxins on her to find out what would kill the Species if they were to return. People are clearly giving me a lot more power and a lot more responsibility. Part II is quite a bit different from the first movie.”
She had just applied finishing touches looping scenes from the Species sequel. “It’s a bizarre movie,” said Helgenberger while clearing her throat. “It’s a very unique story with a combination of odd things. There’s a lot of humor in the movie too. We were encouraged to explore the humor as much as possible. Some of the special effects are really graphic.”
Ben Kingsley was Sil’s father figure in the precursor. This time around, Helgenberger wields a maternal influence over Eve, Sil’s biological clone: “After I’ve administered all these toxins to Eve, she asks, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ One of the first lines I have to say to her is, ‘Well, I’ve explained to you because of what happened with the first one, we have to do this. I want you to understand that the reason I took this job was to make sure these experiments were done with a regard for you.’ If they had hired anyone else, they would have just treated her as a lab animal. I’m there to sort of be her protector. There’s that mother-daughter, creator-creation kind of relationship to a certain degree.”
Any significant differences between directors Roger Donaldson (Species) and Peter Medak (Species II)? “I think Peter really wanted to make a kind of ‘scary/gory’ kind of film,” replies Helgenberger. “Roger was more interested in making a science fiction/suspense-type of film. Peter has a more odd sensibility, so some of his casting choices are not typical. The way his scenes progress are probably more unpredictable than Roger’s – not to slight Roger by any means. He’s a good filmmaker, but there is quite a difference. [Co-producer] Frank Mancuso has been a fan of Peter’s for some time and that’s why he hired him to direct.”
As one of the sequel’s central characters, Helgenberger “spends a good portion of my time in the lab. That was a fun set. I loved that set.” The production designer created a three-story barn set within an abandoned General Electric factory in Columbia, Maryland, not far from the Femme Fatale offices. The scale of the sets proved variable, ranging from extravagant to constrictive. “Because of the special effects, it’s the kind of laborious filmmaking that none of us really enjoy,” admits Helgenberger. “It just takes so much time and everything has to work just right. One effect is spent and then you have to load it up again, and an hour goes by. And the smoke and the gunk and the this and the that.”
“Actually, this movie was different from the first one because, on this one, all of the effects were just there. It’s good old fashioned effects that are performed by puppeteers and stuff, so we actually got to see most of it. In fact, the big creature at the end is so scary – I was scared of this thing. It’s huge and it’s operated by a tall man, 6 feet 10 inches. He’s up on cranes. People were helping him operate the damn thing because it was so big. When it stands on its hind legs, it’s about 12 feet tall. For some of it, there was no acting required on my part. It scared the shit out of me.”
The finale of Species, with the set piece of Sil’s subterranean lair and its connective labyrinths of sewers, strikes a decidedly non-sentimental chord: “I thought the sewer set was kind of cool, it was very authentic looking. But then I had to get into this dirty, yucky water in the cave; that set we hated. They pumped so much smoke in there – all day long – it was horrible. Forest [Whitaker] cut his head open on one of those sharp edges and Michael [Madsen] singed his eyebrows because he had to use this flame thrower. Actually, the sequel’s barn set was more fun than the cave. The cave just really, really sucked.”
Recently, Helgenberger did a marketing symposium for Showtime, the cable network that televises first-run episodes of Poltergeist and The Outer Limits. Last fall, Helgenberger appeared in the network’s Gold Coast: “That was based on an Elmore Leonard novel, and it was directed by Peter Weller and starred David Caruso. It was ‘90s noir all the way. I played a woman who was widowed at the beginning of the film. My husband was connected with organized crime, which I wasn’t completely aware of. He states in his will that I have to remain faithful to him or else I lose out on the fortune, the inheritance. He hires bodyguards to keep guys away from me except for David Caruso. He had been hired by my husband to rob a country club and give it a bad name. He comes along looking to get paid off and we get involved. We cook up a scheme to hoodwink these people who are hired to keep me away from a life.”
“But I think the last role I played in, in Showtime’s Thanks of a Grateful Nation, was actually one of the biggest stretches I’ve had to do. It’s a movie about Gulf War Syndrome. I played the sister of a guy who was sent to the Persian Gulf and, because of all the chemicals and toxins that he was exposed to, ended up getting a severe brain tumor and ends up dying. The character was so far from me, she was from Waco, Texas, and a very religious person and very patriotic and a believer in family and America, not at all wise or sophisticated or cynical. Living in a city that’s full of cynicism, trying to just remove myself from that and be just kind of pure and go on faith alone – that was a big stretch for me. That also stars Ted Danson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Steven Weber and Brian Dennehy. The movie was directed by Rod Holcomb.”
Before packing up my gear, I address the Emmy award-winner with one final query: whom would you consider to be your role models? “There are some role models that I continually try to be inspired by,” says Helgenberger. “Gena Rowlands is clearly a role model of mine – and Shirley MacLaine. These are solid actresses who have had long careers. Most recently, a performance that I thought was just tremendous – and I was really inspired by – was Emily Watkins in Breaking the Waves, which I thought was a very good performance and a very disturbing film.”