Eric Stoltz Wouldn't Hurt a Fly

When we last left The Fly, scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) has mistakenly mixed his genes with those of a housefly and slowly transformed into a grotesque mutant, until he was mercifully blown to pieces by his lover, Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis). But Veronica was left with a frightening situation: She was pregnant and didn't know if the child was the son of Seth or the son of a fly.

We'll find out the answer to this and other gruesome questions this month in The Fly II. And who better to play a boy/fly than the 26- year old master of metamorphosis, Eric Stoltz? The guy looks completely different in each of his films. Okay, four hours' worth of makeup made him unrecognizable as the deformed boy in Mask; but his sensitive teen in Some Kind of Wonderful bore no resemblence to his bob-haired poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in Haunted Summer or his hollow cheeked mailman in Manifesto.

There's just one problem: Stoltz says the entire horror film genre tends to, well, scare the hell out of him. "I spent a lot of time screaming while I was making this movie," he says. He had the same reaction when he watched The Fly. "My date couldn't tear her eyes from the screen-- while I was cowering in her shoulder." Why do a film that will give you nightmares? "I'm interested in doing movies I wouldn't normally be interested in doing," he says. "That's an interesting quote isn't it?"

Stoltz is an interesting guy-- at least he seems to be. He looks every bit the benign all-American kid, but he's skilled in dancing around questions: He laughs off many, won't answer others. When he does, his responses tend to be rather enigmatic. Ask him how he plans to pull off his transformation into a fly, and Stoltz explains that he works with "obscure details." For instance, to capture the madness of Shelley, "I played him with dirty feet." Huh? "I read that when he escaped from England that spring, it was raining and muddy. So I played him with dirty feet." One can only guess what he picked up on to play a fly.

No one knows what to expect from the sequel--not even Stoltz. "This movie could turn out to be campy or a true horror film," he says. What's he hoping for? "A musical," he quips. "Really, it's out of my hands. I get no great satisfaction seeing a film that I've done. I was there. That's yesterday's newspaper. I try not to look back." Not back--but maybe over his shoulder.

-- Connie Passalacqua

Mademoiselle, February 1989