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Articles Source / Date: Entertainment Weekly May 3 1996 Title / Page(s): "The 'truth' about stardom: Garolfalo & Thurman - different as cats & dogs" by Lisa Schwarzbaum pp 13-15 WHAT DO YOU DO when you're an actress filming a scene in which you are required to discuss the probing of a small tortoise's private parts and there's a reporter on the set? Do you (A) throw yourself down on a prop bed during a break, invite the reporter to lounge with you, and chat volubly about the ludicrousness of moviemaking? Or do you (B) eschew an interview, commune with your on-call acting coach, and eventually send the reporter out of the room because probing a tortoise's private parts is deemed too delicate for foreign eyes? If you chose A, you're Janeane Garofalo. If B, Uma Thurman. And this story is not so much about the truth about tortoises as it is about The Truth About Cats & Dogs, a romantic comedy starring Garofalo, Thurman, and British actor Ben Chaplin. More specifically, this story is about different ways of being a movie star. The tortoise, though, is a crucial prop. Cats & Dogs is about a Los Angeles veterinarian named Abby (Garofalo) who is short, funny, smart, and successful--she hosts a popular call-in radio show--but so insecure about her looks that when she's asked out by a charming caller (Chaplin), she gets her friend Noelle (Thurman) to appear, Cyrano de Bergerac-style, in her stead. The tortoise scene takes place when Noelle as Abby meets a little girl whose pet is sick. When the reptile refuses to stick its head out, the real Abby instructs the faux Abby on the fine art of coaxing. No biggie. Just a big difference in styles. While shots are lit and Humane Society personnel assembled, Garofalo, 31, opens up, divulging that the stress of being scrutinized every day had led to teeth grinding. "There are a lot of eyes watching the dailies. This has been one of the more major learning experiences for me--I've had to get a bite plate!" To unwind, she smokes cigarettes and shadowboxes each night. "I'm not cute," she says. "To me, cute doesn't equal comedy." Meanwhile, Thurman, 25, withdraws to a private corner, where her personal hair-and-makeup assistant attends to her angelic blond tresses and forest-creature eyes. She holds her cellular phone in one hand and a pack of Marlboros in the other while she looks over playbacks of her scenes. She retreats. How does a director coordinate the work of two such different cats? "Janeane and Uma are probably as different as the two in the movie," says Michael Lehmann, a kind and gentle man who also directed Heathers, Hudson Hawk, and Airheads. "Janeane, who comes from stand-up comedy, thrives in a situation where spontaneity is the order of the day. She likes to play a scene a little looser. Uma, who's extremely studied and prepared and really goes by the text, likes to know where we're going before we start. So you just pull your hair out and hope for the best." The reporter meets Chaplin, 26--who is about to get mighty known in America--in a hotel suite in New York. "Janeane's never carried a film before, so she found it very difficult," he says in his yoicksy London accent, looking rumpled and friendly and cute as a pint of beer. "It's a miserable thing to have a huge lead--you just think you're bad." The movie's tone, Chaplin says, was being closely monitored by Twentieth Century Fox, which was intent on retaining a PG-13 rating and an upbeat feeling. "There were people who didn't have any faith in what we were doing," he goes on, "so she had that against her, too. And she did it brilliantly. She has keen instincts." Searching for the truth about the Day of the Tortoise, the investigation shifts back to Lehmann: "It was a simple comic scene, but Uma wanted to make sure she did it right," he recalls. "And also, it was really hard to do a scene with a turtle. It took an hour and a half to get one stupid shot, because the tortoise wouldn't do what it was supposed to. The tortoise wrangler was saying `Hey, this thing's got a brain the size of a BB. What do you expect?' " Garofalo swears that Thurman said "she felt that a reporter's-eye view of [the turtle scene] would be very bad, and you would say, `If this is any indication, this is going to be an awful movie.' You know? `If this is what I'm seeing--Uma Thurman Sticks Her Finger in a Turtle's A--'--that would make the movie as a whole look bad." The reporter can vouch that the scene is adorable. Garofalo goes on: "I thought Uma was very nice. She actually got me gifts and everything. She's a superstar, I guess, and all that that entails, but she's a very decent person. You could talk about anything with her." Then she bitches freely and happily: "The movie was torture to do. When you're a principal character, there are way too many critics armchair-quarter-backing you." She couldn't stand the constant fussing with her hair. "I want to scream, `What could have moved in the past three seconds?!' " And Garofalo grinds her teeth with embarrassment at the film's most surprising--and erotic--segment, an impromptu phone date with Chaplin that leads to hot phone sex. Garofalo's thespian secret? "How I did it was, I got hammered first," she says. "I am not comfortable with sexuality as a person, let alone touching myself in front of Local 357, you know what I mean?" Then she disses her own swell looks: "When I was looping, I saw footage and I could not look more--not that this is a slam against my mom, God bless her, but it's official: I have become my mother." The reporter does not get near Thurman, who is unavailable for an interview. One can observe Uma's World from behind glass, but one can't just knock back a soda with the sylphy young star. So instead, the reporter digs deeper and learns something that might have changed the course of this entire story: It turns out one doesn't have to touch a tortoise there, after all, to get its attention. "Usually you touch the tortoise's back leg pocket or the bottom of its foot," says John Behler, curator of reptiles at the Wildlife Conservation Society. "That gets the attention to the tortoise's back end. And if the tortoise is trying to protect the back end of its shell, then the front end is more exposed, and then the veterinarian can grab the beak." Lesson learned: In the movie-star animal kingdom, the world is divided between actors who protect their shell and those who stick their neck out.