By Christina Radish
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Nicollette Sheridan at the People's Choice Awards held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Calif. on January 10, 2006. |
In the New Line Cinema release Code Name: The Cleaner, an amnesiac janitor, who is duped into thinking he is an undercover agent, is subconsciously carrying a secret that can link the FBI with an arms scandal. Jake (Cedric the Entertainer) is a seemingly regular guy who wakes up in a hotel room with a bump on his head, next to a dead body and a briefcase containing $250,000 in cash. As if that wasn’t enough of a predicament, Jake can’t remember how he got there or who he is.
When the beautiful and mysterious Diane (Nicollette Sheridan) shows up on the scene and claims to be Jake’s wife, taking him to a magnificent mansion that she says belongs to Jake, he discovers that she is trying to drug him for information. Upon escaping, Jake seeks refuge in a local diner, only to run into Gina (Lucy Liu), a waitress who claims to be his girlfriend. She tells him that, in reality, he’s a maintenance worker for a video game manufacturer. As Jake becomes convinced he is really an undercover agent for the CIA -- known as The Cleaner -- he sets out to prove it.
Taking on the role of the blond bombshell pretending to be Jake’s wife, Desperate Housewives star Nicollette Sheridan says that she wanted to be a part of the project to have the opportunity to work with comedian Cedric the Entertainer. “The producers sent me the script and, when I read it and found out that Cedric was attached, naturally, it was a shoe-in,” she tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “Everything I’ve ever seen him in, I’ve found him to be quite brilliant. We did a read-through at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and, when Cedric’s and my scenes came up, we just started riffing and playing and ad-libbing. There was a chemistry that I felt could really work, and it ended up being as much fun as I knew it was going to be.”
{quote_top}There is one particular scene in the film where the 43-year-old Sheridan has to dance around in her underwear. With a body that would put most teenagers to shame, the former Knott’s Landing star admits to being petrified about filming that particular portion of the film.
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Nicollette Sheridan with her fiance Michael Bolton at the SAG Awards held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Calif. on January 29, 2006. |
“Diane, my character, is a very straight-laced, hard-core, head of security bad-ass, so she had to think on her feet, in order to try and get this information out of Jake. So, she comes up with this dance, and tries to seduce him into jogging his memory since, supposedly, that would get him to remember something. Being in character, as well as exposing oneself, as big as a Cadillac on the screen, was a little intimidating. It’s easier when it’s a small box, even though TV screens are getting quite large these days.”
“It’s horrible, having to drop one’s robe and be exposed in your knickers in front of Cedric and a crew of people. But, Cedric was extremely supportive. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do once I turned on that music and had to dance over to that bed, trying to extract information out of the amnesiac, so it was probably about 20 takes of the craziest dances. And, Cedric can move like nobody else. He’s a brother who knows how to dance. I was feeling extremely white after seeing him bust some moves. I would do my thing, and then he’d get up and start imitating what I was doing. We had some pretty wild dances, but I think they settled on a tame one.”
Another very memorable moment in the film is a knock-down, drag-out fight between Sheridan and Charlie’s Angels star Lucy Liu. “Both of us have a little foundation in martial arts, so we got together with a stunt coordinator and choreographed the fight. We tried to choreograph it in a way that looked very authentic and tough. People had been calling it a cat fight, which we just didn’t like. It’s not a hair-pulling, slapping, nail-breaking fight. It was combinations of roundhouses, throwing punches and dodging ax kicks. It was the real deal.”
{quote_middle}Back with a very strong third season, Desperate Housewives is going strong and Sheridan says that the cast is very pleased with how the show is turning out this year. “[Show creator] Marc Cherry has been getting back to what made the show work the first season which, to me, was the aspect of how politically incorrect it was and how it just pushed boundaries, with the bizarre situations that people think they would love to behave a certain way in, but if they did, they’d probably get arrested. So, it’s back on track and there’s a new energy from everybody. There are new writers and everyone is inspired again.”
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Desperate Housewives co-stars (left to right) Marcia Cross, Nicollette Sheridan, Felicity Huffman and Eva Longoria at the Emmy Awards held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Calif. on September 18, 2005. |
Working on a show that is so secretive about storylines that the cast usually only gets the script for the next episode the night before they have to start shooting, Sheridan feels lucky that Cherry is so open to input that he will listen to everyone’s ideas for their characters. “You can walk into his office and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t quite working. I don’t think we’re being true to the character by making that choice. How would you feel about this?’ He will love some of it, and he will argue his thoughts on other parts. If I see something that doesn’t resonate, I will call him, and he always takes my calls. He says, `I know if you’re calling, then there’s something I should be looking at.’”
With all the success that Sheridan has experienced from Desperate Housewives, the movie offers are being sent her way. However, because her time is so limited, she says that she has to be very selective about how much work she does.
“When I did The Cleaner, I was literally flying from set to set, from Wisteria Lane to Vancouver, and I didn’t have a day off for a couple of months. The adrenalin gets you through that, especially when you’re enjoying yourself. It doesn’t hit you hard until it ends. Then, I need a day off.”
