Patrick Swayze: 20Q

As the Rolling Stones warned us years ago, you can't always get what you want: Patrick Swayze doesn't fancy being a Hollywood heartthrob, but the women of America have spoken. After leaving the girls breathless in Dirty Dancing and heartbroken in Ghost, Swayze finds himself in a corner. Although he doesn't look it, the baby-faced actor is almost 40 and has really had it, thank you, with playing hunks with hearts of gold. To make that crystal clear, Swayze tackled the role of an alcoholic, disillusioned doctor in his latest film, City of Joy. Swayze knows he's gambling with his career, and all his chips are on the table.

Lawrence Linderman interviewed Swayze at the five-acre ranch Swayze and his wife, dancer Lisa Niemi, own just north of Los Angeles. Linderman reports: "This won't come as a surprise: Patrick Swayze is almost overwhelmingly emotional. He laughs, he shouts and, yes, he cries. What surprised me most, however, was the realization that the guy is a classic overachiever. Swayze has a compulsion to win—and win big—at everything he attempts. So maybe he will, indeed, show he belongs in the same league with the actors he admires. If he doesn't, it won't be for lack of trying."

 

Q1

“ The further along I've come, the more I've discovered that we have no emotional limits. ”

PLAYBOY: Last summer, People magazine proclaimed you the sexiest man alive, a title previously bestowed on you by Us magazine. How comfortable is it for you to be hunk of the year?
SWAYZE: It's good for the career, but it's not good for the head, because if you believe it for one second, you're a dead man. I want to make a mark as an actor. I'd like to think that my career isn't about things like swinging my ass in Dirty Dancing. I'm looking for the spiritual. How far can it take me? How far can I go? What are our emotional limits? The further along I've come, the more I've discovered that we have no emotional limits. The biggest thing I've learned is that I have to keep studying, because there are always greater levels of trust to find within the character, within the scene and within myself as an actor. Hollywood is the most self-indulgent place on earth, and if you allow yourself to get sucked into that life, you start doing self-indulgent movies—and then, all of a sudden, those movies don't work. Unless the film maker has some kind of generous quality that brings people in, it's always going to be intellectual masturbation.

 

Q2

PLAYBOY: Do you think you've steered clear of self-indulgent movies?
SWAYZE: Well, in the beginning, you take what you can get. If a character allows you to shine, you do it. My first movie was Skatetown, U.S.A. and I saw it as an opportunity to get my foot in the door. The movie was destroyed by critics—no surprise there—but Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times went crazy about me in his review. He started it off by writing—and I've never forgotten it—"Not since Valentine did his tango in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse has there been such a confident display of male sexuality. Patrick Swayze sizzles."

Q3

PLAYBOY: You grew up in Houston. What advantages and burdens come with being a Texan?
SWAYZE: I spent so many years being competitive that I hate it now. I don't watch gladiator sports like football anymore and I'm no longer into "kill the other guy." I got out of that part of the Texas mentality.

In my youth, I was filled with a self-deprecating rage. From kindergarten until after I started high school, I was always teased by other kids about being different. My father was a gentle cowboy from a small town in the panhandle who fell in love with an intensely talented big-city girl from Houston. My mother was a choreographer—still is—who had her own ballet company. Patsy Swayze was the majordomo of dance and theater in Houston. She was the lady you called if you wanted to put on a show. Mom was a major, major force in the city's artistic life.

 

Q4

PLAYBOY: Were you teased because of what your mother did?
SWAYZE: No, it was about what I did, which was dancing and playing the violin. There were always groups of kids whispering about me in a way that ate my insides alive. The peer pressure was strange and that's largely where the early rage came from, trying to figure out who I was. When I got to junior high, some of the older guys started railing me out: "Whaddya got in your bag, Swayze? You got your ballet shoes in there? Is that a tiny guitar you're carrying or is that a violin? Girls play the violin." I probably averaged a fight a week.

They didn't understand how much anger was running through my system, and they definitely didn't know that I had been training in the martial arts. My mother's performing-arts school was in a building that also housed a martial-arts academy and Mom worked out a deal: In return for all the martial-arts students studying ballet with her for flexibility and control, her students could study martial arts. I started there with judo, and after that I studied many different disciplines—aikido, tae kwon do, shotokan, isshin-ryu, kenpo and kung fu. The purpose wasn't to learn how to kick people's faces in, though I got very good at it. Many times I would hit that beautiful, blissful place of connecting with my ki—my center—at the expense of someone else's well-being. Everything seemed to be in slow motion when I was fighting, and it became effortless to tear a guy apart and watch his face distort as I split his lip open and broke his nose. Eventually, that took the chip off my shoulder because I hated doing that to another human being.

Mind you, it's a lesson I had to learn quite a few times before I said, "Enough. I will never mess up another guy's face unless my survival is at stake and I have no other choice. It's wrong."