Unlike most Hollywood stars who are looking for exposure, Téa Leoni is looking for a safe haven. With daughter West about to turn six, son Kyd in preschool, husband David Duchovny turning into a director and her own acting career just starting up again after a hiatus, her main concern isn't landing bit roles but finding a place other than California for the family to live.
"I don't understand the weather there, and the lighting is s**t. I've gotta get [the children] out of there," she says with the heightened impatience of an actress on a mission. "Malibu is not the spot for them."
And yet, as much as she loves New York City, where both she and Duchovny grew up, she's not sure that's the right choice either. "I don't want to play that roulette with my kids," she says while staring out a window into the beautiful sunshine of a Manhattan spring day as traffic blares below. She kicks her aqua cowboy boots up on a windowsill and leans back, causing a silver-dollar-sized cameo tattoo of Snow White to peek out between the top of her jeans and her blue wool sweater.
Judging by Duchovny's new semiautobiographical film, House of D, which is just now hitting theaters even though it was finished two years ago, the city can be a dangerous and wonderful place to grow up in. Duchovny paints a romanticized picture of the West Village in the 1970s, even though tumultuous things are going on with the characters. And smack in the middle of the residential neighborhood is a women's house of detention ‑- hence the title ‑- where the inmates can hang through the bars and talk to people on the street. (Read more about the film in Beth Pinsker's review.)
From the start of that project, Leoni's role was more supporting than starring. She stayed in the kitchen of their Malibu home and waited while Duchovny drilled through page after page in the office over the garage. He'd come back in every 20 minutes or so with more for her to read. "I fed him," she says.
On the set, her job was mostly to keep the kids busy while David directed. She says her instincts made her want to help out as much as possible while making the low-budget independent film, which also stars Robin Williams and his daughter, Zelda. "I would have held lights or done whatever," she says. In the end, she just ended up doing what she does best: acting. She plays the widowed mother of a 12-year-old boy (Anton Yelchin) who's struggling to grow up. It's a meaty but small role, although it was still enough to drive her crazy. "I didn't want to be in it," says Leoni, who suffers from stage fright. "I didn't want to be the wife who clearly slept with him for the role. But it was irresistible to me."
For Duchovny, it was the role reversal that appealed to him. "It was a pleasure to have her do what I said," he deadpans.
He says he'll do the same for her one day if she decides to direct, but for now Leoni has no plans to step behind the camera. "I wish I were a writer," she says. "I have script ideas, but I don't want to write. It's been suggested that I produce, but I can't think of anything I'd be interested in less."
But she does realize how things go in the film business: When you reach a certain age ‑- like 39, for instance ‑- you have to take control or the parts disappear. "I've stumbled into roles where I'm old enough to play the mother now," she says, and she's been happy with the results, especially in the Adam Sandler comedy Spanglish, in which she got to play a selfish Malibu mom. She's even playing a mom in her next film, the comedy remake Fun with Dick and Jane with Jim Carrey. It's far better, she says, "than being that single white chick dragged around by her hair on every page of a script."
What she's thinking of most these days, along with some kind of familial move, is getting more involved with UNICEF, which her grandmother Helenka Pantaleoni helped to found. "She had been working for the Red Cross during World War II," Téa says, "and she knew somebody who was working at the UN when they were pulling that together. They decided what the world needed most was emergency children's relief."
Leoni's father now serves on the board of directors, and Téa says he's grooming her to take over that role someday. They went on a field visit to Honduras last summer that inspired her. While some of the children she met had seen Jurassic Park III and called her "chick-a-dino," most of them were simply grateful to the organization for clean water.
"In some places the word for clean water is 'UNICEF,'" she says. "It's amazing to me that kids collect all these boxes of pennies, and 50 years later we're in 146 countries. That's a very big deal. When things happen, we're already there and know how things operate and how to help."
She's trying to find a way now to pass on the spirit of her grandmother ‑- who was also a Broadway singer, a silent film star and a good pal of Eleanor Roosevelt ‑- to her daughter. "She was a really amazing woman," says Leoni, who shortened her name when she started acting after college. "She could really rally people."
