A Dressy Occasion

Butch had Sundance, Felix had Oscar, Thelma had Louise. The “buddy” is a time-honored film staple, but it gets a new twist in Joel Schumacher’s ‘Flawless”--and in this case, it’s something of a drag.

Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in “Flawless” as a female impersonator who goes by the nom de femme of Busty Rusty. Rusty’s neighbor in a rat-infested New York City residence hotel is conservative, hostile, retired security guard Robert De Niro, who has suffered a stroke. In the kind of logic that only exists in movies, he gets speech therapy in the form of singing lessons from Hoffman.

Over the course of the film, which opened Wednesday, the ice thaws between this decidedly odd couple, but that’s not the real “buddy” relationship at work here. Rusty’s closest pals are a trio of fellow drag queens, Ivana, Cha-Cha and Amazing Grace, and they form a unique kind of support group. Pals offstage and on, they provide emotional ballast for Hoffman’s talented but troubled character, and protect each other when they get caught up in a drug deal gone bad.

Men in drag is nothing new in film: think Cary Grant in “I Was a Male War Bride” (1949), Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in “Some Like It Hot” (1959) or Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie” (1982). More recently, Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo played drag queens in 1995’s “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar,” and a year before, Terence Stamp sashayed his way across the Australian outback in “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

There might be some debate as to who looked best in fishnets and false eyelashes (one hastily conducted, unscientific poll placed Leguizamo in the winner’s circle), but there was never any question that these actors were taking a once-in-a-lifetime shot at walking a mile in someone else’s spiked heels.

That’s not the case for Rusty’s three “Flawless” sidekicks, two of whom, Scott Allen Cooper (Ivana) and Nashom Benjamin (Amazing Grace) are in real life professional drag queens. The third, Wilson Jermaine Heredia (Cha-Cha), won a Tony award for his portrayal of ill-fated drag queen Angel in the Broadway musical “Rent.”

Heredia was impressed with the script’s depiction of the female impersonators. “For once, the drag queens are not the court jesters.”

Cooper shares that sentiment. “I felt that if this was going to be another spoof on drag or gay life, I didn’t want to be involved,” he said by phone from his home in New Jersey. “But on the set, there was never the sense of, ‘Those are the actors and those are the drag performers.’ We were cast in roles.”

Cooper and his “Flawless” cohorts are undeniably the ones who provide the drama’s comic relief, but, he pointed out, “when the three of us walked into a scene, it wasn’t like, ‘Here come the queens, let’s laugh at them.’ ”

Cooper pointed out that “it’s not just a good-time-Charlie thing going on” among the drag queens in “Flawless. “We all really care for one another. I think the fact that the three of us just barge into Rusty’s apartment without knocking sets up the fact that there’s more going on between us. And the first time we find De Niro there, it’s kind of a jolt, because he’d been cursing us from his place, and now here’s the man in our friend’s home. In a lot of ways, that’s a betrayal, but we go along with it for Rusty’s sake.”

For inspiration, Cooper turned to another famous trio. “I looked at the three of us like the Three Musketeers, going through life and its adventures together. They’ve joined forces and become their own support system. It’s an unfortunate truth, but many gay people are abandoned by their families, and I think the friendships you make then become a version of a family. The script doesn’t say anything about anyone’s family, but I think that’s one of the things going on. Also, let’s face it, these guys can be kind of obnoxious--I got the feeling that nobody else would tolerate us except for the three of us.”

All three credit director Schumacher, who also wrote the “Flawless” script, with creating an on-set environment that fostered credibility along with creativity. “From the first day on, Joel put us at ease,” recalled Benjamin by phone from New York. “He encouraged us to make whatever changes in the characters we thought would make them more real. He respects drag, and knows that it’s an art form and not just some freak in a dress.”

Benjamin appeared in the 1992 independent film “Swoon,” but “Flawless” represents the film debuts of Cooper and Heredia. When he first read the script, Heredia noticed that his character “was written with a Spanish accent, and to me it would have been insulting to play Cha-Cha as a Spanish drag queen--you know the type: not very smart, can’t speak the language very well and on top of that he’s a drag queen.

“That would be a lot of strikes against the character that people wouldn’t be able to relate to at all. I asked Joel if I had to do it, and he told me, ‘Do anything you want, the character is yours.’ ”

To make the character of Rusty his own, Hoffman visited a number of drag clubs as research. Cooper and Benjamin work regularly in drag--Benjamin serves as MC for a weekly show at a Manhattan bar, Cooper has a steady Thursday-night gig over the bridge in Jersey--but for both this is a profession, not a personal lifestyle. Both are gay, but neither lives as a woman when not working.

“In our real lives, we would never wear makeup during the day,” pointed out Benjamin, who is now concentrating on a music career and recently cut his first single for an independent label in New York.

As for Cooper, “I don’t think of myself so much as a female impersonator as much as I think of myself as an entertainer,” he said, describing himself as a “jeans-and-T-shirt kind of guy” in his day-to-day life. Scrubs and a T-shirt might be more accurate: In addition to his career as a performer, Cooper is a registered nurse and works regularly at the St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J. “Nursing puts a lot of things into perspective,” he said. “Everything you do as a performer is about you, and everything you do as a nurse is to benefit somebody else. Going back and forth between the two is sometimes tricky, but I think I’ve found a good balance.”

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As for Heredia, he went on to star again as Angel in the London production of “Rent.” There, in very un-Angel-like fashion, he met and fell in love with actress Kathryn Elizabeth, whom he married upon his return to the States. Currently reprising the role of Angel on Broadway, Heredia was admittedly reluctant to don women’s clothes again when he first heard about “Flawless.”

“It took a bit of thought,” he said. “But how can you beat Joel Schumacher calling you up and offering you a part in his film?”

The costumes in “Flawless” were designed by Daniel Orlandi, but input from the actors was welcome, given their expertise in the area. “They would ask us, ‘Would you wear this?’ or ‘How would you do this?’ ” noted Benjamin.

And handing off the hair spray and makeup wand to someone else was something of a relief. “When you’re a female impersonator, you are your own makeup artist and your own hairdresser,” Cooper said. “You’re responsible for everything, so it was really great to be able to give up that control to other people who knew what they were doing.” While the world of the drag queen isn’t all big wigs and pancake makeup, its larger-than-life reputation sometimes extends offstage as well as on. “There are no supporting roles in female impersonation,” Cooper remarked. “Ninety-nine percent of the time you’re up there alone. It’s easy to get caught up in it and start to believe that you’re the queen of some small country.”

However, he added wryly, “that’s the time to step back and take a realistic look at yourself. You’re a man in woman’s clothing. This is how you make your living, and if you’re lucky, people want to see it and you get paid to do it.”

Which sounds like a job with pitfalls similar to many others with less outrageous uniforms. And it is. “Drag queens are regular people, just like everyone else,” asserted Benjamin, Heredia put it another way. “You can’t judge a book by its cover, and you can’t judge a man by his pants.” Or lack thereof.