Exploring New Worlds

Sigourney Weaver’s not the kind of person you’d expect to be throwing around “Oh, man’s” as she sips Pellegrino over lunch. As in, “Oh, man, I just let loose” (talking about her life-changing acting lessons around the time of her stage role in “Death and the Maiden”), or “Oh, man, I never knew what was going to happen next” (about playing Alice in her new film “Map of the World”), and “Oh, man, I don’t want that much chaos” (recalling her former resistance to free-form jazz, which she has since grown to love).

It’s hard to get past that artfully coiffed hair, the sculpted face that’s even more impossibly gorgeous than on-screen, the precise diction, the perfect manners. Those “oh, man’s” are a hint of the real Weaver--the grittier, earthier version that hoofs it everywhere in Manhattan, and pines for a normal life. “I ache for the humdrum, to be at home, hang out,” she says.

“Oh, man” might be just the phrase for Weaver’s current films, which pull her in two different and liberating directions. She dons a Barbie-blond wig and bombshell attire as Tawny Madison in the sci-fi spoof “Galaxy Quest.” And in “Map of the World,” she collapses internally and externally as a farm wife accused of child abuse.

There’s a no-holds-barred quality to her acting these days, whether she’s going for the emotional jugular or over-the-top laughs, unlike her more restrained roles in films such as “The Ice Storm.” She credits her newfound range with a process that began after Roman Polanski introduced her to uber-acting coach Jack Waltzer in Paris in 1993.

“I never really learned anything in drama school. It was all about representation acting than about real acting. Real acting comes from here,” she says, putting her palm on her chest. “Not from here.” She points to her head.

“I used to think that I still had to do that stupid head-figuring-out. I didn’t really do it. I was always rebelling against it. I felt like I developed a new technique for every new role I had. Jack helped me discover the kind of actor that I was. So what that did was to have me fall in love with acting all over again, and the idea of reaching into another life and coming out and telling the story to everybody.

“I don’t even have to think about it now,” adds Weaver, who turned 50 in October but looks at least 15 years younger on screen. “You just do your work ahead of time and you experience it as if it’s happening to you. You just surrender to it.”

Keeping Up With the Comedians

Weaver has done lighter material before--the “Ghostbuster” films, “Working Girl” and “Dave,” but with “Galaxy Quest,” she took her comedic timing to a new level. A parody of “Star Trek” (and “Star Trek” fans), and co-starring Tim Allen, Alan Rickman and Tony Shalhoub, “Quest” has become a surprise word-of-mouth hit.

“I mean, she could keep up with me, what can I tell you,” quips Allen, a professional funny man, by phone. The cast, he admits, was intimidated by the entrenched Weaver image as a dramatic actress.

“What did we all expect? I think we were all buying into Ripley [her character in the ‘Alien’ series],” said Allen. “I definitely was a smartass constantly with her and she really liked it. She doesn’t get into all that Yale stuffiness. She’s marvelous at comedy.” In person, Weaver is unusually focused, guardedly unguarded, and concentrates fiercely on each question. Asked why she chose to play the emotionally unstable and complex wife who ends up in prison and recovers her sanity in “Map of the World,” she tries on several answers for size: the script (by Peter Hedges, from the novel by Jane Hamilton); the director, Scott Elliott (“He’s like Elia Kazan, moment to moment”); the unsentimental approach to the material.

Suddenly, she bursts out. “Wait! This is why I did it,” she says. “I’m the mother of a young child. That’s my reality basically, and I’m never offered a part of a normal womanon the Earth, with kids and a job and a husband. I’m often offered these parts, these very isolated women with severe problems. For me to be offered something so much closer to me was just a joy.”

Weaver’s sense of commitment extends to other aspects of her life.”She’s gone down with me three or four times to Washington, leaving at dawn and working straight through for eight or nine hours, meeting every 45 minutes with senators and members of the House,” says Mike Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, by phone from New York. Weaver is a longtime committee board member.

“She’s just no-nonsense,” says Posner. “There’s never a sense of entitlement that she has to be treated differently. She just fights the good fight.” Human-rights abuses is one of her fervent personal causes stemming from her experience in the Philippines working on the 1983 film “The Year of Living Dangerously.”

Weaver chooses to live in New York for several reasons. It’s a respite from Hollywood industry chatter (“I just don’t want to be talking about show business all the time”), but there’s also the melting-pot aspect and the competitiveness.

“Everyone here thinks that what they are doing is so important, which I love about New York,” she says. She chooses a work tempo so that she can have a private life. “I’ve tried to be away as little as I can. After “Alien: Resurrection” [1997], I was here for, like, four months, and even though my husband and daughter came back and forth with me a lot, there is no substitute to being at home,” she says. “Boy, it’s great to be at home, somebody asks you to dinner, you can actually go, have them back.”

Weaver spends as much time with her 9-year-old daughter as she can. “It goes by so quickly,” she says. “I just want to take her to school and just be sort of one of the class moms. Hang out with my daughter.

“I love ‘Sponge Bob Square Pants’ [an animated show on Nickelodeon]. The cartoons are so good. So out there.”

Playing a parent in emotional turmoil seemed natural to Weaver. “Nervous breakdowns don’t seem that far away from people, especially working parents. I think people are overtaxed emotionally and there is a lot of escape into different kinds of entertainment and activities. I think that we are people right now who aren’t really at rest with themselves.

“There is a lot of hunger and reaching for balance. I’ve certainly felt stressed out as a person many times. I think a nervous breakdown is always . . . it’s like, sitting over there,” she laughs, nodding with her head to the next chair at the table. “Or over there,” pointing to the chair next to it.

She compares playing Alice in “Map” to listening to jazz, a type of music that used to frighten her. Now, she says, she loves its anarchy.

“Jazz used to intimidate me because when it went outside, it would be like, ‘Man, I don’t want that much chaos.’ Now, when we go to see people play, that’s the best kind of work, because it’s all just in the moment. It’s so out there, you don’t need to do anything but relax totally and be there, and be picked up by whatever that is and thrown around.

“Playing Alice was like that. I never knew what was going to happen. I was, like, flying.”