Wicked Smaht

Is there friggin’ anything Matt Damon can’t do? As the action hero/leading man/activist/Oscar-winning screenwriter/sitcom revelation/Internet meme finally makes the transition to Serious Director, we’re about to find out

by Amy Wallace

Originally published in GQ, January 2012

I’m ducking Matt Damon. We’re supposed to meet at the Central Park Zoo ticket booth precisely at noon, but I’m not there. I’m thirty feet away, standing behind a huge oak tree, keeping watch.

Cameron Crowe, the director, has urged me to try to get a glimpse of the 41-year-old actor when he doesn’t know I’m there. “Matt’s fans relate to him as an older brother or a member of the family. And that’s how he relates to them,” Crowe says, recalling how during the shoot of their new movie, We Bought a Zoo, he liked to do reconnaissance on Damon as he signed autographs and interacted with his public.

The Boston native, who now calls New York home, can be reticent in interviews, reluctant to reveal too much or get too personal. I want to observe him in his natural habitat, and I imagine that my stealth will be rewarded with the kind of unguarded moment that can only be viewed in the wild. As minutes pass, however, and I don’t spot him anywhere, a thought looms: This is Jason Bourne I’m hunting—the master of evasion. What if Matt Damon is ducking me?

Stepping into the open, I sort of wave my notebook like a journalistic homing beacon, and suddenly there he is, all smiles. “Hi, I’m Matt,” he says, extending a hand. He’s in jeans, a gray waffle-y long-sleeve T-shirt, and what look to be brand-new black Puma sneakers. He has a knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows, which makes it easy to notice that his hat and his eyes are exactly the same blue. He’s taller than I thought he’d be and Click to continue »

Coke, Hookers, Hospital, Repeat

Charlie Sheen talks to Amy Wallace about his latest bender, his true feelings about sobriety and ‘Apocalypse Now,’ and the cyclical insanity of his crazy-ass life

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in GQ April 2011

Five days ago, we closed a profile built around an interview with Charlie Sheen that will appear in the April issue of GQ. Since then, Sheen has continued doing what the article describes—texting and emailing the media (on Friday, he sent images of his new “Death from Above” tattoo to Entertainment Tonight) and calling in live to radio shows.

But Sheen also did something new: lobbed insults at his employers, specifically Chuck Lorre, the co-creator of Two and a Half Men, the top-rated sitcom on which Sheen stars. In a choice of words many saw as anti-Semitic, the actor referred to Lorre, who was born Charles Levine, as “Chaim Levine”—a name that Lorre himself has sometimes used. Sheen also called his hit show a “puke fest that everybody worships” and called the bosses who’d urged him to clean up his act “AA Nazis” and “blatant hypocrites.” Sheen’s spewing of vitriol appears to have pushed CBS and Warner Bros. Television to act. In a joint statement, the two companies suspended production of Two and a Half Men for the season, leaving at least 200 people out of work and canceling four planned episodes.

While there has been no word yet about whether the show will be canceled for good, Sheen himself has been voluble—if contradictory—on the topic. One minute, the 45- year-old actor has said he plans to show up to work even though the show’s sets are shut down (“I’m going back to work,” he texted Good Morning America from an island in the Bahamas, where he was vacationing with three women—a model, one of his ex-wives, and a porn star—on Thursday). The next minute, he has said that he can’t imagine working with the “turds” who run the show ever again. “Can you imagine going back… with those knuckleheads?” he told Pat O’Brien later that same day. “It would go bad quickly… We’re pretty much done.” Whatever his plan, Sheen seems determined to engage his corporate overlords in full-scale combat. On Friday, in a Fox Sports Radio interview with Pat O’Brien, he suggested CBS and Warners were in “absolute breach” and appeared to be gearing up for a legal battle. “We are at war,” he said. “It’s about to get really gnarly.”

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“I Heard the Shots and Ran Toward the Sound”

That’s Daniel Hernandez talking, the 21-year-old intern who helped save Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s life. Here, Hernandez and two other heroes of the Arizona massacre—one of the men who tackled the gunman and the woman who prevented him from reloading—tell Amy Wallace their gripping stories of that dark and sunny Saturday

by Amy Wallace

Originally ran in GQ, March 2011

Daniel Hernandez Jr. (21, junior at the University of Arizona, intern for Representative Giffords): I had thought I wanted to be a physician. Then I volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. I’ve always been drawn to strong women. They face a double standard, and it’s always been a lot harder for them to get half as far, even though they’re working twice as hard. The day after Hillary lost the primary, I met Gabby. She had been the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona state senate. I had an interaction with her at an event, and she just left the biggest impression. After that, my plans changed. It wasn’t that I didn’t like medicine. I just thought I would be able to serve more people if I went into public service.

My internship was supposed to start on January 12, when school begins, but I’d volunteered to start early, because between semesters the office is short-staffed. I’ve known Gabby for years—I’d worked on her campaigns since I met her in June 2008. She’s the kindest, warmest individual you will ever meet. “I don’t do handshakes, honey. I do hugs,” she always says.

Patricia Maisch (61, co-owner with her husband, John, of Oro Valley Heating & Cooling): I was there to thank Gabrielle for her work over the last several years. So much is reported about how the stimulus package didn’t work, but for our small business, it was incredible. There was a $1,500 federal tax credit if you upgraded your heating-and-cooling system, and we had our best year ever in 2009. I went there to tell her I hoped she would run again in 2012.

Bill Badger (74, retired army colonel): I’d never met her, but the congresswoman and I had communicated back and forth on e-mail. Her husband is a captain in the navy, which is equivalent to a colonel in the army. So she’s a military spouse, and my wife is a military spouse. Obamacare was one of the issues I e-mailed her about, especially military medical benefits for life. She was exceptionally good at responding. If I had a question, she’d get me an answer. I’m a Republican and she’s a Democrat, but she works all the way from the right to the left. I truly admire her.

Hernandez: I had gotten up at seven forty-five that day, like I usually do. Gabe Zimmerman, Gabby’s community-outreach director, had organized the 10 a.m. “Congress on Your Corner” event, and he asked me to be at the Safeway at the corner of Ina and North Oracle by 9 a.m. to help with setup. When people started arriving, Click to continue »

For years, Chris Albrecht was unstoppable. He was the man who made HBO, the programming genius who brought us The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire and more, revolutionizing the way we watch, and revere, TV. Then, one night in Vegas, he seemed to throw it all away: He roughed up his girlfriend outside the MGM Grand, and his life exploded in a spectacular blaze of shame. Now, more than three years later, he talks for the first time about what happened that night—oh, and how he plans to turn Starz into the next HBO

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in GQ, November 2010

“How much T&A do you want in your pay TV?” Chris Albrecht asks. We’re sitting in the back of a Dublin taxi on our way to dinner, which is good, he says, because he’s famished. “I need food,” he proclaims. “And some Irish wine.” He also needs an answer to his question. Since taking over as CEO of Starz, the premium cable channel, the 58-year-old executive has been wrestling with how explicit it needs to be to compete. Arriving in Ireland today from Los Angeles, he’s spent the past few hours reviewing marketing hooks for a new Starz show. “There Are No Rules in This House” is one slogan under consideration to hype Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, an upcoming prequel to Starz’s gory, sexy hit Spartacus: Blood and Sand. “How Far Will They Go?” is another. Now Albrecht is wondering: How far should Starz go?

Dressed in jeans, a sky blue dress shirt, and a beloved Dolce & Gabbana leather jacket his two daughters gave him a decade ago, Albrecht says he liked the simplicity of the campaign for Blood and Sand that aired in January, right after he took the helm: a well-muscled stud, sword in hand, ready for action. “Whether or not you want to see that, you get it,” Albrecht says. But right now, after flying all day and working all afternoon, he’s beat. Smiling broadly, he announces, “I want a drink.”

He’s already had one. Three taster bottles of Irish whiskey were waiting for him in his Four Seasons suite when he checked in, and he says he sampled them all. Powers was his favorite, he says, leaning forward to ask if the cabbie agrees. The driver demurs—he’s a Jameson’s man. “Jameson’s was my second choice,” Albrecht replies. As for Bushmills, he adds, it didn’t measure up.

It’s been three and a half years since Albrecht—then HBO’s chairman and CEO—was arrested near a Las Vegas valet stand for choking his then girlfriend. Police said he smelled of alcohol, was unsteady on his feet, and slurred his speech. Albrecht soon sent an e-mail to HBO employees apologizing for his actions and saying he was taking a leave of absence to seek help from Alcoholics Anonymous. Then the Los Angeles Times reported that sixteen years earlier, he’d had an affair with one of his HBO employees that ended in a closed-door altercation; HBO paid the woman a hefty settlement. Within hours, Albrecht was fired.

Today, except for his close-cropped mostly bald pate, Albrecht barely resembles the mug shot that was seemingly everywhere in May 2007. That image, which is still the first one that pops up when you Google him, was sinister—thuggish, even. Now he is tan, fit, and bright-eyed. Ten months after taking the helm at Starz, he seems committed to building the service into one that’s every bit as buzzworthy as HBO and Showtime.

But no comeback tale is complete without a proper owning up, and Albrecht, who understands storytelling better than perhaps any other Hollywood executive, knows that when a hero falters, he must take responsibility before he can be redeemed. Our conversations in Dublin—where he is visiting the set of Camelot, an ambitious reimagining of the King Arthur myth that will air next spring—mark his first public accounting of the events that cost him his HBO job. Over forty-eight hours, this up-from-nothing onetime comedian from Queens describes both his shame about what happened in Vegas and his deep regret about how much it cost him. He apologizes, again, for causing embarrassment and pain to his family and his colleagues. But there is one thing he does not do: deny that he still enjoys his liquor. He hasn’t fallen off the wagon, he insists. Instead, he says, he didn’t need to get on it. Contrary to the assertions he made in 2007—that alcohol made him do it—Albrecht tells me, “After years of reflection and working with specialists, I have recognized that alcohol is not an issue in my life. What I really needed to get at the heart of was my complicated and often very difficult love relationships with women.”

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That first night, the cab deposits us at a restaurant called the Pig’s Ear, where Albrecht takes charge of a big table of colleagues and friends. Over a couple of bottles of Côtes du Rhône, which he orders for everyone and swirls before tasting, he launches into a story about what he calls “the HBO shrug”—the who-knows-if-this-is-gonna-fly-but-let’s-go-for-it bravado that was the norm while he was there. Click to continue »