With a smart new Showtime series, Episodes, the 43-year-old actor formerly known as Joey Tribbiani has finally found a way to turn his signature role to his advantage

DETAILS: We’ve become so used to a certain image of you that some people seem surprised by the graying hair. Matt LeBlanc: I started going gray in my early twenties. I remember on Friends, in the very beginning, putting the stuff on the sides. Then it became a full shampoo job. People are saying, “Oh, he’s going for the George Clooney thing.” I’m not going for the George Clooney thing—I’m getting old. I’m going for the inevitable.

DETAILS: How did it feel reading the pilot of your new series, Episodes, in which you play a character named Matt LeBlanc, whom a pair of producers are vehemently opposed to casting in their show? Matt LeBlanc: I’ve been there. I’ve been pitched for movies and producers say they feel that seeing me would pull the audience out of the movie. In the eighth or ninth year of Friends, during some of the renegotiation conversations, someone said, “We don’t want to be pigeonholed as these characters forever.” And I remember thinking, “That ship has sailed.”

DETAILS: The curse of Joey. Matt LeBlanc: I’ve met a lot of people who will literally speak slowly to me. People call me Joey all the time. I take it as a compliment. There’s no point in correcting them. But I’m much more even-keeled and subdued and relaxed than Joey Tribbiani. Now, with this new role, it’s almost this trick I can play on the audience: “Is he really like that, or is he not?”

DETAILS: You’ve had your run-ins with the tabloids. Matt LeBlanc: Those guys pop out of the woodwork. One morning, it was around Season 2 of Friends, I got a call from my publicist at 6 a.m. She said, “Thank God you’re alive. There’s a rumor that you overdosed and died last night.” I said, “Is that why there’s a helicopter over my house right now?” She said they were going to report it on the news. So I hung up, called my mother, and said, “If you see a report that I died last night, it’s not true.” I firmly believe they have a big wheel at the tabloids, and they spin it, and when your name comes up, they’re like, “All right, let’s make something up about him.”

DETAILS: How has that intense level of exposure affected your dating life? Matt LeBlanc: I have a girlfriend, and she’s an actor, so that’s easy. Before, my guard was really high. It’s like, this person can Google me and find out so much. Who are they? I can’t Google them. You always question people’s intentions. That may be a combination of having money, having fame, and being a little older. When I was young, a one-night stand was really fun. Now the aggravation that goes with it isn’t worth it. It’s like, “Okay, fine, but it sounds like a pain in the ass.”

DETAILS: What did you do after Joey got canceled? Matt LeBlanc: I took four or five years off. There were a lot of things that were spinning out of control. My daughter had been diagnosed with an illness, my marriage was falling apart, the writing was on the wall that the show was going away—that being the least of those three major problems. I was extremely stressed, and then it was all kind of poof!—quiet. So I said, “You know, this is a good time to crawl under a rock.” Literally, an actual rock. I can show you a picture.

By AMY WALLACE

ONE way to understand Emilio Estevez’s backyard vineyard might be to recall a scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Remember Richard Dreyfuss, after a run-in with a U.F.O., obsessively fashioning mountains out of mashed potatoes and shaving cream? Except for the U.F.O., that’s kind of how Mr. Estevez is about growing grapes.

“One day I came home and he had dug up all the grass,” recalled Sonja Magdevski, Mr. Estevez’s fiancée. “He was like: ‘We’re going to plant! We need more space!’ ”

The year was 2005, and Mr. Estevez was working on “Bobby,” a film he wrote and directed, about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The couple lived, as they still do, in a Spanish-style home on a one-acre lot in Malibu — not exactly a prime locale for vintners.

Mr. Estevez had already planted the front yard with vines, ignoring the protests of his parents, Martin and Janet Sheen, who live right down the street. (According to him, they said: “You’re out of your mind. What are you doing?”) Now, excepting the house, the pool and the bocce court, he was determined to fill almost every square inch of the property with 800 vines.

“We were just a couple of rubes,” Mr. Estevez said, acknowledging how little he knew about what he and Ms. Magdevski were embarking upon at the time. “Now, I’m a zealot.”

The Prototype column has focused mostly on innovative people and their ideas — how they develop, protect and profit from them and, often, how their mistakes lead to successes. In this column, I examine a more abstract phenomenon: people who battle creative burnout by using the same muscles they developed to do one thing in order to do something completely different.

Consider the Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley, a 6-foot-3, 250-pound, two-time Pro Bowler. Last month, this newspaper reported that he throws pots in his spare time, using ceramics to recharge and to keep him fresh for his day job.

Mr. Estevez is no different. What others would call a hobby, he calls “a meditation” — a complementary pursuit that not only helps him to weather the vagaries of the movie business, but also, he says, to write better scripts.

“I write a lot of dialogue out there,” Mr. Estevez, 48, said the other day while looking out the window at the pinot noir plants that he and Ms. Magdevski had recently pruned. He found his vineyard, named Casa Dumetz, particularly useful for working out the kinks and frustrations in the creation of his latest film, “The Way,” which has yet to be released in the United States.

“I’d do a row and then back inside to write and then back outside,” he said. “It was this wonderful exchange.”

“Our first year making wine was a lot like my first film,” he acknowledged, smiling as he remembered 2007, when the first wine was bottled under the Casa Dumetz name. He said that in both winemaking and filmmaking, “I’ve gotten better, and the reviews have gotten better.”

Best known in his younger years as a member of the Brat Pack — that group of fresh-faced actors who tended to pop up, as he did, in John Hughes movies like “The Breakfast Club” — Mr. Estevez in the 1990s found himself all grown up. During this period, he leveraged his work in mainstream efforts like “The Mighty Ducks” from Disney (and its two sequels) to fuel self-produced fare like a Vietnam-era drama, “The War at Home.”

He also developed a fascination with wine, collecting California cult cabernets and high-end Bordeaux and making regular visits to the vineyards of Napa Valley.

This is probably the right time to mention that yes, Mr. Estevez has seen — and laughed at — a current TV commercial for Charles Schwab in which a man saving for retirement mocks the poor investment advice he’s been given oven the years by saying, “A vineyard? Give me a break!”

Mr. Estevez does not believe that growing grapes ensures financial stability. While Casa Dumetz is expanding this year — tripling its output to 624 cases, made partly with grapes grown off site — Mr. Estevez says his motivation has always been more spiritual than fiscal.

By AMY WALLACE

First appeared in the New York Times, November 28, 2010

ON Wednesday, Kim Kardashian is going to die a little. So is her sister, Khloé, not to mention Lady Gaga, David LaChapelle, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Serena Williams and Elijah Wood.

That day is World AIDS Day, and each of these people (as well as a host of others — the list keeps growing) will sacrifice his or her own digital life. By which these celebrities mean they will stop communicating via Twitter and Facebook. They will not be resuscitated, they say, until their fans donate $1 million.

“Dry your eyes, everybody,” Ryan Seacrest, the “American Idol” host and another participant in this cyberstunt, says in a videotaped “Last Tweet and Testament” that will be posted on his Facebook profile — and appended to a final post on Twitter — sometime after midnight on Tuesday night. “I don’t plan to be dead for too long.”

He adds, “Please buy back my life.”

“Come on, y’all,” the actress Jennifer Hudson says in a similar videotaped plea. “Buy my life back. Go on a shopping spree and buy as much of it as you can.”

It’s all part of the latest gambit by the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys to raise money for her charity, Keep a Child Alive, which finances medical care and support services for children and families affected by H.I.V. and AIDS in Africa and India.

It’s rare that the Prototype column pays attention to celebrities, but Ms. Keys is the second one who has caught our attention by harnessing fame to philanthropy in an innovative way. The actor Ed Norton, who was featured in the September column, created a Web site that makes it easy to rally people to your cause.

Ms. Keys is up to something slightly different. She knows that she’s not alone in thinking that America increasingly treats its celebrities like commodities. But she believes she’s the first to tether that reality to technology to do some good.

“It’s really exciting. No foundation has used the technology before like we are,” says Ms. Keys, 29, a multiple Grammy Award winner.

On Sept. 30, Ms. Keys and her charity’s co-founder, Leigh Blake, started Buy Life, which sells $35 gray T-shirts imprinted with a bar code. People who have uploaded a Stickybits or Wimo application to their smartphones can donate $10 to Keep a Child Alive simply by scanning any Buy Life T-shirt’s bar code.

“This Shirt Fights AIDS,” the shirts say on the back. “Scan the bar code or Text ‘BUYLIFE’ to 90999 to Join the Fight.”

The planned “Digital Death” this week will take that idea a step further. Famous people with lots of friends, fans and followers will go silent online, but not before calling for an outbreak of generosity. The participants are believed to have nearly 29 million fans on Twitter alone.

And as of Sunday, three days before World AIDS Day, stylized full-color photographs of celebrities lying in coffins, seemingly lifeless, with eyes closed, are to be displayed on the Buy Life Web site.

“Kim Kardashian is DEAD,” says the text that accompanies one of those photos, which features the reality-show star in a low-cut sequined burial outfit that suggests she “died” after a night out clubbing. “Kim sacrificed her digital life to give real life to millions of others,” it adds, asking fans to “visit Buylife.org or text ‘KIM’ to ‘90999’ to buy her life now.”

The strategy here is not just to shock people into paying attention but to enable them to give by doing, as Ms. Keys puts it, “what you always do.”

“You’re always texting your friends,” she says. “Now, you’re going to text to Buy Life.”

All that fans have to do is text the first name of the celebrity they’re “mourning” to 90999, and $10 will be donated.

“It’s a really instant way of grabbing their compassion,” Ms. Blake says.

You’ve heard of impulse buying. These women hope to create a new phenomenon: impulse giving. But the twist is that they’re still couching it in retail terms — winking at people in a way that makes them want to join in. “We’re taking the fixation with retail and with buying and all of that, and we’re turning it on its head,” Ms. Blake says.

The actor won an Academy Award for playing Raymond Babbitt, an autistic savant, in Rain Man. Twenty-one years later, Dustin Hoffman reflects

By Amy Wallace

Appeared in Los Angeles magazine, September 2010

On the research he did to prepare:

Oliver Sacks had this long blackboard in his office, and when he was talking about savants, he made a chalk mark on the blackboard. He said, “You know that’s one. You don’t have to count that.” I said, “Right.” He made another stroke and said, “You know that’s two.” Then he went the length of the blackboard, chalking, chalking, chalking. And he said, “What you see at one, two, three, or four or five—these people see at this number,” which was 78 chalk marks or something. I said, “They’re like calculators.” He said, “No, they’re faster than calculators. A calculator has to calculate. They see it.” The toothpick scene in Rain Man is based on that.

On the dialogue:

We had prototypes that we relied on: Peter and Kevin Guthrie. They’re brothers. Kevin Guthrie was a football star at Princeton University. Peter was autistic and high functioning. We had lunch one day and were going bowling afterward because Peter loved bowling. So he was very impatient, tapping Kevin on the thigh with his finger. He said, “K-E-V-I-N, I want to go bowling.” He would spell the name when he wanted something or when he was very anxious or both. Tom Cruise and I both decided we would find a place to use that. During the lunch, I whispered to Kevin, “Does your brother know that he’s autistic?” He said, “Gee, I’ve never asked him.” And he asked his brother, and Peter’s answer is in the movie: “No. I don’t think so. Definitely not.” There’s nothing in my performance that’s invented. It was given to me. We compensated the Guthrie brothers because they were cowriters.

On feedback he’s received from parents:

I guess the most special moment was a couple of years after the film came out, I bumped into some parents who said they had a nine- or ten-year-old autistic son they took to see Rain Man, and their son had never made physical contact with them. Anyway, they were on their way home, and one of the parents said, “Did you like the movie?” And suddenly their son came forward from the backseat and embraced one of the parents.

On why the movie was such a success:

While we were making Rain Man, we used to joke we should call it Two Schmucks in a Car. We were living by our wits from day to day. Then it came out. Suddenly it caught on, even internationally. I remember thinking, Why? What I came up with was, We’re all autistic to different degrees. For most people it’s hard to receive compliments. When someone tells us “You’re really handsome” or “You’re really beautiful,” we stop making eye contact. It’s too powerful. I think that must be one of the aspects of autism. Eye contact is just too powerful for autistic people, because they’re dealing all the time on that level. It’s just much more intense for them. Their volume is up higher. And that in itself will alter you.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Details August 2010

Details: When Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps hits theaters, there will be those who—on seeing Gordon Gekko complete a lengthy prison sentence—will ask, “Wait a minute: Greed is bad?” Why do you think so many people misunderstood the message of the original Wall Street? Oliver Stone: I was somewhat amazed by the whole continuing cult thing around Gekko. I mean, I was being facetious. Greed is not good. Greed is an awful thing. In the eighties we entered into a period of perversity which I had never seen before. I thought the world would right itself. And every day it’s just become more absurd.

Details: You once said, “Money was the sex of the eighties.” What is money now? Oliver Stone: Money is still sex, but it’s steroid sex. I mean, a million dollars was a lot of money in ’87. Now you can’t even open a hedge fund, it seems, unless you’ve got a billion.

Details: Your last Oscar came over 20 years ago for Born on the Fourth of July. Do you feel pressure to win another? Oliver Stone: You can’t fall in love with Oscars. You have to look at it like a high-school presidency or something. You know: You were most popular at that time. When I won, thank God, it wasn’t a madhouse like it’s become. These independent producers started to come up and really campaign viciously. It was so ugly, after I got nominated for Nixon as cowriter in 1996, I never went back. Woody Allen did the smartest thing. And Kubrick. They didn’t give a fuck.

Details: You’ve said that a lot of your critics over the years have confused you with the characters you were depicting. Does that still happen? Oliver Stone: No, less so. I’m not so much of a firebrand. I would spout off when I was a younger man. Get angry. Pissed off. I realized late in life that I could have been like the Coen brothers: Shut up completely and just let the films speak for themselves.

Details: In a review of Platoon, one critic wondered aloud whether you were “using filmmaking as a substitute for drugs.” Have you ever found a suitable substitute for drugs? Oliver Stone: Oh, sure—money, sex, God, Buddha. There’re so many substitutes. Frankly, I don’t smoke grass anymore. I gave it up. I just wanted to see if I could function without it. But it did save my ass in Vietnam. I could have become a very bitter man. I also did a lot of psychedelics that I thought helped me. The worst drug I ever did, and I’ve admitted to it, was cocaine, from ’79 to ’81. That I regret, because I do think it hurt my brain cells, and I don’t think I was as creative as I should have been.

Details: Is it true you were in the process of kicking cocaine while writing the coke-drenched Scarface? Oliver Stone: No. I stopped before the writing—cold turkey. My attitude was “Farewell to coke.” I mean, it took so much money off me, I said, “I’m going to get something back.”

Details: At 63, is writing a movie harder or easier?
Oliver Stone: It’s always been a bitch.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in GQ August 2010

Toward the end of February, in the first-class cabin of a United flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles, the only man on the planet who has hosted late-night talk shows, appeared on late-night talk shows, and created an iconic TV series that parodied a late-night talk show encountered the man who had just been famously ousted from a late-night talk show.

Garry Shandling was in 1A. Conan O’Brien and his family were three rows back. The two men are close friends, and their unexpected proximity made Shandling happy—so happy, he says, that he asked a flight attendant to deliver O’Brien a present. “Mr. Shandling can’t finish his cookie, and he thought you might want to have the rest,” the woman told O’Brien, presenting the crumb-littered plate. Minutes later, Shandling looked up—way up—to see the six-foot-four-inch redhead planted in front of him, an exaggerated scowl on his face.

“This is the way you treat me, with the broken cookies?” O’Brien asked Shandling, his voice slightly raised to make sure the comedy could be heard over the jet engines. “When I let you get in line with me and my wife and get your ticket ten minutes earlier? This is what you do?”

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” Shandling responded, almost yelling. “I, out of the generosity of my heart, offer you food. And you have the nerve to walk up to my aisle and harass me and heckle me in front of this passenger”—Shandling nodded to the stranger in 1B—”who I don’t know?”

O’Brien turned to Shandling’s stunned neighbor, who will surely be dining out on this story for the rest of his life. “I’m sorry you have to sit next to him,” O’Brien said. “You know, if you call ahead and you find out Garry’s on the plane, they will allow you to switch seats.”

It was a coincidence, these two funnymen being on the Big Island at the same time. Shandling, who had recently completed final reshoots on his first acting role in years—a U.S. senator in Iron Man 2—was enjoying one of his frequent retreats to the Waipio Valley, his favorite place to meditate and ponder the universe. (While he stops short of calling himself a Buddhist, he is a serious student of dharma.) O’Brien, who just weeks before had parted ways with NBC and The Tonight Show, was on what is perhaps best described as a forced vacation. The timing was “synchronistic,” Garry says, recalling that they hung out so much in Hawaii “that Conan’s wife was jealous.”

“We were able to spend some time chatting about, uh, the turtles and anything else that might be going on in our lives,” Shandling says as we stand in the kitchen of the vast Spanish-style home where he lives, alone, in the hills above the West Los Angeles enclave of Brentwood. You can see the distant ocean out the window, past a grassy oasis and Garry’s rock-lined pool. He looks tan and fit, if a little rumpled, in an untucked striped button-down, baggy cargo pants with a tiger emblazoned on one leg, and beige Prada sneakers. When I press, he acknowledges that yes, the topic of O’Brien’s future came up. “Conan’s completely free now,” Garry says with a solemnity more gurulike than you’d expect from someone who got famous making jokes about his hair. “He doesn’t have to fit into someone else’s mold.”

But what Garry really wants to talk about is that hand-me-down cookie. “I’d eaten half, and the other half was in tiny crumbles and pieces,” he says, still delighted. Asked what kind of cookie—oatmeal? chocolate chip?—he adjusts his black baseball cap and takes off: “I asked the same question, and they said, ‘It’s an airplane cookie.’ And I didn’t want to ask what that was exactly. I was frightened.” A beat. “I was in a situation once over water where they said they were having a technical problem with my cookie. I said, ‘Oh, my God, what are you going to do?’ They said, ‘We’re going to have to switch cookies. Give us ten minutes.’”

By Amy Wallace

Originally published in More June 2010

SHARON STONE is shameless. The actress considers it a skill to have no shame. She thinks everyone should try it, though she cautions that if you’re female, shamelessness can cost you. Her refusal to feel guilty, she says, has gotten her labeled difficult, or worse.

“I’m like a Prohibition-era flapper. I’m like a juke-joint hussy,” Stone says over lunch at an Italian restaurant near Beverly Hills. But better to be called names than to be pressured into not being herself. Feeling ashamed, she says, “is not an organic state of being, so shamelessness is closer to godliness. You have to put shame down.”

Minutes later, as if to prove her point, she responds to a question about the watch on her wrist by yanking it off and flinging it onto the cement patio. “That’s the Dior Christal,” she says of the pricey timepiece, made with sapphire crystals, that she’s just tried to kill (Stone says she often does this stunt, which “shocks people but is the reason I am so proudly Dior’s spokeswoman”). She crouches to retrieve her bauble, emerging with a big smile on her makeup-free face. “How about that? It keeps on ticking.”

It’s tempting to say the same about Stone herself. Life has flung her to the hard ground more than once in recent years: She survived a brain hemorrhage in 2001, a bruising divorce in 2004 and, in December, the loss of her 78-year-old father, Joseph, to esophageal cancer. But listen to her tick, tick, tick.

“I’m detached from my celebrity. I don’t need to be ‘it’ anymore,” she says, announcing with what sounds like relief that her days as “a great big movie star” may well be behind her. Not that she isn’t busy. In the spring, she shot a four-episode guest stint on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and headed to Europe to film the sequel to Largo Winch, based on a Belgian comic book series. Still, Stone has a point: Her last movie, Streets of Blood, went straight to DVD. But no matter. When I compliment her poignant portrayal of a hairdresser in Bobby, released in 2006, she pronounces herself happy to be seen no longer as a babe starlet but as “a very fine character actor.” Indeed, Stone reports she is happy with her work, her kids (she has three adopted boys, ages 10, five and four) and her sense of style (“I’m always going to wear leopard; leopard is a neutral for me”). Without sounding too “woo-woo”—a term she invokes when discussing her interest in Eastern -spirituality—she would like you to know she’s been thinking a lot lately about getting older, about womanhood and about lost love. What she’s concluded may surprise you.

“Life and love is like the ocean,” she tells me between bites of a Caesar salad. At 52, she is stunning up close—blue eyed, lithe and radiant in ripped jeans, a white T-shirt sans bra and a linen vest. “Sometimes the tide is in and sometimes the tide is out, and sometimes it’s like the frigging Mojave.” Where’s the tide now? “For me? Mojave! Fortunately, I like the desert. I’m a desert flower.”

But flattering as it is to be courted by men half her age, right now she says she’s going solo. “I’ve reached this period in my life when I feel particularly feminine,” she says, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. She is thinking of her father, who with her mother moved in with Stone seven years ago, after he received his diagnosis. “He was a very tough cat,” she says fondly, dabbing her eyes with tissues she’s retrieved from her bag. Watching a parent fight to live, she says, has changed her sense of self—in a good way.

Los Angeles magazine, July 2010

On this sunny morning at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan isn’t booby-trapping a doorway or defusing a bomb. He isn’t shaping cake frosting into blocks of counterfeit C4 authentic looking enough to fool an arms dealer or making an audio bug from a pair of cheap, rewired cell phones. No, the 42-year-old star of the number one show on cable—the wry spy drama Burn Notice—is simply reciting his recipe for vegetable soup. But since he’s already confided that he believes the best part of Burn Notice is that “nine times out of ten what we’re telling you is counterintuitive,” it’s easy to see his veggie brew as a metaphor.

“Take a lot of parsnips and carrots, summer squash—a medley. Then chop everything up, sauté it with a little bit of butter and olive oil, and boil it,” he says as he surveys rows of organic produce. “What most people do is make that their soup. No.”

This last directive he utters with a finality that fans of his USA Network series, whose fourth season premiered in early June, will recognize. Jaunty in a white formfitting T-shirt, gray suit pants, Puma sneakers, and a gray baseball cap, Donovan looks taut, like you could bounce a quarter off almost any part of his body. Not that you’d dare. His navy blue eyes squint slightly now as if to say: Pay attention. There might be a quiz later.

“What you do,” he continues, politely making way for an elderly shopper as she eases by with her cart, “is you boil it, strain it, then boil it some more. There’s going to be scum. Take the scum off. Then put that into the fridge. Then you come here”—he waves a muscled arm around the stalls at Fairfax Avenue and 3rd Street—“and buy what you’re going to put in the soup: more carrots, some green beans, a little onion, some celery, more squash. You can add a little pasta. Then I add fresh dill right at the end. Because you don’t want to cook dill.”

Anyone who’s watched Burn Notice, which follows a former spy named Michael Westen as he tries to figure out who issued the order (or “burn notice”) that got him expelled from his agency, will see the irony of taking cooking lessons from Donovan. His character, after all, keeps only one thing in his fridge: yogurt.

“You know the whole story about the yogurt?” Donovan asks. Apparently the show’s writers have an ex-intelligence operative on call as a consultant. “They asked him, ‘What do spies eat?’ And he said, ‘Protein in a cup.’ On surveillance you’re sitting in a car for 12 hours. So you pack a cooler. Yogurt has enzymes, cultures, proteins. It’s a perfect little meal.” A beat, then he adds: “I get pretty sick of it.”

*****

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of Burn Notice. It’s plugging along just fine without you, with 7 million viewers a week. Equal parts spy-games cool and slapstick funny, it’s been compared to MacGyver (for the homemade gadgetry), The Avengers (for Westen’s chemistry with his ex-lover Fiona, an Irish terrorist played by Gabrielle Anwar), and The Rockford Files (for Westen’s Mutt-and-Jeff relationship with a drunken FBI informant, played by Bruce Campbell). It also recalls the ’60s British series The Prisoner, starring the late, great Patrick McGoohan.

“I rented it for research,” Donovan says of that show. “I wanted to find these kind of fish-out-of-water flawed characters who cannot escape their own circumstances.” Donovan’s Westen, like McGoohan’s Number Six, is consistently confronting his previous employer in search of answers (Number Six is stuck on an island; Westen is trapped in Miami).

“He doesn’t enforce the law, he solves problems,” Donovan says of Westen. “He’s a rogue operative helping the little guy.”

Donovan relates to little guys. Raised in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he grew up on welfare after his mom left his dad, taking Donovan and his two brothers (he’s in the middle) with her. As a kid, he was a cutup. He discovered acting in high school after an English teacher attempted to have him focus by making him memorize Shylock’s “Hath Not a Jew Eyes?” speech.

Originally appeared in Los Angeles June 2010

As told to Amy Wallace

At DreamWorks Animation, they have free lunch. So as a PA there, you don’t have to pick up food. But you do have to get Jeffrey Katzenberg’s ice. At the campus in Glendale, there is an office. It is unmarked. And I think it’s guarded by some type of demon. In that office is a refrigerator. The refrigerator makes a specific kind of ice that Jeffrey likes, a cylindrical ice, with a hole in it. This refrigerator, which has its own office, makes ice. For Jeffrey. Only for Jeffrey. Jeffrey’s life is meetings. And the meetings are in different rooms. But this refrigerator office is not near any of them. It is the PA’s job to figure out exactly where Jeffrey is going to sit at each meeting and then to place, to his right, a certain type of glass filled to a very specific level with the special office ice. Next to the glass goes a little bottle of Diet Coke. Here’s the problem: Meetings are often pushed. Jeffrey’s earlier meeting is running long. So all of a sudden the perfect glass of ice has water in it. Now it’s a judgment call: Can I get this glass filled with fresh ice and be back here before the meeting starts? And you’re running down hallways, through buildings, with a glass of ice in your hand, and people see you and laugh and say, “You better hurry up! Jeffrey’s coming!”

Originally appeared in Esquire Magazine July, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

Ash Baron Cohen’s father and his uncle — who is Sacha Baron Cohen’s father — were in the shmatte business together.

Our fathers were working-class Jews who were sent out of London during the blitz to Wales, where they went to school and were the only Jews in a completely non-Jewish environment. They learned quickly that they had to stand up for themselves. They were both creative rebels in many ways. And it probably has rubbed off on the two of us. I think Sash [rhymes with ash] and I are both very intrigued with the idea of mixing reality with perceptions of reality.

Baron Cohen arrived in Hollywood several years before his cousin. His first job was as a stand-in for Lou Ferrigno.

The only thing we had in common was we both have the same size hands. His calf muscle was the size of my head.

Baron Cohen financed his first student film by doing strip-a-grams.

I would have to show up in places in a cop’s outfit.

While in film school, he once convinced Richard Harris to do a cameo, for free, in a student production called The Sex Police. (You can watch the Harris clip on YouTube.)

I went to the Sunset Marquis to sneak into their pool. I was going to be confident, stride toward the pool, and take a few dives. As I walked in, I saw Richard Harris on his balcony. Very regal. That shock of white hair. He looked like King Arthur. So I picked up the house phone — I thought I’d just take a chance — and I asked for his suite. Then I heard this voice — “Who the fuck is this?” I said, “Look, I don’t know anyone in this town.” I asked for five minutes of his time. He said, “Be here at 7:00 A.M. tomorrow for breakfast.” So I was. I said, “I’m shooting a student film, would you consider doing a cameo?” He said, “Write me out a scene.” So I went home and for some reason I thought, I’ll write a scene about the etymology of the word cunt. Either he’s going to throw me out or he’s going to be intrigued. I came back the next day. He said, “Brilliant. Let’s shoot it tomorrow.” He was shooting Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood, and he said, “I told Clint I have food poisoning and can’t come to work today.” When we got back to his hotel that night, he called up Clint. He said, “I didn’t have food poisoning. I was with a young filmmaker, and we were running around on the beach. There were seven people there doing the whole thing, and even I was holding my own light.” He goes, “That was real filmmaking, Clint.”

Baron Cohen released his first feature film, Bang, about a woman who impersonates an LAPD officer, in 1997. Roger Ebert named it one of the year’s best. The director used a single name, Ash.

Was I trying to be cool, like Sting? Actually, I was trying not to be thrown out of the country. Originally, I was here illegally.

Oliver Stone saw the film and subsequently wrote a letter to the INS advocating citizenship for Baron Cohen.

After he saw Bang, Oliver says, “We’ve got to get you legal.” I think he said I reminded him of a young version of himself. The blond hair. The blue eyes. We’re very similar. To a person at the Braille Institute, we’re identical twins.

I’m legally blind without my contact lenses. I try to keep them in while I’m directing, because otherwise people wonder why I’m facing the wall and yelling, “Action!”

He has directed three feature films since 1995. His second, Pups, was sort of a teenage Dog Day Afternoon that starred a pre-O. C. Mischa Barton, wielding a gun. It was the first in a series of movies featuring strong, sexy women. This Girl’s Life, featuring James Woods and Rosario Dawson, was told from a female porn star’s point of view. (Dawson didn’t play the porn star.) He’s currently casting RadioActive, which has been described as a female Scarface.