re: Top gun fricking sucks

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I’m sure you’ve talked about Top Gun many a time, but you’ve got such a small yet pivotal role. I have to ask what you think of it now, looking back?

Honestly I haven’t seen that movie since it came out, so I wonder what I would think. You know that was a movie that enabled me to pay the rent for a good two years and do a lot of theater. At the time when I read it the script was a little bit different than the way it came out, so I wasn’t attuned to its other messages. So it taught me a lesson on… well, it taught me a couple lessons on entertainment and how important the decisions you make are.

And also, there’s a difference between when you’re surviving as an actor and a job comes up and you don’t have money to pay the rent and it’s your survival. There’s a big difference between that and when you have actually the choice of material and when you can say no. So I believe that my ability to say “no” over the course of the last twenty years has been something that has been beneficial for me.

The messages you were talking about in Top Gun, do you mean the pro-military mindset that came out of it?

Not necessarily pro-military, because one of the great experiences I had on that film, having never been in the military, was to be around of military people and to understand the human face of that. A lot of the people I met who were serving our country at the time were great guys. So it gave me a wider perspective on the military at the time.

But I’m talking more about the nature of how the film was received and the… shall we say the “jingoistic” nature of how it was received, which is a reflection on the culture and on the movie, but not on the military itself.

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