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"It's been a lovely year," Douglas deadpanned yesterday. He and his new bride were facing media hordes for the first time since their gala wedding two weeks ago in front of 115 family members and 100 celebrity guests, from Jack Nicholson to Meg Ryan, at New York's Plaza Hotel.
The newlyweds are key players in the extraordinary ensemble cast of Traffic, Steven Soderbergh's epic film about the drug traffic between Mexico and the U.S. It opens in Toronto Dec. 27 and wider across Canada early in January.
"Let's say we didn't plan on a press junket two weeks after we got married," Douglas groused good-naturedly about the timing of the Traffic interviews. He's not really complaining.
"We've been on a honeymoon for a year and a half," he said of his time with Zeta-Jones since they met at the Deauville Film Festival in France in June 1999. Since then, the only work they've done was the five weeks each spent shooting their separate sequences on Traffic. Their private lives have been busier. Their son Dylan was born three months ago. Zeta-Jones shot Traffic while six months pregnant.
"We are kind of doing it backwards," Douglas said, laughing. "The honeymoon first and then the baby and then we got married and now we're going back to work."
Memories of the wedding made each of them emotional yesterday. Douglas, 56, recalled walking down the aisle with his 21-year-old son Cameron and seeing "how proud he was for Dad." Then he caught his bride-to-be's eye for the first time. "I just felt such a rush through my whole body."
Zeta-Jones, 31, said her highlight was first seeing Douglas during the ceremony. "I didn't know whether to burst out laughing or burst out crying, and then I saw other people's faces and they were smiling -- so I burst out laughing!"
The Nov. 18 wedding lasted all night, starting at 7:30 p.m. with a 25-minute, non-denominational ceremony, with traditional vows, and ending with a sing-along around the piano bar at 5 a.m. the next morning.
In between, guests were treated to a feast, a Welsh choir and other music by Gladys Knight, Jimmy Buffet, Art Garfunkel, Mick Jones and even Zeta-Jones' ex-beau, Simply Red's lead singer Mick Hucknall.
One of the lowlights of the wedding has been the fuss about photos. Douglas said they decided to sell official wedding photo access to Britain's OK! magazine as a defensive tactic, not to raise money. "It was a way to control all the media. So we were generally very happy with it."
But OK!'s rival, Hello magazine, paid people to infiltrate the wedding and take clandestine videos that were turned into stills.
"I thought it was kind of mean-spirited and poor-loser-like for Hello," Douglas said, calling their photos "ugly" and "nasty" and the OK! photos "nice."
As for marrying a woman 25 years his junior -- a subject that's made him the target for talk show host Jay Leno's potshots -- Douglas dismissed criticism as jealousy.
"It's not quite as unusual and quite as freaky as they make it out to be. I like to think that I'm a pretty well held together 56 years old and she's a pretty mature 31 years old."
Don't expect to see them in any scenes together in Traffic -- their story lines are unconnected. Which delights Zeta-Jones. She is also convinced their fans won't care, thanks to the overexposure the two have generated in the media.
"With all the stuff that's gone on, I think they will be really happy to see him on one end of the screen and me on the other. I mean, if they have any sense at all and are true fans, then enough already."
Eventually, they would like to do a movie together -- and appear in the same scenes. Meanwhile, they are signed for different projects in different cities.
In January, Zeta-Jones starts shooting America's Sweetheart with Julia Roberts, John Cusack and Billy Crystal in L.A. Douglas is heading to Toronto to shoot Don't Say A Word, a dark thriller.
"Our philosophy with an infant is (that) we'd rather both be working at the same time and then be free at the same time," Douglas said.
One other co-production is waiting for the future. Zeta-Jones says she would like another child with Douglas. "But I don't think Michael is willing to go through this right away. Maybe we'll wait until he (son Dylan) goes to school."