  Michelle Pfeiffer, as the 5,000-year-old witch Lamia, loves the notion that her Stardust character’s deadly pursuit of eternal youth is a metaphor for what’s happening in real life.
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LOS ANGELES — Make that two psycho villains in a row for Michelle Pfeiffer, one of Hollywood’s true sweethearts.
“It’s fun once you get over the fear of it,” Pfeiffer says in an interview. “It’s not my comfort zone as an actor.”
This summer, we’ve already seen Pfeiffer’s mean streak in the acclaimed musical romp Hairspray, a made-in-Toronto hit. With relish on the hot dog, she plays Velma Von Tussle.
Tomorrow, Stardust opens with the 49-year-old Californian as Lamia, a 5,000-year-old hag witch. She wants to cut out and eat the heart of a fallen star — sassy Claire Danes — so she can steal Dane’s youth and reverse a hideous aging process.
“My tendency as an actor is to always want to underplay a thing, so I always have to be encouraged and pushed in the beginning,” Pfeiffer says.
With Stardust, British director Matthew Vaughn finally had to rein her in. Pfeiffer was vaulting over the top playing an already flamboyant character. Pfeiffer laughs about it now and admits, “I guess it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of encouragement ... and the character begins to dictate where you need to be.”
Pfeiffer says playing two villains in a role happened by accident, maybe. “It did, I think. But, really, there are no accidents. I don’t really know what it means and I’m not even going to go there. I think it’s just chance ... but I’m also smart enough to realize there really isn’t such a thing. So I don’t know. I didn’t plan it.”
But she does love the notion that her Stardust character’s deadly pursuit of eternal youth is a metaphor for what is happening in real life. And it is happening, she says, “with women in general,” and not just with actresses in Hollywood. That pursuit has become as “grotesque” in life as it is in the movie, because of issues ranging from plastic surgery to eating disorders, Pfeiffer says.
“It’s much more global than our business. But we are chronicled, which makes it harder for us. We have to actually look at ourselves and scrutinize ourselves, and the aging process over the years, in a really unnatural way.
“As if aging for a woman weren’t hard enough, then you add that on top of it. So I certainly know what that feels like, what kind of pressure that is.”
As a result, she believes there is a subtext to watching Lamia, and her two sister uglies, pursue Danes while the movie’s hero — emerging star Charlie Cox — tries to protect the heroine.
The point going in was to ridicule the lust for unnatural youthful looks, she says. Pfeiffer remembers discussing the issue with Vaughn and saying, “Let’s just really turn it on its head and shine a light on it and poke fun at how absurd it’s become.”
Pfeiffer, however, has no fond memories of the 61/2 hours of makeup and prosthetic applications she underwent before shooting her extreme witch scenes. Or the one hour it took to peel it off, leaving her skin reddened and sore.
“I think we all underestimated what it meant to have full prosthetics on,” Pfeiffer admits. “None of us had done them before so it was a really, really, steep learning curve for everybody. But we survived.”
Pfeiffer, meanwhile, denies she took Stardust to please her children, even though they are fascinated at the prospect of seeing mom as a witch. Pfeiffer says she never selects role for daughter Claudia Rose or son Jack Henry.
“The only thing they ever motivated me to do was The Muppets in the 1990s on Muppets Tonight) and then they kind of couldn’t care less. They were not impressed. They were a little bit too young.
“I think people become parents and, all of a sudden, you see them do Sesame Street and they (the children) are like six months old. What are you thinking?”
Pfeiffer new to this fairy-tale stuff
The world of fantasy and fairy tales has finally swallowed up Michelle Pfeiffer.
Before shooting Stardust, which is based on the popular fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman, Pfeiffer admits she never had much of an interest in fairy tales, even as a child.
“I am not a big fairy-tale person. It’s not the sort of reading I would gravitate toward.” She is more likely to pick up a non-fiction biography.
“But my kids certainly love all of that and it’s been great for me because it (Stardust) has introduced me to the world of fairy tales, which is something I kind of missed out on when I was younger. So I’ve been able to discover all these great ‘new’ stories that I wasn’t aware of.”
And her two kids relished the prospect of seeing their mother transform back and forth between being her usually beautiful self and a monstrously ugly witch with peeling skin, flyaway hair, a jowly neck and a breast that suddenly drops. She looks fantastically awful.
While her adopted daughter Claudia Rose is intrigued, her son Jack Henry Kelley (with husband David E. Kelley, the TV producer with the Midas touch) is wild about seeing mom as a witch.
“Because he loves all that!” Pfeiffer says with a laugh.
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