"People are always surprised ' to learn," says actor Terrence Stamp, "that I never wore diapers as a child."
Odd variations in toilet training were not the subject of the press conference held last July in Los Angeles, but Stamp has spent most of the past decade sorting through the psychoanalytic reverberations in his life. Such details were connected to both his career and his decision to play an aging transsexual in the Australian comedy The Adventures of Prisclla, Queen of the Desert.
"I was one of those eldest sons who always had to be perfect," Stamp continues. His drive for perfection has always been evident in his acting, even though Stamp has spent a long stretch of his career coasting through easy-money parts as the fancy English villain in expensive American films. Though he gained critical respect in the early '60s in such movies as Billy Budd and The Collector, Stamp has mostly made his living with such parts as the evil General Zed in Superman II and the world's meanest Mr. Potato-Head in Alien Nation.
Such typecasting was, admits Stamp, part of the reason why he was interested in playing Bernadette, a very prim gender-bender who joins two young drag queens on a campy excursion through the sand-blasted Outback.
"I've often boasted that if I'm frightened by a role, then I'll take it. That's how I grow. But when this role came up, the fear threshold became so rarefied. There were times when I was absolutely petrified and had to counter years and years of conditioning."
Stamp, a 54-year-old straight man, has a handsome and youthful appeal that even his snowy white, widow-peaked hairline cannot alter. But as a woman, Stamp's sharp facial features form a crow's nest of repressions. The shrewish quality of his performance was accentuated by the discomfort of his costumes: a parade of house dresses, sequined tights, pantyhose that tucked in his genitalia and water-filled condoms that propped up his bra. "I looked like the worst kind of draggy old tomcat. I finally started yelling, 'Come on! Make me look even more stupid!.'"
Added to this was the rigor of a 39-day shooting schedule, most of which took place on a seemingly endless sweep of road that cuts across the sweltering wasteland. The filming, like the movie, was an absurd journey through arid terrain best known for its enormous flies. The sight of three actors in drag, tooling around in a pink-colored bus named Priscilla, must have been a dubious spectacle for the miners in the region.
"Not really. The locals were actually pretty laid back," insists Stephen Elliot, the director of Priscilla. "What they're into is much weirder. Really weird. It's mean out there in towns like Coober Pedy. You get on someone's wrong side and they blow you up."
Priscilla is Elliot's second feature and its success on the film festival circuit has given him a rep as the hot, new talent from Down Under. At 30, he looks excessively boyish, with a gap-toothed smile and an Aussie accent that practically screams for a translator.
"I didn't want to make a gay film," argues Elliot when pressed about the audience he intended for Priscilla. "As far as I'm concerned, the film is not a gay movie. I wanted to make a musical, and drag was a great vehicle for it." Ironically, that contradiction has been both help and hindrance for Priscilla. The overt gayness of both its story and humor doesn't always click with a straight audience, and some homosexual groups have been upset with the movie's refusal to tackle political issues. Priscilla has a compromised quality: as it avoids the thornier parts of its own concerns, settling instead for a gaudy display of feather boas.
"I honestly wanted to do a film where you start by laughing at these characters," explains Elliot. "They are freaks, and people come into the cinema to see the freak show feeling unthreatened. Then, very slowly, it changes, 'til you're laughing with them. You end up having complete sympathy with them.
"That's my way of making films."
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