When Norman Reedus arrives at the upscale, downtown Manhattan hotel lobby on this steamy early evening, the actor(and one-campaign Prada model, but don't peg him as such) looks appropriately SoHo anti-fashionista. With heavily faded blue jeans, an army-green uniform shirt, newish Puma sneakers, and hair that's intentionally shaggy, he's the picture of a "hot young actor" - but don't label him that way either.
After a few minutes in the hotel, it's clear that the atmosphere is too formal for this meeting. Reedus is wary of becoming a "movie star." He'd just as soon forget the pretense and go across the street, to the cheep, noisy Irish pub crawling with patrons. Once there we have to wait for a table, which makes me nervous(this interview is temi-limited, I assume) causing me to accidentally drop my tape recorder on the floor, smashing it in two. Reedus laughs; during a magazine interview the day before, the reporter's tape recorder broke, too.
"It must be me," he says earnestly, the offers to let me use his tape recorder, which is at his apartment a few blocks away, Modern-day gentleman I think. Finally we head to the third venue - a dark, reddish subterranean bar on Houston Street that's empty and icily air conditioned.
The 30-year-old Reedus may be recognizable to art house film fans as the murderous Oedipal son in "Six Ways to Sunday" or for his first role as a sewer worker in 1997's Mimic, but his image is ready to explode.
He appears in several movies on the verge of release: Adam Coleman Howard's Dark Harbor with Alan Rickman; Let The Devil Wear Black, directed by Stacy Title and starring Jacqueline Bisset and Mary Louise Parker; Davis Guggenheim's Gossip, with Kate Hudson; Preston Tylk, directed by John Bokenkamp and starring Luke Wilson; William Roth's Floating, with Chad Lowe; and Troy Duffy's Boondock Saints with Willem Dafoe and Sean Patick Flanery, in which Reedus is a trechcoat-wearing shotgun wielder (bad timing, he admits, in the wake of the Columbine shooting)
Plus, Reedus is coproducing a movie called Whitey, about white boys dancing across the US (not to be confused with Danny Hoch's recent Whiteboys)
In no danger of slowing down this year, Reedus has just been in Mexico City filming a feature with Courtney Love on the Beat Generation. His career isn't the only thing giving birth.
He's expecting a baby with his fiancee, Helena Christensen (yes, Nylon's Creative Director - more on that later) Indeed, Reedus may give Brad Pitt and Edward Norton a fight club of their own.
