An Interview by Robert Abele
The secret to Alyssa Milano's Charmed life? Hard work, and lots of it. Now with her hit show and a burgeoning Internet business, there's no question that she's the boss.
For the first six hours, she was completely nauseated. Here she'd made several movies, been on two successful television series (Who's the Boss?, Melrose Place) and worked as an actor consistently for 20 years, and yet the first day of filming on WB's Charmed was the most nerve-wracking ever for Alyssa Milano.
Not only was she cast as the youngest Halliwell sister, Phoebe, a mere three days before she had to report to the set for work on the first episode, she was also replacing the actress from the pilot (Lori Rom, who left for personal reasons). Plus, her costars Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs had been best friends for seven years. Milano was pretty sure she was about to find out what it was like to feel like a third wheel. "Oh, God," she recalls thinking, "I'm going to be the total loner and have to stay in my trailer. I can't even come near them."
In the end it was Milano's approach to the role that broke the ice. "Phoebe was sort of a brooding, serious, rebellious character, and I think from the first day it was apparent that's not who I am," says Milano with a laugh, collapsing into a chair minutes after a photo shoot. A relaxing slump undoing hours of stillness for the camera. "[Shannen and Holly] were happy that I was bringing a new energy, so they made me feel really comfortable."
Aaron Spelling, the ever-grateful producer of Charmed, was the one who made the call to Milano in July 1998 and asked to book the next nine months of her life. (The actress was in Hawaii at the time, shooting an episode of the short-lived ABC revival of Fantasy Island.) "She brings an I-can-do-this attitude to Phoebe," he says. "What she did was step in and kick the hell out of it."
The programming spell cast by this coven certainly reduced executive stress levels at WB when Charmed, despite the network's wall-to-wall Felicity blitz that year, became an unexpected hit. Now, as its second successful season (it's WB's second-highest-rated series) winds to a close with an elaborate episode directed by Doherty, the show has become impossible to envision without Milano's delicately sexualized brand of humor and vivacity. She won't say much about the final episode (airing May 18, 9 P.M./ET) except that Combs's character "goes away, and there's that feeling that she might not come back," and that Phoebe will develop a new, "active" power.
Milano, 27, has fought to rescue the jobless Phoebe from being a housebound layabout, and she takes credit for the character's return to school this season. "I think part of the cool thing of the show is having to keep this secret from friends, and college seemed like a good arena for that," says Milano, who didn't go to college. But she sees another difference between herself and her character: "[Phoebe is] less driven. A little flighty. I never went through a slacker period because I've been working consistently since I was 7 years old." After stating this admirable fact, she raps three times on the underside of a nearby table and whispers, "Knock on wood." When a reporter repeats this knuckled action on a table's surface, however, Milano offers a correction: "You have to knock on wood up, to let the wood sprites out." She smiles reassuringly. "I just learned that."
The show's bubbly tales of empowerment witchcraft may have increased her belief in superstitions, but Milano (who was reared in Staten Island, New York) knows firsthand that there's no magic in the perseverance it takes to be a child star. Her musician father, Thomas, and fashion-designer mother, Lin, cheerily accepted their firstborn's love of hamming it up. But when 7-year-old Alyssa turned to her parents after seeing "Annie" on Broadway and announced "I can do that," their response, Lin admits, was a gently dismissive "Uh-huh. Let's go out for ice cream."
Cut to an open-call audition for "Annie" months later--an afternoon time filler improvised by Alyssa's baby sitter--where Milano, after taking the stage, found herself one of the kids chosen for a touring version of the musical, cast to play orphans Kate and July. That breakthrough was, Lin says, "very frightening, the realization that we can only add support. We can't hold her back."
Mom dropped her business to travel with her daughter, and the two laid a groundwork for family soundness--home-cooked meals, mother staying out of the stage wings--that has kept Milano centered and her mother functioning as Milano's manager to this day.
Life on the road even produced a brother, Cory, who was conceived mere months after 9-year-old Alyssa had requested a baby brother--and a flute--as gifts to mark the tour's end. (Cory, now 17, lives at home in a Los Angeles suburb with Lin and Thomas, who've been married for 32 years.) Of her father, Milano says, laughing, "He's got a better career than I do," and she notes that he's worked on such films as "The Insider," The Hurricane" and "Girl Interrupted" as a supervising music editor. "It's really important to him just to be the dad, and I love him madly for that," Milano says.
She holds her former TV dad, Tony Danza, in equally high esteem, although her recollections of the period that catapulted her to child stardom--when she played his daughter, Samantha Micelli, on the ABC comedy Who's The Boss? from 1984 to 1992--are slightly fuzzy. "I sort of remember those as the lost years, because how much do you remember from when you were 11?" she says. "By the time I was old enough to say, 'I'm going to remember this moment,' I was ready for it to be over, because it's hard to do anything for that amount of time," she adds. "But it was the perfect way to grow up in this business, because it was stability, and I was around people every day [whom] I loved."
But what did she do for an encore when Who's The Boss? ended and she found herself unemployed at age 19? If Milano had possessed Phoebe's power of premonition then, she might have been jolted by a vision of unremarkable TV-movies, an eye-opening Bikini magazine spread in which she wore only mud, and direct-to-video erotica. "I saw somebody who was totally willing to take the risk," Anne Goursaud recalls about directing Milano--a love-scene novice--clad and unclad, in "Embrace of the Vampire" and "Poison Ivy 2: Lily" in 1995. "It's like losing your virginity," says Goursaud. "So the first time is like an acting exercise: 'OK, let's see if I can do that.' But she really is a consummate professional."
Milano claims to have no regrets about this soft-core detour--it definitely laid any child-star vibes to rest--but she admits she would have preferred more mainstream roles. "If I had my choice between 'Embrace of the Vampire' and 'Beetlejuice,' I would have done 'Beetlejuice,' believe me," she says, laughing. "I did what I had to do to continue working."
Work she did. In 1997, she got a call from superproducer Spelling, who offered her a one-year stint on Melrose Place playing Jennifer Mancini; that association would eventually lead to Charmed. She also became an Internet entrepreneur. Naughty stills from the soft-core movies had come back to haunt Milano in the for of Web-page fodder, and a rash of faked nude photos began appearing as well. In 1998, she sued many of the sites that had posted the pictures without her permission, and began collecting judgments, eventually winning close to half a million dollars. "I felt like a pioneer," she says of the much-publicized lawsuits.
As a result, Lin Milano started CyberTrackers, a company that watches out for unauthorized uses of celebrity images on the Internet (often nudes or faked nudes) for celebrities who request the service, then sends out cease-and-desist orders to persuade the sites to take the photos down. Alyssa, meanwhile, created a flip-side business, Safesearching.com, which designs and protects authorized Web sites for celebrities by ensuring that only client-approved photos are posted and that any fan-site links don't contain porn. Aside from obvious clients such as Milano's Charmed costars, Safesearching.com has created official home pages for Ally McBeal's Portia de Rossi, Will & Grace's Eric McCormack and Ladies' Man's Sharon Lawrence. Milano is now expanding her Web business interests further, through a new joint venture with Internet company Keen.com that will facilitate phone calls between fans and celebs.
Even with her new Internet ventures, though, acting remains Milano's first love, and with Charmed, she's made a resurgence as a television star. A professed homebody with three dogs, four cats, eight birds and a Victorian garden to tend, Milano was initially hesitant to return to a series, but then she began to recall how much the steadiness of the work suited her. She'd missed "that feeling of being able to go to your house and get in your own bed and not have to worry about locations," she says. "They take really good care of actors on television shows."
Milano's own hospitality is well known, too, and is evident in the after-work parties she throws at her Beverly Hills home, energized of late by a karaoke machine she received from her mother last year for her birthday. But don't expect Milano to warble, even though her achievements include having five platinum albums in Japan. "I'm the best cheerleader," she says. "I actually like to mix my friends from different parts of my life, so to see my friend who I've known since I was 14 talking to Shannen, that's beautiful."
Lin Milano, orchestrator of her own weekly Sunday feasts for family and friends, explains, "We're Italian, so hosting is part of our blood." When will Alyssa take over the Sunday dinners?" I've made the sauce once, and it was very good, but it was not like my mom's," Milano says. A pause. "Probably when I have my family."
Any hopes she had of starting a family in the near future were dashed last December when her marriage to musician Cinjun Tate, who fronts the alternative rock band Remy Zero, broke up after less than a year. Milano's official response is careful but forward-looking. "It was a very hard time for me, but I felt so incredibly blessed in every other area of my life that it was hard for me to be sad," she says.
Charmed actor Greg Vaughan, who plays the sisters' neighbor hunk, Dan, says that between Milano's sex appeal, her "overwhelming kindness" and her easy chumminess with guys--she's a basketball fan and encourages raiding of her well-stocked fridge at home--she'll never lack for suitors. "Every time my buddies call, they want me to introduce them to her, because she's amazing," he says.
Not that Milano has time to rebound romantically. "I'm so busy," she says. "It's a workaholic thing, not knowing how to be idle." Indeed, her hiatus will find her corralling celebrities for her Web businesses before leaving for a 10-week shoot in South Africa for an Italian television miniseries called Diamond Hunter, in which she'll play a young lawyer who's addicted to painkillers.
The day after she gets back, Charmed starts up again. So even today, having wrapped up a season of work barely 24 hours earlier, she can't quite get her head around the idea of slowing down. "As soon as I completely let go, I'm going to get sick," she says, laughing.
