Call Her Cyclone Helen

All around Helen Hunt, the winds of change are swirling through the set of “Mad About You”--NBC’s state-of-the-heart Sunday night sitcom--but as the unmistakable howl of the blowup that is coming in the next scene gathers in the distance, Hunt remains perfectly still, seated on the show’s living room sofa, peering out from the calm in the gray-green eye of the storm.

The room is a blur of set dressers and technicians, eddying rapidly around her, while on the perimeter of the stage a cluster of Teamsters in black Harley-Davidson T-shirts looms like a dark funnel cloud. It is the first time that Hunt has been alone all evening, and for the next five minutes she does not appear to move a muscle, while inside she is completely reconstituting herself for the show’s dramatic final scene.

“The kind of acting that interests me most is when your center of gravity changes,” Hunt had said earlier. “It’s that subtle. The differences are emotional and energetic, rather than linear or tangible.”

Hunt’s center of gravity will undoubtedly get another jolt on Friday with the release of “Twister,” the summer’s first big action movie and her first chance at the brass ring of movie stardom. If what is standing outside the box offices next weekend is long and linear and what is sitting in the seats are tangible assets, the effect on Hunt and her 24-year acting career will be sudden and profitable.

At this moment, however, Hunt is rearranging her molecules, or whatever it is she does, to prepare for the final scene of a “Mad About You” that is something of a psychic twister. She and co-star Paul Reiser have at times aggressively pushed the boundaries of what a sitcom marriage can be during the show’s four seasons.

“Both Paul and I have wanted for years to really give them a scary challenge to try to overcome, I think because both of us know that’s how life is,” Hunt says of TV’s most lovable married couple, Paul and Jamie Buchman. “Part of what’s scary about relationships is how out of control they make you. Every time you think you’ve got a handle on them, it’s like life comes along and goes, ‘Oh, really? Well, f--- you.’ We try to honor that.”

Hunt’s most interesting relationship, and possibly the scariest, may well be with herself, for she is a relentless striver who frets endlessly over each scene until--like life--it’s not quite perfect.

“If we have an episode in which the couple feels out of balance, I want to be brave enough to have their jokes miss a little bit,” she says, “to have them misunderstand each other and end the scene not on a big laugh but on a slightly minor chord. We sacrifice a lot of big, funny lines because we feel like they’re cheating.”

From the moment she agreed to do “Mad About You,” Hunt has wanted to make sure the joke was not always on her.

“Her concern was that she was going to be Gabe Kaplan’s wife, that it was going to be a show about the comedian and the girl who stands there while he says funny things,” Reiser recalls. “She said very emphatically, ‘If I’m going to do this for a long time, you’ve got to know that I’m not quiet.’ ”

As a child actress, Hunt had played the daughter of Murray Slaughter on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” But neither Moore nor the archetype conceived by original “Mad About You” executive producer Danny Jacobson--Audrey Meadows of “The Honeymooners”--seemed a suitable role model to Hunt.

“It never occurred to me to aspire to be any of these women on TV, because I didn’t think I was going to do a TV series,” Hunt says. “I wanted to be Ingrid Bergman.”

She seems far more likely to become Barbara Stanwyck--the Stanwyck of “Meet John Doe,” “The Lady Eve” and “Ball of Fire”--particularly if “Twister” can turn her into a big movie star. Hunt will be 33 next month, the same age Stanwyck was when she made those edgy masterpieces. By then she will know which way the twister that determines an actor’s choices has turned.

“Moments like this are very vulnerable-making because you don’t know what it’s going to do,” she says. “People say, ‘Your life is going to change.’ That’s the one I’ve heard. What does that mean?”

Meanwhile, there is the little matter of the network sweeps period, which kicked off last week, and which Hunt, unlike some actresses, does not view as a national plebiscite on her own popularity.

“She doesn’t worry about Jamie Buchman being likable,” says John Pankow, who plays Reiser’s cousin Ira on the show. “Helen doesn’t know how to play false notes, and because of that, her performance is darker, it’s got more of an edge, and there’s a bigger payoff in the end.”

“She has set a new standard for this form of acting,” says Larry Charles, the show’s executive producer. “I don’t think that any other woman in television right now is doing what she’s doing. She’s brought a Meryl Streep-like layering to this character. She makes it look effortless, and yet when you watch her rehearse, you see how painstaking and complicated her process is to get there. All this thought, all this contemplation come out in a very spontaneous way, as if she’s making up the words in the scene.”

*

If actors like Streep can lose themselves so completely in a part that at some point the character herself seems to take over, Hunt works a less gaudy kind of magic, making the characters she plays lose themselves in her, as she did in last year’s “Kiss of Death.” It was that quality that attracted “Twister” director Jan De Bont to Hunt.

“I wanted someone who was a great actress but also was a real person, and I felt that so much with her,” says De Bont, who had been particularly taken with Hunt’s performance in “The Waterdance.” “She was so real in that picture,” De Bont says. “She didn’t appear to be an actress--she didn’t act. And on her television show, she’s like that too, like a real person. She doesn’t do all those gimmicky things that a lot of actors do on those TV shows. I really dread those things, they’re so boring. But Helen was totally natural.”

She was also totally surprised when De Bont and executive producer Steven Spielberg--two dynamos of effects-laden blockbuster entertainments--summoned Hunt to lunch one day to dangle before her the starring role in their latest adventure epic. Hunt was not allowed to read the script--De Bont wanted to describe the story to her--but she suspected the part was cut from the same cloth as the female paleontologist played by Laura Dern in “Jurassic Park,” a generic Hollywood role Hunt describes as “the scientist in the denim shirt.”

“I was planning on not working last summer,” Hunt says, “so I drove over to their office thinking, ‘Well, it’s kind of exciting to get to meet Steven Spielberg, but I’m not going to do this. I don’t care how fancy Steven and Jan De Bont are, I’m not going to be standing there in a pair of fake glasses and my denim shirt, reading off statistics about tornadoes.” Then they described this character--this complicated woman who sounded unlike any other woman I’d ever seen in a movie--in an action picture with no guns. And I left there going, ‘Oh, s---, I’m going to have to do this. I’m going to have to go to Oklahoma for four months and do this insane movie.”

Even more tantalizing was De Bont’s obvious determination that Hunt not be made to jump through any of the hoops Hollywood customarily places in front of actresses who have never carried a picture bigger than, say, “Quarterback Princess,” one of Hunt’s 16 made-for-TV movies.

“Jan, who I hadn’t met before, never wanted me to audition,” Hunt says. “He never wanted to meet me to see if I was right for the part. He seemed to know that before I knew it.” He certainly knew it long before executives at the two studios that were co-financing the film did. “I’m sure he had to do some fighting with Warner Bros. and Universal,” Hunt says. “I can’t imagine I was their first choice to star in this $72-million summer movie.”

The only reason De Bont wasn’t laughed off two lots for suggesting Hunt was that the only other picture the former cinematographer had directed--”Speed”--made a star of the far less well-known Sandra Bullock and grossed $337 million for 20th Century Fox.

Still. “At one point the studio started getting really worried,” De Bont recalls. “They said, ‘There are much better actresses, and bigger stars.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not what I want.’ They said I had to see other actresses, so I had to go through the motions of doing that. The other actresses would come, and I would tell them, ‘Listen, I have to do this, but you have to know that I really want Helen. I like you very much, but this movie’s for her.’ I felt very awkward going through the process, because there was no doubt in my mind that I just wanted her.”

And that was not the end of it. Hunt had to insist upon a binding stop date for filming so that she would be able to resume work on “Mad About You” in August.

“I spent weeks getting 10 calls a day from my agent about how impossible it was going to be,” she says. “They had never given a stop date to an actress on a movie this big. And Jan just fought and fought and fought. I’d get these messages on my machine. I’d get one message from my agent saying, ‘Look, you have to begin to let go of this. It’s a ridiculous longshot.’ And then the next message would be from Jan going, ‘Don’t give up hope. I know you’re born to play this part.”

Too much in control of herself to ever allow for wanting something she wasn’t already sure she could have, Hunt made no effort to campaign for the part, letting De Bont do the job for her.

“There was so much pressure from the studio,” De Bont recalls. “I was fighting so hard, and I kind of needed her help, too. I wanted her to become really enthusiastic for the part. You know, it doesn’t happen very often in big action-adventure movies that a female has the lead and is totally independent from the male character and doesn’t have to be rescued by a big male star. It was a unique part to play.”

Even after the role was hers and filming had begun in Oklahoma, Hunt seemed so overwhelmed by the physical peril she was being thrown into that, at times, she appeared unable to connect to the reckless joy of a woman who actually ran toward the storm.

“What I told Helen at the beginning of the movie was, ‘It’s really, really important that you love what you’re going to do in this movie, that you love seeing those tornadoes, for the movie to be successful,’ ” De Bont says. “ ‘Because if you don’t really love it, if you’re not having a good time, it will show in your eyes, and I’m going to see it on the screen. Even though you’re in the mud and the debris and the hail, and there’s no hotels and no restaurants here, I want you to love it.’ ”

Once Hunt overcame her terror of eating at Luby’s, she was ready for anything.

“It very quickly turned around, and she was extremely helpful,” says De Bont, who needed the actors to stand in a maelstrom of his making while he raised the stakes for special effects in films. “This is like a whole new generation of effects, many generations beyond ‘Jurassic Park,’ and they’re so photo-realistic you don’t even know they’re effects. So I never have shots of just tornadoes, because that would be boring. I wanted to see how the person in the foreground relates to what happens in the background.”

Usually, the person in the foreground--with a 300-mph wind goosing her in her background--was Hunt.

“It was extremely difficult having those giant wind machines and jet engines blowing, and helicopters over your head,” De Bont says. “It’s like a war zone. I knew it was going to be bad because I knew we were going to be in the mud and debris was going to be flying around her head. What I didn’t realize was that when you fly little leaves and hay through the wind machines, if a leaf flies in your mouth when you’re talking, you can’t talk anymore. At one point we had to give up with the debris and dust because the leaves got stuck in her throat. She would start coughing, and then couldn’t get the lines out. It wasn’t very pleasant. You can start throwing up, basically, and that’s not very good for the scene.”

If “Mad About You” requires Hunt to lead with her heart, “Twister” came mostly off the top of her head, usually by the quarter-inch. In one of the movie’s early scenes, she and co-star Bill Paxton dive into a ditch under a wooden bridge to escape a tornado.

“Each time we did the scene she had to stand up,” says De Bont, “and the number of times I saw her hit her head on that bridge was unbelievable. She had so many bumps on her head, we had to start hiding it. It was horrible. She looked like somebody was attacking her. She started crying because it really hurt, this giant bump. But she was so in the scene, she was kind of forgetting where she was.”

Through the often difficult transition from child actor to adult star, Hunt seemed rarely to lose her way. There were undoubtedly moments of navigational difficulty, some of which she overcame with the help of her father, acting coach and director Gordon Hunt (he has directed her in several episodes of “Mad About You”). At 16, she attended her first improvisational acting class, taught by the founder of the famed Groundlings improv troupe, Gary Austin, who wasted no time putting Hunt onstage with a group of other actors.

“I was walking around looking at people, and I suddenly heard this loud sobbing up on the stage,” Austin says. “She was lying in the fetal position against one of the backstage walls, crying like a baby. And I mean really crying out loud. I went over to her and asked what was the matter, and she said, ‘I’m scared.’ Which was pretty incredible considering she had been a pro since she was 9.”

The class lasted six hours, during most of which Hunt looked as if she were being pursued by a dark cloud. She swore over and over to herself that she would never come back.

“I was just so overwhelmed and intimidated,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘If I get through these six hours it will be a miracle.’ They put you through an obstacle course of things designed to make you look stupid, until you didn’t care anymore, until you realized it doesn’t matter.”

But control did matter to Hunt; it was precisely what mattered. And yet when she got home that night, she made the decision--rather startling for a 16-year-old--to turn and run recklessly toward the storm. “I decided if it scared me that much,” she says, “then that’s right where I should be.”

Giddy with the freedom she found in improvisation, Hunt explored a side of herself that no one would ever confuse with Jamie Buchman. Or Ingrid Bergman, for that matter. In the early ‘80s, Austin demonstrated his improv techniques at a press conference for 300 people at the Los Angeles Press Club.

“I had Helen get up and make a fool of herself, which is an exercise that we do,” he says. “I tell people, ‘Try to embarrass yourself as much as you can.’ And so she went onstage, and for 20 seconds she embarrassed herself thoroughly, and then she did something at the end of her 20 seconds that was one of the most embarrassing things a human being could do in front of an audience. I’ll let you use your imagination. It was quite radical.”

Although Jamie Buchman can at times be maddeningly button-down, Hunt’s own subversive streak was cultivated as a child during daily Lucille Ball marathons.

“When she was a little girl I used to have an argument with her dad about how many sitcoms she was allowed to watch,” says her mother, Jane Hunt. “I thought she should be reading books and studying. I’d say, ‘How can you watch four episodes of Lucy?’ But that’s uniquely Helen, that kind of absolute immersion in something she loves. And I guess she was just doing her homework after all.”

Helen began tagging along to a relative’s acting classes at age 7, hung around after the children’s sessions for the adult classes, and before long, her mother says, “the grown-ups started looking for scenes they could do with a child so they could work with her.” By the time she was 9, her acting coach had made an appointment for her to meet an agent. “I took her in, and she did a monologue for them, which they had apparently never seen a 9-year-old do,” Jane Hunt recalls. “These two women sat there with their mouths open, then they said, ‘Oh, yes, definitely, we’d like to handle her.’ ” Later that afternoon, she auditioned for a movie of the week called “Pioneer Woman.”

“Three days later we were in Canada,” her mother says. “The first scene she ever did, she was standing in this wheat field, and she was supposed to be chased down the hill by a bull. She looked beautiful in her little flower-of-the-prairie dress. I looked down at her and whispered, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ She looked me in the eyes and said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’

“She was never a kid, you know,” her mother adds. “There was never this little child there. There was always this mature person, an old soul. My mother came into the delivery room when she was born--there was no doctor there, the nurse just sort of caught her--and my mother looked down at this baby and said, ‘That’s the most independent child I’ve ever seen.’ That was always the feeling you got about her.”

Helen Hunt has been involved romantically for almost four years with actor Hank Azaria (“The Birdcage”), who has a recurring role on “Mad About You” as Nat the dog walker, and yet it is Hunt’s powerful projection of an independent spirit that seems to draw people in.

“It’s very funny,” she says. “I mean, I’m living with my boyfriend, and we have an incredibly solid relationship. And yet every article I read about myself says, ‘Ironic! She plays America’s favorite wife, and she’s not married.’ ”

That is among the least of Hunt’s intriguing contradictions, according to Reiser, who once described her beauty as “accessible,” only to learn later that “apparently the accessible beauty comment wasn’t what every chick wants to hear,” he says. Still, Reiser elaborates, “You can’t see it. You don’t know why or where it’s happening. It could be the smile, it could be the intensity, it’s just something that engages you. It’s not like ‘Gee, it’s the hair.’

“And the fun part when you get close to it,” he says, “is that you’re not always allowed right in there. There’s always another little element that she keeps for herself. But to me that’s intriguing and makes you want to scratch at the door a little more. She doesn’t work too hard making sure people like her. So there’s that sort of push and pull. That’s what makes someone so appealing, is when they’re clearly strong and yet clearly really very vulnerable. Both extremes are in there.”

It is the Bernoulli principle of personality: extremely reduced pressure in the center of the funnel, surrounded by winds that will more than muss your hair a little. Structures that aren’t ventilated properly when the pressure begins to drop often simply explode.

“I’m constantly trying to figure her out,” says Larry Charles. “There are so many facets that you can continually circle and not get them all.”

Charles is tracing concentric circles in the air with his forefinger, little cyclones of uncertainty. “The better I know her, the more layers I discover,” he adds. “She has a very strong sense of herself, but I think she’s in the process of discovering herself too. Helen’s kind of at a crossroads in her life, so she’s trying to figure it all out, just as we’re trying to figure her out.” Somebody be sure to leave a window open.