Nicollette Sheridan had to juggle her Desperate Housewives schedule with filming Code Name: The Cleaner, an action comedy starring Cedric the Entertainer and Lucy Liu. The Desperate Housewives star was kept busy flying between Wisteria Lane and Vancouver, but she didn't mind the long days. "I think the adrenaline gets you through that, and especially when you're enjoying yourself it doesn't hit you that hard until it ends. Then it's like, 'Okay, I need that day off.'"
In New Line Cinema's Code Name: The Cleaner, directed by Les Mayfield (The Man, Blue Streak), Sheridan plays a beautiful and mysterious woman who may or may not be the wife of a man (Cedric the Entertainer) suffering from amnesia.
The Appeal of Code Name: The Cleaner: “Actually it came to me from the producers who sent me the script. When I read it and found out that Cedric [The Entertainer] was attached, naturally it was a shoe-in. Everything that I've ever seen him in I've found him to be quite brilliant. We did a read through actually here at this hotel and we had a big cast of people and when ’Jake’, Cedric's scenes and mine came up we just started riffing and playing and ad-libbing. There was a chemistry there that I felt could really work. It ended up being as much fun as I knew it was going to be once I walked out of the read through.”
The Scoop on the Sex Scene: Sheridan was surprised when told that Cedric the Entertainer had said Sheridan was much more comfortable with the sex scene than he was. “He said that? Ah, that's cute - that liar (laughing). No, I was petrified. It's horrible having to drop one's robe and having to be exposed in your knickers in front of Cedric and a crew of people, but Cedric was extremely supportive. Yes, he was very supportive. I wasn't sure what I was going to do once I turned on that music and had to dance over to that bed trying to extract information out of the amnesiac. So it was probably about 20 takes of just the craziest dances and Cedric can move like nobody. He is a brother that knows how to dance, and I was feeling extremely white after he started busting some moves. So, he'd just get back in the bed and I would do my thing and then he would get up and start imitating what I was doing. We had some pretty wild dances and I think that they settled on a quite tame one.”
Lucy Liu Says Her Code Name: The Cleaner Co-Star’s in Great Shape: To which Sheridan responded, “Oh, that's nice. She's in pretty damn good shape herself. Yes, we got together with the stunt coordinator and basically choreographed the fight. Both of us have a little foundation in martial arts. We tried to choreograph it in a way that looked very authentic and tough. People had been calling it the cat fight, which we just didn't like. It's not a hair-pulling, slapping, nail-breaking fight. This was combinations and roundhouses and throwing punches and dodging kicks. It was the real deal.”
On the Bubble Bath Fantasy Sequence: “That wasn't in the script initially. Cedric's character Jake has these fantasies throughout the film, and close to shooting the fight scene Cedric thought that his male fantasy could come in handy. He had the producers suggest that we have this bubble bath fantasy, not clothed, luring him into this world of bubbles. And Lucy and I thought, 'No. It's not going to happen.' But then on closer examination we thought of a way that it might work, picking the outfits that we wore and finding the humor in it since it is a theme throughout the film - these fantasies. It would be pretty appropriate to have a fantasy like us in a bubble bath together, so we shot it.”
On Seducing Cedric the Entertainer in Code Name: The Cleaner: “First of all, my character Diane in this film is a very straight-laced, hardcore, head of security badass. She had to think on her feet in order to try and get this information out of Cedric's character and comes up with this dance, having to seduce him into jogging his memory since supposedly that's what would get him to remember something. I think that being in character as well as exposing one's self in that way, as big as a Cadillac on the screen was a little intimidating. It's easier when it's a small box, even though those screens are getting quite large.”
Page 2: Nicollette Sheridan on Costumes and Desperate Housewives
