Stripes Star "Flashes" Back
When late-'70s/early-'80s Hollywood "It" girl
P.J. Soles heard that an extended-cut
Stripes DVD was being released, she braced herself for what was going to come out with the reinserted footage of her character, military policewoman Stella Hansen: her boobs.
"When the original movie [hit theaters] in '81, I was relieved; I went, 'Oh, shoot! They didn't use [every second that I was topless]!'" the
Rock 'n' Roll High School and
Private Benjamin costar tells TVGuide.com with a laugh. "But obviously, I was there when they shot it, so I knew what was filmed.
"Now that I'm older, it's like, 'Oh, good. I'm glad [I let it all hang out on camera],'" the lovely 55-year-old mom adds. "'It's proof, kids! I was once young and hot!' I don't want my nephews in Arizona to see it yet, though."
Perhaps it's not surprising that the actress is able to laugh off the added exposure she receives in the long version of the
Bill Murray Army comedy. Her memories of the shoot are too sweet to let a
Tara Reid moment sour them. "[During the stovetop love scene with Murray], my reactions were genuine," she insists. "It was completely ad-libbed. We were supposed to be on a hill outside watching fireworks, and the only original line was, 'You're very pretty... for a cop.'
"But," she continues, "time was short. It was 3 am, and they didn't want to change locations, so we were stuck in the house. [Grasping for inspiration], I said, 'I don't know... Let's just go in the kitchen.' Bill opened up the refrigerator and took out a carrot. I said, 'Wait, wait! Let's set up the camera first!'" And the rest is celluloid history.
A veteran of
Carrie and
Halloween (and soon to be seen in
Rob Zombie's
House of 1,000 Corpses sequel,
The Devil's Rejects), Soles has equally vivid recollections of
Stripes ingenue
Sean Young. "I used to call her Sean
Very Young," she admits. "It was her first movie, and it was funny [to watch her], because whenever the director [
Ivan Reitman] would yell cut, Sean would go, 'That was pretty good. But Bill, are you sure you want to do the line-reading like that?'
"He would pretend to wack her over the head, and I just thought, 'You're going to tell
Bill Murray how to do his lines?' We all thought that was pretty funny," she concludes, "so I would say, 'Paging Sean Very Young... please come to the set. We need acting lessons!'"
