THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 10, 1996 TAG: 9605100080
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Bonko
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
TIME MARCHES on, my friends. Melissa Joan Hart of Nick at Nite is out of her teens and playing a character on NBC Monday night that would shock her perfect, tofu-eating family of ``Clarissa Explains It All.''
In ``Twisted Desire,'' airing at 9 p.m., she plays a bad seed named Jennifer who talks her lover into murdering her parents as they sleep.
Clarissa takes a lover?
Yes. He pumps gas when he's not pumping bullets into people.
Perfect daughter Clarissa offs her mom and dad?
Yes. She hates them because they put a curfew on her that cuts down on her social life. She has to be home by 11! Pop had the audacity to drag her away from a party when she violated curfew.
Totally mortifying.
Not only that. Mom and Pop (played by Daniel Baldwin and Isabella Hoffman, who were once an item on ``Homicide: Life on the Street'') order Hart's character to stop wearing clothes to school that reveal her navel.
Now there are grounds for murder if I ever heard any.
Hart broke out of the almost angelic role of Clarissa earlier this year when she starred in ``Sabrina the Teenage Witch'' on Showtime. ABC will pick it up as a weekly series, perhaps in the fall of 1996.
``Sabrina'' is a grown-up role, to be sure, but for Hart, it wasn't much of a stretch from playing Clarissa. Sabrina is cute. Sabrina is reasonably wise. She wears funky clothes. The world loves Sabrina.
That's Clarissa all over again.
Hart's role in the NBC movie is something else again. In time, you'll learn to hate Jennifer Stanton, who manipulates family, friends and lovers - she's involved with two boys - to get her way.
Hart looks so-o-o-o-o nasty when she narrows her eyes, pulls her lips into a thin, straight line, and urges her boyfriend to execute her generally decent parents.
``She's phenomenally calculating,'' says Hart.
There's a $1-million-plus inheritance waiting for Jennifer. That's the motive.
Explain it all, Clarissa. Why take a role so dark as Jennifer Stanton?
``I wanted to do something totally different from anything I've done in the past. When I was Clarissa and Sabrina, I felt like I was acting in a cartoon. I thought it would interesting to play somebody who is just plain mean and evil,'' said Hart not long ago from her home in Man-hattan. ``Playing a bad girl is a lot of fun.''
She attends classes at New York U. when she's not before the cameras. When ``Clarissa Explains It All'' wrapped up after five seasons, Hart took almost a a year off to see Europe and study art in France.
Taping ``Clarissa Explains It All'' wore her out, said Hart. She was in almost every scene of every show. The taping went on for hours because the producers used special effects. It takes time to do it right.
``While I miss the actors I worked with, I can't say I miss doing the show or that I miss Orlando, where we taped. I don't miss being on the set from 9 in the morning until 9 at night. The money, attention and friendships I made doing that show were great. But it was hard work to do the same line 12 or 13 times.''
In contrast, working in a TV movie is a breeze, said Hart. It's fast. You learn a few pages of script. You sit in your trailer until they call you. You tape. It's all over in a few hours. You go home at a decent hour.
You don't have to carry a TV movie all by yourself.
``And it's great to look like an angel on screen and have the heart of a devil,'' she said.
Because she is so ``bad and gross'' in the movie, to use her own words, Hart is urging the kids who watch her in re-runs of ``Clarissa Explains It All'' to stay away from the NBC movie. ``If the kids do watch, I hope they realize that it's all make-believe, and that I'm more of a fun person like Clarissa than the awful Jennifer.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Showtime
Melissa Joan Hart
by CNB