Kelly McGillis is this year’s recipient of the QFest Icon Award, celebrating a career that includes memorable turns in the locally shot “Witness,” the megahit “Top Gun” and the Oscar-winning drama “The Accused. ” The event will be held 5 p.m. July 17 at the Ritz East.
On the phone from her home in Mohnton, Pennsylvania, McGillis said she looks back on her career with pride. “I always wanted to act, but it never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that I’d end up making movies,” she demurred. “I wanted to be a New York theater actress!”
Her first film, “Reuben, Reuben,” cast her as an ingénue and, while she made a striking first impression, it was the opportunity, not the role, that attracted her to the project. It wasn’t until she made “Witness” in 1985 opposite Harrison Ford that McGillis started to become a household name. That project got her a two-picture deal with Paramount, and helped her get cast in “Top Gun” with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer.
“That’s the number-one thing I’m remembered for,” McGillis said with an infectious laugh. “It’s amazing that people still watch that film and they still enjoy it.” The actress describes the experience of making “Top Gun” as “a blast. It was like I was the only girl at summer camp.” Fondly reminiscing about the film, she confessed, “I thought it would be a fun movie that no one would ever see.”
McGillis also admitted she was not psychically prepared for “Top Gun” to become such a big hit, and it was scary that suddenly everyone knew her name.
“Fame for fame’s sake is not something I ever aspired to,” she conceded. “That kind of attention screwed with my head in a big way and I don’t think I dealt with it well, or gracefully. But [the success] afforded me the chance to do theater and risky work that I wouldn’t have done otherwise.”
McGillis is honorably candid and realistic about her less-successful films. “Everyone comes to the table with the best of intentions and hopes it works out. You can’t blame any one person or thing. Sometimes it doesn’t gel.”
One of those projects was “The Monkey’s Mask,” a little-seen lesbian thriller based on Dorothy Porter’s novel, in which McGillis was cast as a poetry teacher. Asked if the film helped her to navigate her sexuality on screen, she responded, “It was much more about working with Dorothy Porter, than about my sexuality. I really liked the book. I was fascinated that they were going to do a film in contemporary-language poetry. I don’t think the film works, but to me [the project] was exciting.”
Likewise, McGillis said her arc on Showtime’s “The L Word” was also not influenced by her sexual identity. “I would love to tell you I had honorable motives, but I did ‘The L Word’ because I liked what the script had to say.”
The actress had been living with a woman for seven years at the time she guest-starred on “The L Word” in 2008 and was raising her two children. She came out publicly in a video the following year when a reporter asked her a point-blank question about her sexual identity.
“I had one of those moments of truth,” she recalled. “I thought, Do I say the truth or avoid the question? And I chose to say the truth. It wasn’t a huge thing. Anyone who knew me had known about my sexuality for the last 15 years. It hasn’t been a big secret. I lived openly, but I didn’t choose to talk about it publicly.
There’s this whole weird thing in our culture — knowing everything about everybody in the media. If you’re a postal worker, you don’t stand on the soapbox [and say you’re gay]. We have a weird standard in the public eye.”
McGillis said she waited to come out because she had children to protect. “When I moved from Key West to live in [what I learned was] a conservative area, my kids really struggled with what their friends and their friends’ parents [thought] of me and my relationship. My daughter was a cheerleader and she wouldn’t allow us to go to a football game. As a parent, I wanted to provide a safe environment. That is why I never felt it was important to say something, because the price of my children’s well-being was too great.”
Even now, after coming out, McGillis doesn’t understand the fascination with her — or anyone’s — sexuality. “If I were a plumber, no one would care.”
She now lives in an openly gay neighborhood, but resists holding her partner’s hand in public. “I don’t have to shove my beliefs down other people’s throats,” she explained. “I just have to be respectful of others.”
Actions, for the actress, do speak louder than words. “It’s how you live your life, it’s not what you say about your life. When are we, as a culture, going to get that? What I say has far less impact than who I am and how I behave.”
And McGillis is anxious to get back to acting in films, TV and theater. After taking a decade off to raise her children, she has two projects in the pipeline and is looking to do more.
“It’s challenging now because people think I’ve fallen off the face of the earth,” she acknowledged. “But it’s exciting. I won’t do plastic surgery, or color my hair — that has made it more difficult for me — but the trade-off is that I value my true self more than ever before, and I am no longer willing to sacrifice who I am to do what I want to do. I can be who I am today, and that’s the greatest act of courage I could ever do — be who I am. It’s difficult in our culture, especially in this profession.”