Reinventing Rebecca Romijn
By George Gurley
Photo Credit: James White
But it's not nonstop bliss chez Romijn/O'Connell. They've each got their idiosyncrasies, and that's taken some getting used to. Consider O'Connell's BlackBerry obsession. "We had been traveling for, like, five weeks," Romijn says. "And he had just been texting away. So I told him I was kicking his friends off of our vacation. And I took the BlackBerry, walked into the kitchen, put it in the sink and turned on the water, then crossed my arms and watched it die. And he walked in and goes, 'What are you doing?!' And he pulled it out and spent the next five hours taking it apart and drying every single little piece with a hair dryer. He eventually got it to work again, except for the texting part. And I was like, 'Good! That was the only part that was bothering me.'" Was he angry? "Honestly, no. He was like, 'I can't even get mad at you because there was something kind of awesome about it.'" Then there are the hours O'Connell will put in watching sports on TV. "The way it sounds makes my skin crawl," Romijn says. "It's the graphics, the interstitial music-dung-dung-dom-dong, rarrrgh! I find it so awful to listen to. My brain just shuts off when I hear somebody talking about it. It just sounds like 'wonk-wonk-wonk.'"
She pauses, takes a bite of her chicken enchilada. "He also just revealed himself to be a pretty serious gamer, which I did not know," Romijn says. "Video games. I actually just came home the other night, and he had his laptop next to him on the couch, and he'd obviously been like that for the past three hours. We're all allowed to have guilty pleasures-I unwind watching crappy reality shows; he gets to play video games. But I came home, and he had his laptop open next to him, and he was in a chat room asking some pimply 12-year-old in Japan how to get to the next level of some game he was playing."
I ask Romijn, who calls herself an "easy cry," if she's in therapy. "Yes. I love it," she enthuses. "Everybody in my family went to therapy; I grew up so therapist-savvy. The first few I went to, I actually knew how to work them a little bit. Ha ha! Even when I went to couples therapy a few years ago, I knew what to say to get the therapist on my side. So I had to find one who was two steps ahead of me. And this woman-I love my therapist. She can read me like a book." Romijn orders another Dos Equis.
I tell her I'd read somewhere that she only drinks on weekends."Oops," she says. "Today's Saturday, right? No, Wednesday . . . oopsy!" I give her a pass-the girl's earned it. She's taken her shot, made her mistakes, learned from them-and now here she sits: in love, on a hit show, and still gorgeous as ever. As she finishes her enchilada, Romijn, I think, is reading my mind. "I've always sort of been a hustler," she laughs. "I've worked my butt off. And I feel like I. Have. Paid. My. Dues."
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