Fighting the Malibu Barbie Stereotype

Unlike most Hollywood stars who are looking for exposure, Téa Leoni is looking for a safe haven. With daughter West about to turn six, son Kyd in preschool, husband David Duchovny turning into a director and her own acting career just starting up again after a hiatus, her main concern isn't landing bit roles but finding a place other than California for the family to live.

"I don't understand the weather there, and the lighting is s**t. I've gotta get [the children] out of there," she says with the heightened impatience of an actress on a mission. "Malibu is not the spot for them."

And yet, as much as she loves New York City, where both she and Duchovny grew up, she's not sure that's the right choice either. "I don't want to play that roulette with my kids," she says while staring out a window into the beautiful sunshine of a Manhattan spring day as traffic blares below. She kicks her aqua cowboy boots up on a windowsill and leans back, causing a silver-dollar-sized cameo tattoo of Snow White to peek out between the top of her jeans and her blue wool sweater.

Judging by Duchovny's new semiautobiographical film, House of D, which is just now hitting theaters even though it was finished two years ago, the city can be a dangerous and wonderful place to grow up in. Duchovny paints a romanticized picture of the West Village in the 1970s, even though tumultuous things are going on with the characters. And smack in the middle of the residential neighborhood is a women's house of detention ‑- hence the title ‑- where the inmates can hang through the bars and talk to people on the street. (Read more about the film in Beth Pinsker's review.)

From the start of that project, Leoni's role was more supporting than starring. She stayed in the kitchen of their Malibu home and waited while Duchovny drilled through page after page in the office over the garage. He'd come back in every 20 minutes or so with more for her to read. "I fed him," she says.