Tom Arnold Carving Out A New Role For Himself
Good luck follows Tom Arnold these days like tabloid writers used to.
The 36-year-old ex-husband of superstar comedian Roseanne just married Julie Champnella, a young woman who by all reports is as well-adjusted as Arnold’s ex is, well, multifaceted.
Meanwhile, the actor’s movie career is going great guns and, unlike his decent if unsuccessful stabs at TV stardom, it’s clearly the result of his own talent. After winning some of the best notices associated with last summer’s action hit “True Lies,” Arnold has been working nonstop.
He plays an obnoxiously enthusiastic family man in the current romantic comedy “Nine Months.” He’s headlining the upcoming comedies “Big Bully” and “The Stupids,” and he soon will begin work on the feature “Carpool.”
Arnold’s name even has been replaced in TV talk show monologues by his “Nine Months” co-star Hugh Grant’s, who got caught with a hooker a few weeks before the movie opened. Talk about your stroke of luck; now no one’s even mentioning the amount of time the two men spend kissing each other on screen.
“It was nice; it was really nice,” Arnold quipped, answering a question that would have been on the lips of millions not too long ago. In the film, Arnold’s boorish Marty misses no opportunity to give mouth-to-mouth to Grant’s uptight Samuel.
“Actually, it hurt ‘cause I kissed him so hard. And he has an overbite, and so do I.”
All joking aside, Arnold could not be more grateful for the way things have turned around for him so quickly since his acrimonious split with Roseanne.
“It’s a year later and everything’s better, just as I hoped it would be,” Arnold said. “Things change. I feel I’ve been given a second chance with my whole life.”
Arnold met Champnella exactly one year ago, at a birthday party for comedian David Spade at the Sunset Strip’s Viper Room. Despite the setting, Champnella, a student from Michigan who was attending with her comedy-writer brother, impressed Arnold with her decidedly non-Hollywood look and easygoing, down-to-earth attitude.
Even though he jokes that her father threatened to come get her when he heard they were dating, Arnold vowed to keep their whirlwind courtship on a much more even keel than his tempestuous and very public relationship with Roseanne had been.
“I don’t like being alone, and I don’t like running around,” said Arnold, the eldest of seven children raised in Iowa. “The whole point of dating is to meet that one person, so when I met somebody who I connected with right away and was crazy about, in spite of what common sense and my therapist might say, I wasn’t going to let that go.
“And I have been so lucky, ‘cause it could have been a disaster.”
Like the last time, perhaps. Despite the double-edged fame and career advantages his first marriage brought, it also generated endless media scrutiny and collapsed in a heap of very public recrimination.
While he expresses a seemingly genuine desire to let bygones be bygones, Arnold readily admits that he and Roseanne could have handled a lot of things differently.
“I think that all of the attention was a strain on that marriage,” he said. “But I also think you can participate in making that a strain by the way you live your life.
“There are a lot of famous people who aren’t in the papers all the time for personal reasons.”