Heeb

“Right now is some of the most exciting stuff of my whole life,” beams Corey Feldman during a break at our photo shoot with him at Manhattan’s Sol Goldman Y. This past summer, Feldman, 33, starred in a tongue-in-cheek off-Broadway adaptation of Fatal Attraction. In the indie film The Birthday, currently on the festival circuit, he stars as a timid neurotic trapped at a bad party. This year he’s set to direct another film (his directorial debut was 1996’s straight-to-video comedy, Busted), and his band, Corey Feldman’s Truth Movement, recently released an album. Best of all, he’s happily married to model Susie Sprague, with a 1-year-old son, Zen.

After 15 years of dubious film choices (including 2001’s My Life as a Troll), it comes as little surprise that Feldman was eager to grace the pages of Heeb’s first-ever sex issue. “I think it’s hot!” he says, lighting up a Marlboro Light. “I wasn’t very sexy in Goonies. But as I got older, the level of women that were attracted to me—you know, really hot women come up to me and they’re like, ‘You’re so beautiful.’” So perhaps it’s not surprising that Feldman would end up tying the knot with the model, Sprague. “My wife is a very, very sexy lady,” he says.

Feldman’s confidence is impressive, considering the punches he’s taken in the media. Earlier this year, he agreed to a 20/20 interview only after journalist Martin Bashir promised the segment wouldn’t be about Feldman’s childhood friendship with Michael Jackson. Bashir filmed 36 hours of footage, which were edited into a 20-minute segment entirely about how Jackson introduced an underage Feldman to porn.

Then there was Feldman’s participation in the 2003 season of VH1’s Real World-with-D-listers, The Surreal Life, which he now considers a mistake. Feldman says he allowed the show’s producers to film his wedding to then-21-year-old Sprague because he was promised a classy, $100,000 affair. He was shocked when the MC Hammer-officiated ceremony came off as a crass publicity stunt. “They prostituted the wedding,” he says, “by making it seem like it was our idea to do it on television and making us look like cheesy TV whores!”

All this public degradation has made Feldman slightly press-shy. He admits, “I was kind of afraid of doing this interview because I didn’t want to get crucified…for lack of a better word.” On the other hand, he urgently wants to set the record straight on matters such as his relationship with Jackson—even though he never testified at the Jackson trial. “That whole thing needs to be cleared up,” he says. “There’s things that happened that made me uncomfortable—not then, but as an adult looking back.”

He also wants to let the world know that his days of getting high with Corey Haim are over. He’s been sober for 14 years. He devotes much of his time to charities and animal-rights groups like Farm Sanctuary. He attends High Holiday services. And he prays every day, often on his knees, “for the good of all beings, including animals.”

“I feel like when I pray to God there’s this world receptor radio and he’s listening to all these different stations,” he says. “I’m trying to tap in, like, ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’ I’m just trying to break through for a second.”

Could it be that God has taken notice? “It seems that now people are turning their receptors back to me,” he says. “For whatever reason, I’m back on the radar.”