Poor Stephen Rebello was tasked with interviewing a pre-Clueless Alicia Silverstone for the March 1995 issue of Movieline Magazine. At the time, Silverstone was best known for her Aerosmith videos and The Crush. In the interview, she gets very defensive about her sexy image and very catty about any other actress whose name is mentioned.
“People think, ‘Wow, you’re an actress, so people must be really nice to you and kiss your ass.’ Nobody kisses my ass. On the contrary, people are mean; make me feel like a nobody. Take, like, Leonardo DiCaprio’s whole group, those kids that do the Young Hollywood scene. Now that I know Leo, I know he’s really separate from them, but a lot of girls in that crowd say things about me like, ‘Why is she getting all these parts? She just uses her sex, that’s why.’ If they only had a clue how much I’m constantly avoiding that. I’ve only made love with one person in my whole life. I don’t really like men–there’s so much machoness–I just like them to be my friends. Guys are all trying to be like, ‘Screw as many girls as you can.’ They’re so ridiculous, so pathetically insecure. That’s probably why my favorite thing in the world is a box of fine European chocolates which is, for sure, better than sex.”
Such pronouncements, uttered by Alicia Silverstone with the solemn conviction that only a just-turned-18-year-old can bring to a conversation, could deflate this great nation’s collective tumescence for the girl who played the jailbait temptress of The Crush, and then slinked her way through three popular Aerosmith videos. Well, almost deflate it: I mean, have you seen her in that movie or those videos? All that and the MTV Movie Awards she’s won have brought Silverstone exposure that has put her in a place where she’s now starring in four more films due out this year. And, she’s about to tear into the sought-after centerpiece role in director Amy Heckerling’s big-studio comedy Clueless, a Fast Times at Ridgemont High-type spin on Jane Austen’s Emma. Silvers tone has become, arguably, this season’s most desirable Hollywood teen dream girl.
Blame it, if you like, on the way she looks – Silverstone could be the secret offspring of ’60s superstarlets John Phillip Law and Sue Lyon–but people do wonder if, as the old James Brown song put it, Silverstone’s used what she’s got to get just what she wants. “Every one of those movies I auditioned for, every job, I worked my ass off to get” asserts Silverstone over breakfast at the Chateau Marmont, “If people look at what I do and go, ‘She’s just really sexy and pretty, that’s all,’ that’s total bullcrap. How many millions of pretty girls have been in videos without ever going on to do a lot of movies? What studio executive cares about pretty girls who appear in music videos? You don’t get to carry a whole film unless people see that you’re able to carry off a whole film. Period.”
Agreed, but surely Silverstone has noticed the attention men in this town have been all too willing to pay her. ”I do notice it.” she says. “I mean, some guys are so obvious. Old men, older men, do it all the time, they’re always looking at me. There’s weird stuff out there and I sense it very fast, so I usually run the other way. I’m not very sociable. I really stay away from it. Many people right now tend towards making me appear the ‘sex girl’–people just know me from one movie and the videos. When my next couple of movies come out they’ll go, ‘Wow, she’s not a psycho crazy person or a tough brat.'”
Why is Silverstone so eager to throw off the siren image she’s known for? Didn’t giving off heat waves in their earliest roles do nothing but good for Demi, Julia, Patricia, Winona, et al.? What’s wrong with being thought of as sexy in an industry that feeds on it? “I’m also very good at doing a thousand other parts,” she demurs. “If people just go, “Wow, you’re really sexy’ and don’t get anything else about me, it’s limiting. Even shooting the pictures for this article, at one point they got this idea to put me in a little slip with red, red lipstick: Miss Sex Kitten, right? I immediately felt so bad, like a victim. Well, I just did this thing called The Forum, have you heard of it? It’s, like, this education.”
I tell her that I have indeed heard of the three-day intensive training, which some have compared to such dig-down-into-yourself self-help marathons of the past as est. She explains, “So, through The Forum, I’d just gotten that, you know, ‘You’re not a victim.” I know now I have to speak up about feeling victimized. When I first came to Hollywood, I trusted everybody and really got screwed left and right. I’m a real people-pleaser, you know? In my work I can be that sexy girl because I’m an actress, but it’s not me. The Forum really helped me a lot with that stuff. And that’s where I really met Leo.”
Hmmmm, Leo again? Leonardo DiCaprio, the Oscar-nominated star of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and the cover subject of this issue, seems to be cropping up regularly in Silverstone’s conversation this a.m., and I’m getting curious. Leaving aside what she’s just told me about how all men are dogs, is she dating DiCaprio or anything? “I don’t know him well, I just think he’s pretty cool,” she explains. “I met him at The Forum, because he was taking the education at the same time I was. I had no idea he was going to be there. We had met before, like, 15 times and everybody thought we were friends, but we were just like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ I’ve finished The Forum but Leo is going to do the advanced course. So, last night, Leo and this wonderful woman, Caitlin– who is also in The Forum–and I went out to Denny’s. These people started bugging me. This guy comes over, probably because one of his friends sent him over, and says to Caitlin. ‘Are you the girl in The Crush?’ He didn’t even get it right, but Caitiin, all smiley, says, ‘No,’ and I just looked at him. I was in this bitchy mood because [of] what [I’d been] dealing with in class, discussing how to get through stuff exactly like this.
“People approach you and they don’t really get that you’re a human,” she explains. “People think you’re an object.”
“Anyway.” she continues, “so, we’re trying to eat our stuff, then this totally loud, obnoxious guy turns to me and goes, ‘Oh, so you were in the movie,’ and I’m all bitchy, going, ‘Yeah.’ And he’s saying, ‘I’m really glad to meet you, you’re a wonderful person,’ but I’m like. ‘How do you know that?’ He says. ‘Could my friend get your autograph?’ and I said, ‘If your friend wants an auto¬graph, he should come ask for it, but not when we’re eating, okay?'”
Silverstone covers her eyes with her hands, lets out a wail and shakes her head.
“After he left, I was like. ‘God, I was mean to him,’ when, actually, I was fine. But that’s the thing: I always feel like I’m not being nice enough. Leo, who gets this stuff–and worse–happening to him all the time, was, like, ‘Get over it, Alicia. You were a little bitchy, but you just have to be clear with people like that and get it over fast.’ He told me this story about some guy who came up to him and said, ‘Weren’t you some guy in some retarded thing?’ These people are so unclear. I mean, if I weren’t in acting and I saw Michael Jackson, I’d go up to him but I’d at least have my thoughts together before I opened my mouth.”
It sounds to me as if she’s having a bumpy adjustment to being recognized, sought after, desired. “Desired,” she says, repeating the word, rolling her eyes, laughing now.
“Come on,” I remark, only half-jokingly, “didn’t The Crush win you an MTV ‘Most Desirable’ Something-or-Other award to prove you’re the sexiest thing in movies?” Silverstone, suddenly unamused, clarifies the matter like a shot. “I didn’t win ‘Most Desirable Female,’ Janet Jackson did. I won the better awards: ‘Best Villain’ and ‘Breakthrough Performance.’ When I noticed that John Malkovich from In the Line of Fire was in the ‘Villain’ category with me, though, I thought, ‘This is pretty interesting.'”
I ask whether getting up onstage at the MTV Awards, and suddenly being so instantly recognizable to so many people so early in her life, has thrown open to her the doors of the best clubs. ‘The only time I go out is if I’m specifically invited to a party. Like, I was invited to Tori’s birthday at the House of Blues last May, but I haven’t been back there since.” That’s Tori Spelling–don’t you know?–the mention of whom makes me wonder whether Tori’s producer pa, Aaron, didn’t ask Silverstone, post-Crush, to play a role in one of his glossy teen sex soaps, like “Beverly Hills, 90210” or “Models Inc.”? “He did,” she says. “On ‘Beverly Hills, 90210,’ when he needed a new girl, he asked me. I was so flattered. I’ve seen him in his little blue robe with his little cigar and he is so cute, but I just didn’t think it was right for me. I don’t know if he drinks or not, but he seemed really drunk at Tori’s party and–[though] he already knew I wasn’t going to do it–he said, ‘I really want you to be in my show.’ I think it would have been really detrimental because I want to do [feature] films. Also,” she says with a shrug of her shoulders, “I just don’t think that there’s a lot of acting going on in that show.”
Wasn’t the offered role the replacement for Shannen Doherty, which Spelling reportedly had at one point also approached Drew Barrymore? “I’m sure he asked her first,” she observes of the actress to whose pouty looks hers have been compared. The comparisons, she admits, “used to be a thing with me because, work-wise, Drew Barrymore isn’t somebody that I look up to. I was kind of disappointed to be compared to somebody who is nothing like me.”
So she passed up Spelling, but have there been any movie roles which she tried for but missed out? “I would have loved to have been in Little Women,” she admits, “and they told me they would have loved me, but my age was off. Actually, I’m happy I didn’t get it because I heard that they had a miserable time shooting it. On My Father, The Hero, I didn’t get it because I was a little bit heavy compared with the girl who did get it, but that was a blessing because the girl runs around in a bathing suit throughout the whole thing. It was the worst movie I’ve ever seen. And the girl was really bad.”
Starlets cannot live by work alone, so I ask about her romantic life. “To be in a relationship with a man is difficult,” explains Silverstone. “Even with Moize.” Moize Chabbouh is the 28-year-old French hairdresser with whom Silverstone has been close since she relocated to Hollywood from San Francisco some three years ago. Given her feelings about men and sex, what’s the deal with the two of them? “I’m nobody’s trophy, that’s for sure.” she asserts, easing into the issue. “Right from the beginning, I was a very good girl. I met him when I was 15 and we didn’t kiss until six months after we met. I think it would be awful to sleep around, especially with people you weren’t in love with, because I don’t think sex is for anything but someone with whom you’re completely in love. I know a lot of 30-year-old women who need to have sex and say, ‘I just wanna get laid.’ I’m like. ‘Get over that.'”
At some point Silverstone and Chabbouh became involved enough for Silverstone to accept a role in a French-made film–Le Nouveau Monde, the new movie from Alain Corneau, the director of the art-house favorite, Tons lea Matins du Monde–so she could travel to France and meet her sweetie’s family. “I play the pretty blonde girl, which is boring,” she says of the movie, “but I wanted to go to France because Moize hadn’t seen his family in eight years,” How’d she like France? “I hate Parisians, they are so evil, I want to go back there with a gun and shoot every one of them. Their city is so beautiful but the Parisians are so mean and have such attitudes. But it was worth it because we got to spend time with Moize’s family. They don’t have any money, but they’re the richest family I’ve ever met.”
And how did they take to meeting a brand-new Hollywood princess? “Princess,” she repeats, laughing. “My boyfriend calls me ‘princess,’ but I think of myself more along the lines of ‘monkey’ and ‘retard.’ I don’t think of myself as a princess, just a really normal, really weird Jewish girl. I am the farthest thing from being a Jewish-American princess. There was no JAP in my mother, an amazing woman from whom I got my heart and warmth. She hated people who were princesses, and in temple she would point out, ‘she’s a princess,’ or ‘there goes a princess.’ Because I was always giggling and didn’t study at all in Hebrew school, nobody thought I’d be able to handle my bat mitzvah. But the cantor said to me, you’re the one young Jewish girl who definitely, with all the success and things you have, is not a little princess.'”
Silverstone certainly could have acted the princess had she wanted to–the poor little rich girl variety. “I’ve been on my own, basically, since I was born,” she says, trying hard to sound matter-of-fact about her well-to-do, peripatetic parents. “My mom and dad would either be working, traveling together for months or, because they’re both English, they’d go home. So I grew up on nannies.” She quit high school in her sophomore year and, after taking acting classes in San Francisco, Silverstone did a couple of commercials, got gigs on shows like “The Wonder Years,” shot an unsold NBC pilot, did a play here, a TV movie with Tyne Daly there. With regard to the TV flick Torch Song, in which she co-starred with Raquel Welch–who portrayed an Elizabeth Taylor-styled movie queen who marries a blue-collar stud she meets in drug rehab–it strikes me that Silverstone’s complaints about not being taken seriously sound not unlike Welch’s complaints about how there was more to her than curves and cheekbones. “But there isn’t” Silverstone declares about Welch. “Everybody warned me. ‘She’s going to be a tyrant because you’re young and beautiful and she’s just going to go crazy,’ She was nice to me, but it must be just horrible, you know. I mean, when the movie aired, people said it should have been about my character. So I sympathize with her.”
As for The Crush, which disappeared pronto from theaters, but has lived on as a popular video rental, Silverstone says, about playing a psychotic 14-year-old who terrorizes her parents’ renter. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. When I showed up in Vancouver to meet the director, I couldn’t even talk. [Co-star] Cary Elwes was supportive and kept saying, over and over. ‘You’re going to be okay, you’re going to be okay.'” Silverstone proved okay enough, anyway, to land such follow-up films like one of those Showtime drive-in knockoffs. The Cool and the Crazy, as well as playing the sprig of Jeff Goldblum and Christine Lahti in Hideaway, which, she says is “like Cape Fear. There’s good, great scenes, it’s not just an action movie.” On the other hand, the upcoming True Crime with Kevin Dillon, was, she says, “an awful, miserable shooting experience; I had to be the producer, the assistant director, the personal assistant. Kevin and I were the only ones who knew what we were doing. I wanted to leave every day, I was so miserable.” Coming soon, too, is The Babysitter, which Silverstone says she “kept turning down because it was objectifying a woman. Yet, I knew that if it got in the hands of any other young girl, it could be this bimbo movie. They let me; literally, go through the script with a red pen crossing out all the sex and nudity. After it was shot and edited, the producers said, ‘Now will you add a nude scene?” And I went. ‘After all I told you, are you crazy?’ But it’s a really good movie, much better than The Crush.”
Silverstone says she’s looking forward these days to Clueless, playing “someone totally unlike me who is so materialistic that she lives, breathes, eats Armani,” even if she calls her casting process for the movie “very, very strange. My agent and I sat down with the producer and the director, Amy Heckerling, who was, like, the weirdest person in the world. She just sat there like this dark being, with such an angelic face. Afterwards, I’m telling my agent, ‘She hated me and I don’t even know what the point of that meeting was,” but my agent says. ‘She meets all the girls that way, but you’re the one she wants.’ When I got the role, I told Amy how weird I thought she was. I’m not sure how she feels about me. I mean, you never know, I may be very disappointed in Amy when I’m working with her, but she’s got a great mind and every page of the script is hilarious.”
One last question before we part and go our separate ways down Sunset. What, if anything, is missing from Silverstone’s young life? “I wanna get married and have a baby so badly,” she says, “because I want the unconditional love of a child and to grow up with that child. But maybe that’s selfish. I’m gonna wait a long time.'” she decides, “until I’m, like, 25 or 30.”
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Stephen Rebello co-wrote “Future Sex” for the Jan./Feb. issue of Movieline.
The post Alicia Silverstone: The Crown Princess of Young Hollywood appeared first on Lebeau's Le Blog.
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