Muse Me No More

She's built a career playing victims, naifs and muses. But, indie darling Chloe Sevigny really just wants to do a costume drama.

By Emily Nussbaum, published on September 01, 2003 - last reviewed on November 04, 2007

'Every director is a conman," confides Chloe Sevigny. She leans into the tape recorder, her trademark half-smile amped to full.

It's an odd comment to hear from an actress who has been—for more than a decade—a cheerleader for experimental film. But if Sevigny has insight into the allure of the manipulator, it's no surprise. After all, she's played indie muse to a series of charismatic auteurs, starting with ex-boyfriend Harmony Korine and director and controversy-magnet Vincent Gallo. In her acting roles as well, Sevigny has specialized in a kind of transcendent suckerdom. In Kids, she was seduced by a teen smoothie; in The Last Days of Disco, bedded by a Wall Street cad; in American Psycho, besotted with a serial killer. In the Oscar-winning crossover hit Boys Don't Cry, she portrayed a snake-beautiful toughie who fell in love, then discovered that her perfect boyfriend was in fact a girl.

In her film, Shattered Glass, Sevigny plays another mark: the sophisticated, sardonic Caitlin, best friend and colleague to notorious New Republic fabulist Stephen Glass. As Caitlin, Sevigny gets fooled again, this time by the only Svengali perhaps more dangerous than a director: a journalist.

But if she's built a career as mark and muse, at 28, Sevigny has begun to chafe against both roles—in real life and on the screen. Separated from Korine for several years, Sevigny has been doing what amounts to an aesthetic reboot, reexamining her own outsider's credo and trying to figure out what's borrowed and what's her own. "We were teenagers together," she explains. "We became who we are, and we became established in our careers together. For me especially, I always felt like 'Harmony's girlfriend.' He was the brilliant mind—which he is, the eccentric, the artist. But then it was like, 'And she's an actress.'" In the early 20th century, Sevigny points out, actresses were considered whores. "Sometimes it still feels that way," she says.

It's a familiar crossroads: how to establish a grown-up identity without disowning your past. But the task is trickier for an actress who fears being pigeonholed—and in Sevigny's case, has been criticized for some of her more outrageous roles. Living in New York with her boyfriend, rock musician Matt McAuley of A.R.E.Weapons (his fellow band member is Chlo`'s deejay brother Paul), she's slowly sorting out the question of how to shrug off the mantle of "quirky, controversial girl." It won't be easy: For one thing, her quirkiest and most controversial film at the time of this interivew—Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny—was on the verge of release.

Sevigny's career began almost by accident, when she fell into fame through the back door of hipsterdom. An artsy teenager, she'd spent her days fleeing her hometown of Darien, Connecticut (aka "Aryan Darien"), for downtown New York. In the early '90s, she club-hopped and worked as an intern at Sassy, a magazine for teen girls. In a 1994 New Yorker profile on Sevigny, Jay McInerney famously called her "The It Girl," a sticky label she's been trying to slough off for nearly a decade. In 1995, Korine and Sevigny became celebrities with the controversial teen-sex drama Kids, scripted by Korine, then still in his teens, and directed by voyeuristic photographer Larry Clark. Along the way, the actress gained a reputation for qualities brash and enviable, as well as easily mocked: She was the sloe-eyed hipster, the vintage-clad vamp, the film snob.

Yet in person, Sevigny is no intimidating fashionista. With her elegant lion's face and denim jacket and jeans, she seems alternately relaxed and rueful. As we chow down at her favorite East Village Polish diner, she talks about the changes she's going through. The biggest impact was the loss of her father, who died when she was 21. "You lose the spark," she says. "I can't celebrate things as much as I might have." In the aftermath of his death and her breakup with Korine, Sevigny moved back home to Connecticut for several years. She also went into therapy, at her mother's urging. "The first couple of weeks, I was really depressed, because you verbalize all these things that you never said before. Then it gets better, and I do think the therapist really helped me—in gaining confidence, in dealing with criticism," says Sevigny. She stopped the sessions when she moved back to New York, both because of distance and because she sensed that the therapist was turning her against her mother. "My mother was like, 'Chlo`, I really think you should go!' And I was like, 'Mom, she's making me hate you!'" She giggles. "My mom was like: 'Uh, OK!'"

Part of this self-examination means taking a critical look at her own indie/edgy values. "I can't remember the last time I went to see an independent film," Sevigny confesses. "The truth is, sometimes I just want to be entertained. You know, to have fun, and...escape." When it comes to the thrall of the independent director, she sounds downright rebellious. "I'm so sick of this hero worship," she scoffs, fingers splayed on the tabletop. "People think directors are the be-all and end-all, and they have the last word on everything, and they're like rock stars." She lets out a low laugh. "I mean, I still love a lot of my directors. But maybe I've got more confidence. I'm not as easily manipulated as I used to be."