She may talk the talk, but Sevigny still comes off as distinctly self-critical. She cringed watching her comically radiant orgasm in Boys Don't Cry. "That was the worst! In the first take, I did it more natural, and the director said, 'That's very lovely, but it's not going to work like that: It has to be the most heightened, the most explosive, most volatile, most everything orgasm you've ever had.' And of course, that's what made it into the movie." She sounds both proud and dismayed. "It's hard when you're exposed in that way. But then again, I never in a million years thought that the film would become as big as it has." She giggles and rolls her eyes. "The nudity! You know, I thought that was an art-house film."
When Boys Don't Cry unexpectedly hit the Oscar jackpot, Sevigny became famous to a wider audience. Morphing into celebrity has been a bit of an adjustment. "I had my own little following—people who were just messed up kids like I was, you know what I mean? I think I was sort of sheltered." The attention isn't always positive. "People on the street will say things like, 'Oh, she's not really that pretty' or 'You're much prettier in person.' I'm like: 'Oh, is that a compliment?'"
But even with the success of Boys Don't Cry—and Sevigny's smooth supporting role in Shattered Glass—escaping the art house won't be simple. For one thing, another experimental film has already attracted plenty of negative attention in the press. That would be The Brown Bunny, an experimental road-trip drama by Vincent Gallo—a movie panned so severely by critics at Cannes that they might as well have stormed the projectionist's booth and torched the negative. A grimly realistic narrative, The Brown Bunny features Vincent Gallo driving a motorcycle across America. In the final third, the narrative is broken by a graphic sequence: Sevigny appears as a dream vision of Gallo's character's dead girlfriend and gives the director oral sex, for real.
Sevigny is conflicted when she describes her decision to do the scene. On the one hand she praises Gallo as "tremendously fascinating" and "an eccentric, when there are so few eccentrics out there." The actress first met Gallo when she was a teenager in the New York art scene, but the two had not spoken in years. Then Gallo contacted her to pitch the role. "He explained to me that there was going to be this scene, and it was going to be very explicit and very shocking. He's very charming, and it's not that I was convinced, but—the way he speaks, it makes so much sense." The role of the angelic dream girl appealed to her as a challenge: She was someone who was "only forgiving, only loving, can't get angry, can't be judgmental." And since the director and the actress had already been intimate—although never boyfriend and girlfriend—she felt comfortable performing the explicit scene with him.
It's a choice she knows many actresses would have shunned, blurring as it does the already fuzzy line between performance and porn. "I was scared about the sex scene, and I'm still not sure," she says slowly. "Maybe it wasn't the best thing to do. But in the context of the film, it made sense. It's a really beautiful scene; it's tragic. And everyone has done that, and had it done to them." She argues that the sequence's sexual explicitness has been overstated and compares it with the infamous butter encounter in Last Tango in Paris, a scene that was also considered radical in its time. "Ten years later, it's nothing anybody even cares about."
But despite this qualified bravado, Sevigny says she's finished with roles that require that much exposure."When I was younger, I just wanted to show sex in a real way, and I was not afraid of it," she says. "It was my taste at the time; I'd see scenes where the girl would have her bra on, and that doesn't seem real to me… as for the The Brown Bunny, I don't know what will become of it. But for my mother, it's hard for her, and I feel bad: She wanted me to be in pretty period clothes, and that's all I've ever really wanted to be in. Sometimes I don't know how I ended up in these movies."
If she can't precisely resolve these contradictions, Sevigny can live with them. And she lights up when she describes her artistic fantasies: to design costumes for her beloved period films, to broaden her range as an actress. She'd love to switch gears, she says—to play the bombshell, the manipulator. Would she play the conman? "Ha!" she says, bursting into peals of laughter. She grins again, all the way. "Oh—I'd love it!"
Down, Out and Duped Sevigny's Shortlist
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Kids 1995
Manhattan teenager Jennie, deflowered by virgin-hunter Telly, learns she's HIV-positive. Drugs derail her attempts to keep him from further conquests.
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Gummo 1997
Wastrel siren Dot tears duct tape from her nipples to make them bigger in Harmony Korine's gritty depiction of a rural Ohio town.
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Last Days Of Disco 1998
A publishing assistant by day, Alice escapes to decadent dance clubs to meet older men in a paean to seventies nightlife.
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Boys Don't Cry 1999
Lana loves a girl pretending to be a boy whose masquerade ends in tragedy. This role earned Sevigny a best supporting actress nomination.
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Julien, Donkey-Boy 1999
In another jagged Harmony Korine shocker, harp-playing Pearl is impregnated by her schizophrenic brother.
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American Psycho 2000
Jean is the adoring secretary to a serial killer, a grounded counterpoint to a whirlwind of sociopathy.
Tags:
acting,
acting roles,
american psycho,
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boys don t cry,
brilliant mind,
Chloe Sevigny,
conman,
crossro,
don t cry,
experimental film,
fabulist,
fashion,
film,
half smile,
harmony korine,
last days of disco,
manipulator,
perfect boyfriend,
stephen glass,
svengali,
therapy,
toughie,
vincent gallo
