The role of Lazarus
was preempted by Samuel L. Jackson, but no one actress could immediately
lay claim to Rae's teensy blue-jean skirt.
"Everybody
was auditioning for Rae," recalls Christina Ricci, one of the
actresses who managed to get a copy of the script in early 2005 because
her agent, Toni Howard, also represents Jackson. "I read it and
immediately fell in love with her."
The response from
Brewer and Black Snake producer John Singleton, though, was "No
thanks." They didn't even want to meet Ricci. At 26, she has
been in studio blockbusters (The Addams Family), indie classics (Buffalo
'66 and The Opposite of Sex), critics' favorites (The Ice Storm) and
Oscar fare (Monster). But many of those films came out years ago;
since 1999's Sleepy Hollow, Ricci has been flying low with mini movies
like Pumpkin, Miranda and I Love Your Work and outright duds such
as Prozac Nation and Cursed. Television appearances on Ally McBeal
and HBO's critically applauded The Laramie Project were, to those
in the movie biz, hardly more than consolation prizes.
So Ricci offered
to come in and read for the part of Rae—a humble gesture that
suggests she knew her place in Hollywood's finely delineated caste
system—and the Black Snake team relented. She prepared for her
audition as if for the actual movie, bleaching her dark hair, learning
to talk like country trash and smearing on some character-appropriate
blue eye shadow. The audition scene featured one of Rae's anxiety
attacks, a panicky episode that climaxes in a writhing, crotch-rubbing
nymphomaniacal frenzy.
"It's a very
strange transition to make," says Ricci with admirable understatement.
"That's not my kind of anxiety attack."
When it was over,
Ricci asked if she could do a second scene she had prepared on her
own initiative: a gut-wrencher in which Rae confronts her mother about
her sexually abusive stepfather. The actress tapped such deep reservoirs
of secret emotion that she couldn't stop crying afterward. The Black
Snake team was blown away.
"I could
not stop thinking about her," Brewer recalls. "I like women
with guts, like Debra Winger, Faye Dunaway, Bette Davis, Katharine
Hepburn. And I put Ricci in that category."
When Brewer subsequently
offered her the role, Ricci accepted on the spot. "I had said
to my therapist that if I didn't get the part, I would have had to
quit this business," she says evenly, as a breeze plays with
her bangs poolside at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. "I
would have had absolutely no clue what the f--- I was supposed to
be doing as an actress."
In the Hollywood
universe, Ricci may be considered a lesser star, but she does have
the one thing shared by the giants: a unique identity or, as Brewer
puts it, a screen persona that could be caricatured with a few deft
pen strokes. Ever since she was in her teens, Ricci has embodied not
just a physical type—tiny and ripe—but also an entire
worldview, one that is defined by the outcast's droll distance from
normalcy. She is, at just over five feet tall, a sexpot for losers.
"You know,
I was kind of weird when I was a kid," she admits. "And
I've been told that as an adult I can be very unsettling. And I know
that the way I like to look is not normal too. But I kind of like
it. At a certain point you have to say, "This is who I am and
this is how I'm gonna look."
Ricci says that
she doesn't exactly feel typecast but that she often has to argue
for the chance to be who she is, as an actress and as a person: "I'm
really sorry to disappoint all the people in my life who would prefer
that I was a little bit more commercial or a little bit easier to
package or easier to pin down or explain."
The implication,
of course, is that if she hasn't aligned herself with industry expectations
yet, it's not going to happen now.
Ricci hasn't had
any training as an actress other than what she's absorbed on sets
starting with the 1990 film Mermaids and The Addams Family the following
year. Director Don Roos asked her to audition for The Opposite of
Sex some five years later based on what he remembered of those two
movies, and he was initially surprised by the self-assured reading
she gave for Dede, a teenage runaway who goes to live with her gay
brother and then swipes his boyfriend. Ricci's sense of the character
was sharply different from Roos's, and she flatly declined his suggestion
to make the character more endearing.
"She said,
'I don't want to give a handjob to the audience,'" Roos recalls.
"'I'll play it straight, and they'll like me or they'll hate
me.' She wasn't dimpled. She did it her way. I found that with Christina,
it's best to follow her. She's very perspicacious. She scared me,
naturally."
Many critics would
say that Ricci did her best work in 1997 and 1998, when she brought
memorable roles to the screen in Buffalo '66, The Ice Storm and The
Opposite of Sex, all of which were made during a moment when independent
cinema was flourishing. Today, Ricci contemplates her indie period
with the wistful air of an industry veteran looking back on some long-past
golden era.
"You can
say 'low-budget' these days, but you can't say 'independent,'"
Ricci says, noting that even movies that begin outside of the studio
system today are made to appeal to studio buyers. "So you're
still playing by the rules of the studio."
Black Snake Moan,
she notes, is the rare example of something different that slips through,
if only because it has been "packaged the right way" with
a stylized look that disguises the film's otherwise unpalatable storyline.
The film is set near Memphis in the 1970s, a world of humid, rural
melancholy taken straight out of William Eggleston photographs. Ricci
had never spent time in the South before she showed up for the shoot
last summer, but she fell for the idiosyncrasies of Southern culture,
like the way the Lord kept popping up in conversation.
"Everybody
was talking about Jesus," recalls Ricci, who identifies herself
as a Christian but nonetheless prefers to keep conversation about
faith between herself and her creator. "All these sayings just
become part of the day, like 'God bless' or 'Bless her heart.' It's
the common language. You end up talking about Jesus too."
Of course, old-time
religion coexists with the devil's own music, and Black Snake Moan
deals with both. Brewer took the name from a Blind Lemon Jefferson
song, and he calls it his "blues movie," as if it were part
of a grand musico-cinematic scheme begun with Hustle & Flow. For
Brewer, the central metaphor, a clanking chain that ties Rae to Lazarus's
radiator, represents the healing power of home, family and faith.
As the movie opens,
Rae clearly needs some kind of saving grace. She swishes her tail
in front of every horndog in town, and the audience is asked to endure
three sex scenes in the first half hour, only one of which is with
her boyfriend, Ronnie, played by Justin Timberlake.
"I think
I've had enough sex for the next two years of my career with this
movie," admits Ricci, who has declined other roles in the past
because she found their portrayal of sex "disgusting." "I
know that I have a very simplistic, childlike morality, but I believe
I can feel somebody's negative intentions in the writing, and if I
do, I can't be a part of it." What makes Black Snake acceptable
in her view is that it attempts to seriously plumb the emotions of
a damaged young woman some might dismiss as a "slut."
"It's about
identifying a behavior that I don't think is explored all that often
in the proper way," Ricci continues. "I have read a ton—a
ton—about child psychology. I have a kind of bizarre fascination
with true crime. And I've done a lot of thinking about these sorts
of traumas."
Rae's spree of
casual sex ends when she mocks the wrong guy's equipment and he retaliates
with his fists. Her healing begins when Lazarus finds her beaten body
and takes her home to recuperate. Because she tries to flee his ministrations
during a fevered nightmare, he locks 20 feet of chain around her waist.
Rae fights it with such demonic fury that Lazarus thinks she is possessed—and
the audience starts to worry about Ricci's physical well-being.
"She insisted
on using the real, 80-pound chain," recalls Brewer, who adds
that he pleaded with her to use a plastic dummy chain instead. "There's
only so much that a young woman of her size can do, and daily Christina
would exceed it, to the point of vomiting after takes."
When things got
too hard, Ricci turned to Jackson, whom she calls her "Big Daddy,"
for comfort. "I'd be like, 'Sam, I don't know if we should do
this,'" she recalls. "And he'd be like, 'What's wrong, baby?
Come here. I'll take care of it.'"
"I found
myself being her protector because she's so willing to try things,"
explains Jackson, "that sometimes I said, 'No, you can't do that.
You can't run out the door blindly with this chain around you because
you don't know what that chain is gonna get caught on. That's why
we have stunt people.'"
Ricci says she
adored working with Jackson—"I could not admire that man
any more," she gushes. "When I was 14, I wanted to be Sam
Jackson." She also praises Timberlake's performance, and when
she makes the point that his work ethic reflects the sterling habits
of a former child actor, she might well be speaking of herself. Ricci
was born in Santa Monica, the youngest of four children, all of whom
were approached to be child actors. Her mother, a former model, resisted
until Ricci had her turn. By then, the other siblings were old enough
to "bully" their mother into giving Ricci a chance, she
recalls.
It's ironic, given
the teenage sex queens she would go on to play, that the one role
Ricci didn't snag in her early days was as the most famous jailbait
of all, Lolita. It was a disappointment that, in retrospect, looks
like a lucky break, since she didn't then understand what she almost
got herself into. ("I just reread the book two months ago,"
she says, "and I was horrified by things I don't even remember
reading when I was 13.")
Asked whether
her parents objected to her auditioning for such a role, Ricci says
that both were huge movie fans who would have understood the film's
artistic merit. "My mother, especially, thought nothing was ever
going to damage me," Ricci explains. "I was never really
shielded in that way."
In the past Ricci
has openly discussed her struggles with anorexia as a teenager, and
one wonders if growing up in the film business didn't lead to her
distorted body image. Ricci is almost protective of the movie business—she
refers to "this industry" with a fondness most reserve for
their hometowns—and she refuses to blame it.
"I was 12
or 13," she recalls. "I was in puberty. It was a horrible
time. I saw a television movie, and I was like, Somehow, what Tracey
Gold is doing right now is something I'd like to do. So obviously
there was something wrong with me." She says she pulled herself
out of the self-destructive behavior because she realized it could
end her career.
Over the past
few years, when fewer screen roles have come her way, Ricci has satisfied
that hunger for work with television roles. This year she guest-starred
on Grey's Anatomy, an appearance that won her an Emmy nomination announced
on the morning of this interview. ("I guess I feel mature now,"
she deadpanned.)
"This is
a girl who spent most of her childhood on a set," says Roos,
who has remained close with Ricci since they worked together. "She
loves the action, the activity, the focus and the attention. She likes
to be around the camera—in front of it, behind it or beside
it."
Ricci is also
self-aware enough to admit that she sometimes likes to knock the socks
off her TV colleagues, who don't have the luxury of the long rehearsals
and countless takes that movie sets provide, by whipping out her biggest
acting moves, like crying on command. "I'm kind of a show-off
sometimes," she confesses. "Acting is the one thing in my
life that I actually think I'm good at. In every other area I'm totally
retarded."
Ricci's next screen
appearance will likely be in Penelope, a modern-day fairy tale about
an unfortunate girl from a wealthy family who is born with a pig's
nose but learns to love and be loved in the end. (Black Snake Moan
was originally slotted for a fall opening but was recently rescheduled
for early 2007, when it might benefit from a buzz-building premiere
on the festival circuit.) Penelope will no doubt have its place as
wholesome entertainment for teenage girls, but Ricci presumably is
doing such fluff for financial reasons. She admits that her salary
is modest by industry standards and that she has an expensive habit
to support: fashion.
"I was told
by my business manager that I have to stop buying clothes," Ricci
admits. "I'm not allowed to buy any more fur. No more jewelry.
I spent a lot of money."
Her ultimate fashion
goal, she explains, is to buy enough clothes so that she'll never
have to shop again, so that her closets would be like a costume house
or a wardrobe trailer, "where I could go in and find anything."
She recently removed the books from the shelves of her home library
and put her shoe collection in their place. "I have more shoes
than books," she reasons. "At first I was so embarrassed
I didn't want anybody to come over. And then I was like, 'I'm obviously
not an idiot.' So I painted it bright pink."
Ricci favors prim
little-girl looks or proper old-lady outfits, with a special fondness
for Chanel suits—"Karl Lagerfeld always seems to make the
perfect small clothes," she says—and anything in sherbet
colors. Although Ricci generally dislikes the ruckus of the front
row, she has attended the couture in Paris, and Lagerfeld once made
her tingle to her toes when he judged her "très mignon"
in one of his designs. Ricci also walked the runway for Louis Vuitton
in 2004, the year that Marc Jacobs cast her for the brand's ad campaign.
"It was terrifying,"
Ricci says. "But it was something I'd always wanted to do. And
I'm five feet tall, for Chrissakes, so when else am I ever going to
be in a runway show?"
For this interview,
Ricci wore a simple sundress and, around her neck, a rose gold anchor
with the initials AG. It's a gift from boyfriend Adam Goldberg, who
is now on-again after a serious split when the couple sold the house
they lived in together. Ricci isn't thrilled that the subject comes
up, but after a long pause she decides she will at least explain why
they got back together.
"Because
I love him and I feel like we were meant for each other," she
says through clenched teeth, before adding in a more relaxed mode,
"It sounds silly, and he hates it when I say this, but I believe
that things are fated. It drives him crazy."
Ricci deflects
a question about marriage, saying that it takes two to decide, but
she acknowledges that her life is more settled than ever before. She
has finally accepted L.A. as her hometown after years of feeling more
comfortable in New York, and she feels less professionally flighty
as well. Two interesting projects a year would be ideal, she figures.
"I just want
to be able to do things that I don't have to lie about later,"
she says, with the kind of candor one rarely hears in interviews.
"I want to do movies where I don't have to go to the press junket
and lie, basically. That's my only goal, to be able to say honestly
I like what I've done." "Christina's World," photographed
by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, has been edited for Style.com;
the complete story appears in the September issue of W.
