Juliette Lewis: Juliette of the Spirit

Juliette's performance in Cape Fear earned her Golden Globe and Oscar nominations, and at this juncture in her career the line on this actress is that she's a bullet. She, for the record, does not share that view: "My performance is awful," she says of her latest work in That Night. Not only that, she thinks there's a better than even chance that, however temporarily, the current rave over her will change when this new picture is released. "How will I handle it when people say I suck? I won't care, because they'll never think I was as bad as I think I am. Look at Cape Fear. I'm really happy about the response I got, but I didn't think it was as good as some people said it was. The truth is, I'm not at the level of acting that I'd like to be at... at all. It's on-the-job training. And I'll use where I'm at in real life to improve. When I have more structure--hey, I have more than some people, but certainly not enough--once I have that in my real life, it'll go over into my work."

On a mutinous quest of their own, my eyes drift to the pile of abused laundry--it looks like it's been kicked--lying dormant in the way of the half-closed bathroom door. Scores of videocassettes spill out of a bookcase as if they'd been stacked by the one-armed man from "The Fugitive." And then, of course, there are the spider webs. I'm trying to get another glimpse of these spider webs above me without being too obvious about it. My strategy of combining a fake yawn with a fake stretch is going off without a hitch when I suddenly discover that what I thought was an armrest on my side of the couch is actually a pillow. Picking myself up off of the floor, I'm thinking this has to be a first for me, yodeling during an interview.

"Cobwebs--how terrible," Juliette says, apparently judging both my curiosity about her cobwebs and my dive off her couch to be within the boundaries of unremarkable behavior. "Well, they're high up," I offer, settling back into the couch.

Juliette lives in her cobweb kingdom with actor Brad Pitt, the devastating hitchhiker of Thelma ? Louise, the pompadoured Johnny of Johnny Suede, and the star of next fall's Robert Redford film, A River Runs Through It. Perhaps inevitably, the combination of a high-profile real-life romance and a high-profile on-screen sexual performance has led to intense tabloid coverage of Juliette's more private existence.

"It went something like, 'Hot to Trot Lewis!' Plus they didn't start out on a gradient, they didn't start low and build it up. It was like, blam, I couldn't get enough action. And it was like, 'Stud-actor Brad Pitt, soon she'll be leaving him because she can't get enough.' It said I had sexual fantasies--they twisted that scene with De Niro to make it like it was soooo exciting for me."

Unfortunately, I point out sympathetically to Juliette, some people feel they're entitled to know what side of the bed you sleep on, what position you like to make love in.

"See, I don't mind if they could cover it correctly," she tells me, lighting up a cigarette. "I could tell everything about me. I don't care, I have no problem with it. But it's what other people do with your information. They can turn it into such a lie in their own minds. You tell them, yeah, I had sex on Friday. Simple. But they'll turn it into this whole scenario." Blowing smoke towards the TV squatting in the fireplace, she stops herself. "Wait, what day is it?" This being Monday, Juliette does a quick calculation to figure out when it was she did actually last have sex. "See," she says, having discovered it must have been Thursday or Saturday, "even that wouldn't be accurate."

In the immortal words of Robin Leach, whose camera lenses would've cracked coming through Juliette's door, I feel as though I've lost control of the interview.

"There are things I can't talk about," Juliette continues, "because I'm 18. I mean, I hung out with gangs who shoot people--I got a street education--but I can't elaborate on that just yet because it'll be used against me. I suppose when I'm 30 and there's more distance, I'll be able to talk about it as if it were a million years away. But if I talk about it and it's four years ago, the tabloids would have a field day, as if it happened yesterday. Hey, I play around--I dance in my living room naked... Okay, maybe I don't dance, but I walk around naked here a lot." If he's observing us from his chandelier, the house spider has a view of two people at a standstill, Juliette with her cigarette, me with my coffee cup of water.

"You don't know what it's like to be a woman," Juliette complains, her voice getting about as close to a whine as the voice of someone who's been on her own since she was 14 can get. "Life has been just one big drama..." She trails off, running her palm over the cushion of her soiled couch. And then it hits her like a dentist's drill on a cavity. "OH, THE MOST SIGNIFICANT THING IN MY LIFE!--I fell in love for the first time. And that's not a joke, that's not like, 'Oh, I'm in love, me and Brad.' I have found, like, my mate for life."

"Wow, I hope he did, too."

"Oh, no, no, no, that's what I mean. You can't have one person saying, 'I'm in love.' You can't be in love with someone and not have them be in love with you. You can, but it's a different kind of love. I had a relationship with someone I thought I was in love with." When I ask her how old she was at the time, a howl emanates from somewhere in her solar plexus. "I was 13. But that wasn't love. That's like sickness. You know, you cheat on each other, all this crazy shit. You climb through your bedroom window, you know what I'm talking about." Like it happened yesterday, Jules.

Even if I did know what it is like to be a woman--and Juliette's right, I don't--I still wouldn't be able to imagine falling in love with a person named Brad. But Juliette sure can. She's so far out there off the deep end with this guy, she's got her heart opened wide for nothing less than Mankind. Or make that Humankind. "This is gonna sound real sappy," she warns me, "but I'm, like, real concerned with the world. I wanna get an element of power, and I wanna make millions of dollars so that just the simple people in my life that I come across who need help, the ones that have these really basic jobs that don't even pay them enough to just live, I just wanna get them set up. I want these people to grow. I want to inspire people and make them believe that they're strong, you know what I mean?"

I make the mistake of thinking I know the stretch of open road Juliette's reasoning is heading out on. You leave your phony hall pass, your fake I.D. and your lunch money at the steps of your high school to chase an acting career down. You spend what seems like an eternity in the sitcom trenches. Then things start to go your way. So the ultimate, clearly, is a starring role opposite Pacino and Nicholson with Brando as the curmudgeonly uncle, and Coppola directing a William Goldman script with Vittorio Storaro behind the camera. Right?

"The career, that's just a little job, that's what I'm doing. And I really like acting. But for me, what's most important is to get organized." I am suddenly sitting next to Travis Bickle with a sex change and a dose of requited passion.

"I want to be able to be there more for the people I love. I wanna be able to have people come over to my house, have a little social get-together, have them come over and I...cook."

This good-girl romantic bent, grafted so improbably onto a disposition as indestructible as recyclable aluminum, is enough to make me nearly drop my coffee cup of water.

"Being with Brad," Juliette continues, "and being in love--I've never experienced that womanly side of me before. You know, like wanting to cook." Gazing up past the cobwebs somewhere, she retrieves some wickedly enjoyable fantasy and gets a look on her face that I figure must have been what got to Woody. Then she lets her eyes settle on me. "I wanna make him a pie..."

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Michael Angeli interviewed Sara Gilbert, Edward Furlong and Lukas Haas for our March issue.

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