Ashley Judd: Steel Magnolia

Q: In Kiss the Girls you play a psychologist who helps Morgan Freeman track down a man who kidnaps and kills women. What res¬onated for you in this character?

A: Her determination, power and deep emotional commitment. She is faith in action.

Q: Since Kiss the Girls is a suspense thriller with some frightening violence in it, what importance does this film have that mitigates the darker aspects of it?

A: I can't answer that. People just have to see for themselves how the final scene is the inevitable culmination of my character's story. After all the harrowing emotional crescendo, it is extremely gratifying.

Q: In Kiss the Girls you kickbox. How good are you?

A: Very good. My trainer used to have me stand under a tree and he'd tell me to kick a certain leaf.

Q: Would you like to have kicked the executives at Fine Line who sent Normal Life almost straight to video?

A: I had an incredible experience on that film. The woman who took over Fine Line [Ruth Vitale] didn't want to send a bratty stepchild to Harvard, which was what Normal Life was. She came in ready to revamp a company: out with the old, in with the new. She hadn't financed the movie, she hadn't approved the script, she didn't have anything to do with the casting of it, she didn't look at the dailies or get preliminary cuts sent to her. She got this incredibly powerful, disturbing film given to her when she wanted to make storybook quasi-Merchant Ivory movies. Normal Life got caught in her ideological crossfire. The thing that was cruddy was that she lied about the movie. She said it was set up to go to video. Excuse me, I do not actively seek out movies that are set up to go to video! What horse manure! I have a very fond spot for Siskel and Ebert, because they saw the movie and gave it an incredible review.

Q: You have a will and confidence about your career choices that must go back to your childhood. Did you really feel, as you've said, that you practically grew up in the back of a U-Haul truck?

A: We were a tight family, but there was something about the inconsistency of it all, the vagueness that would often come up in my experiences with my mother because she wasn't available to me due to financial hardship or emotional strain.

Q: Did you have any fears as a child?

A: No, [though] being powerless was a condition I endured quite a bit, so there may have been some fear accompanying that.

Q: You've said that Wynonna was born with clenched fists, whereas you were born with open hands. What does that mean?

A: She was at an age where she understood and felt the effects of divorce more than I did. I was so young I was basically immune to it. It shaped me, but not in the dramatic and angry ways that it would impact an eight-year-old.

Q: You were 14 when your mother and sister made their first album--what are your memories of that?

A: The music is a balm. Music is the greatest gift.

Q: And you didn't feel you had that gift at all?

A: Didn't have anything to do with whether or not I felt I had it, it had to do with where my interests were. I did my own thing. I read and was extremely independent. I liked to play by myself. Once I got active in school I had a comprehensive social network, so music wasn't interesting to me. I think I played the washboard in the second grade for fun. Never got much noise out of it--I didn't understand how it worked.

Q: Did your father ever tell you anything that stuck with you?

A: There were some things he only said once, and that's what I'll always remember him for. One was with regard to the power that women have with men. I was 17. He said, "Go easy on the boys, you've got something we don't." He was talking about the power to carry a life in your womb. Then there was something else he said when I was 17. He told me that at that age I was already smarter and more sophisticated than he would ever be. That's not necessarily true, [but] I understand the esteem and regard that he had for me.

Q: What major revelations did you go through when you turned 16 and 18?

A: What I experienced about myself at 16 was that I'm very gritty. That I'm extremely ambitious and very hardworking. I don't mind striving to attain the things about which I dreamed. At 18, I went to college and it was the perfect environment for me. It was someplace beautiful and consistent. I really flourished. To a certain extent I had always been afraid to work as hard as I knew I could, because I had always been told that I was gifted and special. If I had to work hard at something, it meant that I wasn't already good at it. If I wasn't good at it, I wasn't special.

Q: After college, you went to L.A. and became a hostess at the Industry-heavy restaurant, the Ivy?

A: Yes, for about a year. I was also going to a fantastic acting school at Playhouse West. I had fun at the Ivy just being a kid. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Q: Did you make any Industry connections?

A: Yeah, I got to be friends with a lot of people because they were good customers. Every now and then we have a laugh about my escorting them to table five.

Q: You appeared in Picnic on Broadway. Did being on Broadway mean to you what it means to a lot of New York actors?

A: Yeah, but you're still a bit of a foreigner. It's like not being French and going to Paris to eat at a fancy restaurant. I speak the language, I'm a bit of a connoisseur, but it's not going to blow my mind on a genetic level the way it would a French woman. So was I elated and esteemed? Yes. But I wasn't raised in the theater.

Q: Weren't you offered a larger role in the movie Kuffs than the one you ended up with, if you were willing to do nudity?

A: I wasn't offered the part. It was my first audition. There were two other women and I thought they were boiling it down to a booby factor--choosing a pair of breasts. I was counseled by my agent not to do it.

Q: You've had the same agent since you came to Hollywood--how much do you trust her counsel?

A: She is my advocate. She doesn't give a rat's ass about anybody else. That feels good, especially where you're the younger of two and you come from a family where there's a tremendously charismatic dynamic constantly in motion. To have somebody who is just yours. Everybody needs a figure like that.

Q: Do you have scripts or books you want to do?

A: Absolutely We've been extremely conservative letting people use my name or go out to writers, directors, costars, but I've found stuff I feel very confident about. What I'm looking for is what my character has to say. Is there value in it? Do I respond to the woman? I just read Ang Lee's new script--it's gorgeous, but I didn't respond to the woman. If he still would like to meet me, I would be insane with joy to meet him, but maybe we should wait until he's done making this movie, because it's a waste of our time right now because I'm not interested in embodying that girl.

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