Gretchen Mol: Rhymes with Doll

Gretchen Mol's quiet existence won't be quite so quiet after playing the girlfriend opposite two of Hollywood's hottest tickets--Matt Damon in Rounders, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Celebrity.

_____________________________________

It's a typical New York scene: 100 burly construction workers are milling around with a few dozen cops, all this in front of three 20-foot-high inflatable rats. Gretchen Mol (rhymes with doll) walks into the restaurant I'm at and hooks her thumb back towards the rats. "What's the deal?" she asks innocently. "Is it Groundhog Day or what?"

Not only is it summertime, these rats look nothing like groundhogs. When Mol sees the slow grin spreading across my face, she starts laughing, too. "Sure, now you're gonna say I'm a dumb blonde, right?"

As a blonde myself, I'd never make that claim against another. (For her information, the rats represent nonunion labor on the building site.) And if Mol's track record is any indication, she's anything but dumb. After a few small parts (as one of Spike Lee's phone-sex operators in Girl 6, as a veritable crying machine in Abel Ferrara's The Funeral and as Michael Madsen's girl in Donnie Brasco) and a big part (as Jude Law's obsession in Music from Another Room), she won two of the most coveted parts of the year--Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriend in Woody Allen's new film, Celebrity, and Matt Damon's girlfriend in Rounders.

At 26, Mol, who looks young enough to play a high schooler, cringes when she sees that I'm holding a stack of stories that have already been written about her. "I'm so embarrassed," she says, actually turning red. "It takes longer to read everything that's been written about me than it does to watch all my minutes on-screen." While that might be true--and while it also might be true that after reading this stuff you still don't have a clue who she is--all that is about to change.

"Don't worry," I tell her. "You've just worked with the best actors of your generation. There must be a reason why you were cast in these films. What was it like working with Leonardo DiCaprio after the success of Titanic?"

"When we did Celebrity, Titanic wasn't out yet, so there wasn't such a frenzy. But Romeo & Juliet had come out, so there was attention. In Celebrity, Leo plays a big star, and I play, well, I play this girl who's just sort of around."

"Don't you have a near-nude scene with Leo?"

"Yes," says Mol. "The day we were doing the dress rehearsal for that scene was one of the strangest days of my life. The scene takes place in a hotel room, and I'm not wearing much. It's supposed to be comical, so I felt OK about it. But there was a rack of clothes to try on, and each thing I put on seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. The whole crew was standing around, Woody was over by the camera because they were filming it. I think I wanted someone to go, 'I know this is embarrassing, honey.' But that never happened. And so with each piece I put on I felt, 'Why don't I just get naked?' My stomach was in knots. But you know what I realized? I'm not the kind of actor that needs coddling. This is what needed to be done, and I did it."

"Woody never talks to his actors. Did he talk to you?"

"He just told me a few directions and that was it. What really astounded me was that he wrote a letter to Harvey Weinstein at Miramax and told him that I would be good for the part in Rounders. I was floored."

"Every young actress in Hollywood wanted that role. It couldn't be a bad thing to play opposite Matt Damon and Edward Norton."

"I never worked with Ed, just Matt. When I first went in to read for the role, I had no idea who Matt Damon was. I felt really relaxed, really sure of myself. As they say, ignorance is bliss. By the time I went back to read a second time, Good Will Hunting and The Rainmaker had come out. But by then I already felt comfortable."

In Rounders, Damon plays a reformed gambling addict who jeopardizes his relationship with Mol, who's allergic to gambling, when he goes back to playing poker to win money for his down-and-out pal (Norton). So, is she still buddies with Damon? "Matt was great to work with--talented, smart, giving, spontaneous," says Mol. "But we didn't get to know each other on a personal level. It was established early on, in the makeup trailer, that we were both involved in other relationships, and so it made everything simple."

According to my notes, Damon had already started romancing Winona Ryder. But what I'm interested in is who Mol's dating. "I'll only say this about him," says Mol, "he's a civilian. Getting back to your question about me being buddies with Matt, though--I don't call him up on the phone to chat, and that's OK with me."

"Wow. Sounds a little depressing," I remark.

"When I first started in this business, I expected to maintain friendships when the shoot was over. But I realize now that if you maintain one friendship per film, that's great. For me, it's always the hair and makeup people. You can be yourself with them. In the end, if those people like me, I know I'll be OK."

_____________________________________

Martha Frankel interviewed Terry Gilliam for the June '98 issue of Movieline