Mena Suvari: Mena Season

Sometimes I don't feel like the person I'm supposed to be. But it's like my agent keeps reminding me, 'Not only have you gotten a break, but do you know how rare it is to have two movies in the same year do so well? It doesn't really happen.'"

But happen it has. And how did it happen? What sort of creature was she growing up? How posh were her circumstances and why did kids pick on her in high school? "I kept to myself," she says with a certain protective wariness. "Nobody asked me to dances or anything like that. I didn't go to the prom. I wasn't a cheerleader and I wasn't valedictorian. I was not at all popular. I guess I didn't kiss ass enough. I didn't care. Kids are kids. It doesn't matter what you do. I had a few things against me, I guess."

Such as? Suvari shrugs dismissively and replies, "While I was growing up in Rhode Island, we lived in a stone house built in 1870 on acres and acres of land that I used to run around on with my brothers. The house and yard were so big I didn't need to go anywhere else. In summer, I'd pick raspberries and blackberries from our bushes. I'd ride my bike. I didn't watch movies or even think about them. I wanted to be a paleontologist, an architect, a writer. I remember deciding one day that I wanted to be an archeologist, too, so I started digging in our backyard. Our land was so old that I dug three feet down and found fragments of china, glass, a bullet."

Taking a piece of paper, she draws me a map of the layout of her childhood home, which is located off Newport's fabled street of millionaires, Bellevue Avenue, and sketches details of the mansion itself. Even in crude miniature, the place evokes a Gothic fairy tale castle. There's a long, circular driveway and magnificent staircases, secret passageways, a ballroom with a balcony designed to accommodate musicians, graceful verandas, as well as what she describes as "slave quarters." All things considered, an intoxicating world for a small child.

"I always felt that I had an imaginary friend," she tells me when I ask what this fantasy land was like for her. "I would say things like, 'Let me see you,' and 'Give me some kind of sign you're here.' I was too little for it not to be innocent and honest. I seriously believed it and tried to convince my family that he was real. I was always telling my brothers, 'Someone is here.' Even when I was little, I read books about the paranormal. They always say that children are more susceptible because they're open and see more. And I had this sense he was there. I would talk to him sometimes if I was alone. There were weird instances, like when I was alone one day thinking about what should I call him and, at that moment, something just told me, 'Look that way now,' and when I did, I saw this name scratched into the wood: 'Ted.' I wrote a letter to him once and put it in the attic. My brothers wrote back an answer to me just to torture me."

What became of this imaginary friend? "I'm totally about to admit that I'm psycho, but..." Suvari checks me out to see how I'm taking this before continuing, fully animated now. "My brothers and I talk about how our house was haunted. I've always believed in that stuff. I'm not very religious. I love the cosmos and that whole science. What's cool is that I can talk to my brother Sulev, who I totally trust. He would never lie to me. Because of him, I know that ghosts exist. I always knew I was right about my imaginary friend, but my brothers actually saw things and my mother had experiences, too."

I'm all ears. It seems that Sulev reported seeing a male apparition on a stairway, perhaps Ted himself, who might have been the slave who died on the grounds in the late 1800s when he was killed by hunting dogs that had been starved too long before an impending foxhunt. Suvari also relates an incident when her brother woke up in the middle of the night and saw ghostly children in white playing in the trees outside the house, and others when her mother heard carriages coming up the driveway and phantom raps on the front door. Once when her parents were away and the area suffered an electrical blackout, her oldest brother was guiding his three siblings hand-in-hand through the house in the pitch black and felt an extra, unaccounted-for hand holding his.

Didn't any of this strike her as at all Amityville? "Nothing ever harmed us," Suvari protests. "When my brother told me the story about feeling that fourth hand, though, I peed my pants. I mean, I believe this stuff. I definitely think that everything is energy and, when we die, that energy must go somewhere. I always felt things. But I never saw anything like they did. I don't know what I'd do if I did."

So, did the family move to get away from this house? Suvari shakes her head and giggles, "No, we moved because it was too big to clean and we wanted a warmer climate. So, we moved briefly to the Virgin Islands and then to South Carolina."

From the look on Suvari's face as she begins to describe her life at an all-girl school in the South, it's clear she preferred the spirit world to what followed. "Talk about catty," she says with a sneer. "I was a total loser because I didn't shop at The Gap or Banana Republic. And, coming from Rhode Island, I was also a Yankee. I had one friend and just did my own thing."

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