Mena Suvari emerged practically out of nowhere to become the It girl of two of last year's megahits. Is the unusually striking actress at all like the sweet, offbeat schoolgirl she played in American Pie? Or is she the too- cool-for-school object of erotic obsession of American Beauty? More will be revealed in two new movies, but to hear Suvari tell it, she's none of the above.
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Fame is an unpredictable benefactor. It can creep up on an actor stealthily over time with movie after movie the way it did for Winona or Keanu. It can bless and curse a promising young actor like Leo when a movie becomes a worldwide phenomenon. Sometimes it descends on a completely unknown actor with a single movie that changes everything overnight.
Fame dropped rose petals all over Mena Suvari last year in an almost freakish way when she appeared in not one, but two movies--_American Pie_ and American Beauty--that almost simultaneously captured major critical attention, hit the $100-million box-office mark and won her fans (reread her reviews) and, well, worshipers (read those Web sites devoted to her). What is more, while American Pie may have seemed like a lark aimed at horny young guys, it struck a chord with Gen-X and Gen-Y moviegoers of both sexes, and scored with the Gen-W audience as well. Similarly, the more ambitious American Beauty was targeted at an older crowd, but its deadpan, acerbic take on just how screwed up we all are right now fascinated younger audiences. Suvari's sleepy, Novocained good looks and insolent, hilariously over-it way with dialogue were an essential ingredient of the success of both movies. On top of that, she had appealing, virginal chemistry with young Chris Klein in one movie and seductive, vulnerable chemistry with the older Kevin Spacey in the other. And for good measure, there was that insinuating body which apparently ignited impure thoughts in some senior critics who probably weren't ashamed of themselves the next morning.
In both of her American epics, Suvari displayed a screen presence that, with time and more exposure, could spell big trouble for men on-screen. She had the poise of a pro, even though she was just 20 and almost nobody had heard of or seen her before American Pie. Had she just been cruising at lower altitudes on Hollywood's radar screen, maybe on a sitcom or in smaller roles in smaller flicks? Or was she a natural who'd just emerged suddenly from the ether?
When I meet Suvari for lunch in a popular trattoria in the old-L.A., Young Hollywood-friendly neighborhood of Los Feliz, some of the pieces of the puzzle click into place. Casually groomed, she looks fresh-faced and glowy as she flicks back her long hair. And although she could easily pass for a high school junior, she moves with the ease and self-possession of one who grew up with privilege. The personal biographical details she begins to lay out for me as we start our conversation support that impression.
The daughter of a psychiatrist and a nurse with a 24-year difference in their ages, Suvari was indeed raised against backdrops of money and style. She lived in Newport, Rhode Island, as a child, the Virgin Islands as a young teen, South Carolina in her early high school years and Southern California from the age of 16 on. She derived her first name from her Egyptian godmother and her last name (pronounced "soo-VAHR-ee") from her Estonian father, Ando. She has three older brothers, Sulev, Yuri and Ajai, each two-and-a-half years apart. As a kid, she spent five years as a Wilhelmina model before graduating to commercials (Rice-A-Roni, Pizza Hut) then to occasional TV work ("Boy Meets World," "Chicago Hope," "ER") followed by small parts in movies (Nowhere, Kiss the Girls, Slums of Beverly Hills and The Rage: Carrie 2), That's when the one-two punch of American Pie and American Beauty came along. Now Suvari is on Hollywood's short list and modeling sunglasses in fashion ads. Why her, some ask?
"Why you?" I ask.
"I can't figure it out myself,'' says Suvari with the telltale residue of a New England upbringing in her crisp delivery and the first of frequent giggles. "I never thought I would be where I am right now. Its all exploded for me. There are people who have lived here for decades and haven't even gotten a commercial. Here I am, a kid who came here with her parents with no thought of being an actor, and now I have people sticking microphones in my face, and I just can't say anything. I go to an awards show and there are all these people screaming and waving when they don't even know me. My agent says to me, 'Turn around and wave frequently just to be nice and courteous.' And I'm like, who am I? Some of the people out there yelling and cheering are my age. Some of them are probably smarter than me, better than me. I mean, I was someone who was totally picked on in high school. I'm thankful and grateful but I don't necessarily understand it and it feels very weird."
It must feel weirder than weird. And sure enough, she rolls her eyes and shakes her head, elaborating on just how weird. "Take the Internet sites they're doing about me," she says, oblivious to the scrumptious-looking roast turkey panino and green salad her smitten waiter has placed in front of her. "I have no idea what all this Web stuff is about. I had an awkward growing-up stage when I was a teenager and guess what? You can go on one Internet site and it's like, 'We have Mena's high school picture--check it out!' It's so bad. This site also has frame-by-frame stills of the nude scenes of me and Kevin Spacey in American Beauty and it's like, 'Hey, download dirty pictures of Mena.' I wrote in to another site to correct all the biographical facts, like, 'I have two brothers who went to The Citadel, not three' and signed it 'Mena from California,' and then two weeks later someone wrote in as 'Mena from Burbank,' saying, 'Thank you to all my fans! Love this Web site.' Why would a person sign on as if they were me? It's just another thing I can't figure out. Like I was saying to my friends the other day, I'm not the kind of person who's like--" here she affects the grand voice of a self-enchanted movie star--"'Oh, dahling, let's lunch.'
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."
Part of her thing was going up for modeling jobs and commercials, and she quickly landed some. Then, when her family decided to move to Los Angeles, Suvari suddenly gained cachet with her formerly unimpressed classmates. "The girl who had been the worst to me was like, 'Ooooh, you're acting! I'm coming out to L.A. to visit,' and I was like, 'See ya. Honey, I don't forger so easily.'" Los Angeles presented a new set of problems: "I was 16 and got teased for being from the South. I was also ahead in my classes, so I was a freshman in sophomore classes and they were like, 'Who does she think she is?' But when things started going well with my career, people were suddenly like, 'Oh my God! Congratulations,' and I was like, 'Where were you three weeks ago when I wanted to hang out and you didn't call me back?'"
Suvari insists she didn't dream of a movie career or do much to pursue one, but she had, after all, been modeling since she was 13, and she obviously went so far as to go to auditions, which tend to up the chances of an attractive young girl's getting cast in things. "I started auditioning after school because my modeling agency had a commercial division. I did a few commercials and got cast in a couple of sitcoms and in 'ER,' But when I graduated in 1997, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I thought, instead of working in a bagel shop or a McDonald's, I've got this acting thing going on that doesn't seem too shabby. The money was good. The fact that I looked younger than I was seemed to be working For me. I thought, 'I may as well take advantage of this while it's in front of me.' I was pretty much 'la-di-dah,' while trying my hardest. With me, it's always been, whatever happens, happens. I saw how flighty the business was. When you're doing cattle calls with 50,000 other girls, all you can do is to go in there, smile, do your best and what will be will be."
Suvari was clearly aces at those cattle calls, because she quickly started getting movie roles and never stopped. She's done 10 movies in less than four years. "I look at it this way," she says. "For me, it's fun and it's going well. It's better than I thought it was going to be. My family can't believe it. They're like, 'Oh, my God--our Mena!' Maybe there will come a day when the phone never rings, but then I could always go back to school and get a degree in something."
She's unlikely to do that any time soon. One of her two follow-ups to American Pie and American Beauty is a black comedy titled Sugar and Spice, in which she costars with James Marsden and Marley Shelton.
"I feel like I'm under a microscope, but I'm not about to kill myself if my next movies are not hits," she says. "I'm in the business to provide entertainment to others, but I'm not necessarily going to please everybody. I do things that I think are going to be challenging and cool. When I think about a project, my only decision-making is about whether I think it's going to be fun, with a great crew that's really organized. It doesn't matter to me that something is or isn't going to make $100 million."
OK, so how's Sugar and Spice? "It's a comedy to the core, a lot of fun and no more than that," she tells me. "It's got this cute little Reservoir Dogs feel to it because each of us wears a signature color when we're not in our cheerleading uniforms. I'm in black and blue because I'm the tough girl named Kansas. It's kind of like a girl-power flick. I hope girls like it."
Suvari has a bigger role in what could potentially be a bigger movie, too. She and her American Pie costar Jason Biggs star with Greg Kinnear in writer/director Amy Heckerling's Loser, a bittersweet riff on Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning classic The Apartment. Heckerling's clever reworking of Jane Austen's Emma, the hilarious 1995 hit Clueless, gave Alicia Silverstone a career-changing opportunity few young actresses get. With Loser, Heckerling has refashioned Wilder's tale in a contemporary college setting, and given Suvari, cast as the lower-class, tough-talking, emotionally bruised student befriended by outcast Biggs and abused by professor Kinnear, the chance for an interesting career stretch.
"It worked out beautifully," Suvari says. "It's funny and romantic, something I hadn't done before. I'd never seen The Apartment, because I don't know anything about old movies. That's one of the reasons I'm a horrible actress and need to build up my library of older movies. Anyway, I met with Amy and [co-producer] Twink Caplan and they were so cool, so completely wise and down to earth. I've been trying now when I go into a room to make it more friendly -- we don't all need to be so damned nervous. It went well and they had me back to read with Jason to see our chemistry. When it comes to chemistry, you go in the room and look at somebody and just know whether it's going to work. Jason and I were there for an hour and a half just fooling around, and when I left, I was like, 'This better happen because I would just have so much fun with this guy every day. I love the guy."
Is Jason Biggs sexy? "Of course he is," she says. "There's more than just physicality that makes someone sexy. You meet him and he's so-o-o sweet and funny." And is he more or less kissable than Chris Klein or Kevin Spacey? "Each kiss means something different in a different scene," she says, "No one was better than the other. But should we really let readers know whether there's serious kissing in Loser? OK, there is some kissing, definitely. And it was such a blast."
I tell Suvari that not long ago another actress told me in an interview how she'd had no interest in doing a movie in which her character uttered the line, "I swallowed your cum and you won't let me sleep on your couch." It turned out to be a line from Loser. "Yes, I know, that was Christina Ricci," Suvari replies. "But if you take any line out of context, it could seem rude or be misunderstood. She took it too literally. In fact, it's a really important moment in the movie because it's a turning point for the character beginning to stand up for herself in a bad relationship." Suvari shrugs, as if to suggest that Ricci's loss was her gain, and says. "I've seen it and I really like it. It's a sweet, romantic movie. You're so happy at the end of it."
Since we've been discussing the topic of sex and romance, I ask whether she's had the experience of being hotly pursued and hit-on, despite her marriage to 37-year-old cinematographer Robert Brinkmann. "I don't look for that, pay attention to it or expose myself to that by going to places where it could happen. I don't really drink or go to bars. I pretty much hang out at home, go out to a movie or to dinner. For the same reason, I haven't gotten much weird behavior from fans either." Does she understand how sexy some people find her? "I'm pretty much humble about that, I was just lucky the director saw that in me for American Beauty. It's flattering, but I don t want to be a model or a beautiful girl. Look at Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich--now that's so cool." Suvari is referring here to Diaz's mouse-brown frizz and washed-out face, which even admirers of Spike Jonze's little gem found perhaps too authentically unglamorous,
"If someone says I look nice," Suvari continues, "it's great. But I don't feel I've earned anything for being that way. I don't really even think about it." Speaking of that, do she and Brinkmann have plans for a child any rime soon? "I really enjoy my husband. We have no plans to have children yet," she replies. "I want to be a bit more settled in my career and I'd have to take off over a year to have a child. I still feel like I'm a kid in a lot of ways and I would never want to do that to a child."
I tell Suvari that I hear a lot of actors claim they're not obsessed with their careers when they obviously are, but that I believe her when she insists it's not what makes her tick. "Then I must be a good actress, huh?" she shoots back, and laughs. "No. I'm not fooling. That's really how I feel. I just want to be happy. All of this career stuff is great and now I'm getting offers to do a couple of period movies that would be very different for me. The fact that people are responding to me is astounding. But, honestly, I just live my life day by day. And I'm not going to die if this movie career doesn't work out."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Ridley Scott for the May issue of Movieline.