Premiere Feb. 1999
QUEEN OF THE WILD FRONTIER
We’ve watched her morph from cherubic child star to wicked teen
queen. And Christina Ricci is only getting started. Imagine: By the
year 2020, she should be just about the coolest 40-year-old movie
star in the galaxy………….by Margy Rochlin
If at lunchtime you should happen to stumble into Spago in Beverly Hills, you might be
struck by the Nancy Reagan bouffants, the pastel Adolfo suits, and the jewelry by the
pound. Christina Ricci, the apealingly glitz-resistant-eighteen-year-old star of The
Opposite Of Sex, Buffalo ’66, and Pecker, surveys the crowd and sees only pickey
eaters.
“Once, I worked at a snack bar,” she explains, letting her memories drift back to the
summer of 1993, when she temped at the country club her parents belonged to in
Montclair, New Jersey.
“These women were rich and bored and all on weird diets,” she says. “They’d tell you,
‘No mayonnaise!’ And we wouldn’t put any on, and they’d start screaming, ‘I taste
mayonnaise!’ They were so obnoxious and demanding, just horrible-but we were
allowed to be horrible right back. All the snack-bar girls were members of the club. It
didn’t matter if we got fired; we’d still be there.”
At the time, she was already fairly well known as an actress, having appeared in four
movies, including The Addams Family. Images dance in your head of little Wednesday
behind the counter, garnishing turkey on wheat with deadpan threats and maybe a
little arsenic. So how did ms. Ricci put her deeply tanned customers in their place?
For a few beats, she says nothing. In life, as in her movies, there is something acutely
unsetteling about Ricci when she’s quiet. If a camera were to focus on her face at this
moment, it would pick up an ingenue with her knife and fork poised over pink slabs of
London broil, delivering one of her famously masklike reaction shots. Although her
facial muscles have barely twiched, all sorts of complex emotional activity seems to
be coursing just below her pale skin. Then, a light switches on in her hazel eyes.
“I’d go , ‘Okay ma’am,’” she says sweetly. “ ‘We’ll make you another sandwich.’ ” Of
corse, it’s possible that Ricci complied like a perfect food server. But it’s just as easy
to envision her scraping off the imaginary condiment and substituting fat free spit.
During the past sevral years, Ricci’s public profile has gone from adorably
self-possessed screen kid (Mermaids, Casper) to entertainingly feisty teenager du jour.
In the past twelve months alone, she’s managed to outdo Parker Posey in the
Yep-I’m-In-That-One-Too sweepstakes, showing up in nine films, if you include her bit
parts in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and the upcoming 200 Cigarettes; her
voice-only performance in Small Soldiers; plus her still-unreleased low-buget flicks
Desert Blue and I woke Up Early The Day I Died.
During their frumpy pre-adult years, Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields mostly hid out in
University study halls. But Ricci tackled her post-puberty transition the modern way,
by carefully selecting the roles that celebrated both her shrewdly appraising squint
and curvy, belly-dancer figure. Then she wooed the media with her rebel apathy:
chain-smoking parliaments and chatting blithely about burning her arms with
cigarettes and of her bout with anorexia, all the while cursing as if she were Redd
Foxx’s illegitimate white child.
Despite a fleeting late-90’s trend towards embracing gee-whiz Jennifer Love Hewitt’s,
Americans will always have a weakness for intelligent, spunky protovixens. Jhon
Waters says he “laughed out loud” when he learned that after spending several weeks
in Baltimore as a hyperdedicated Laundromat manager in Pecker, Ricci promptly
informed a journalist that she loathes the town Waters loves most. “It was the most
Cinematically incorrect thing she could say.” Still, Waters believes that her big mouth
is only another reason of why she seems like an exotic, mysterious island in young
Hollywood’s shallow sea. “she’s not just a good comedian and actress who is
provocative onscreen,” he says, “She’s great at press, too, wich they never are.”
Still, these days Ricci is not sure what she’s won by being the It girl with the punk-rock
communication skills. “ I read my interviews, and think, Ohj God! I’m not like that! This
is so embarrassing! People must think I’m gross, slutty, and, like, dirty…,” she says
later adding a medical diagnosis to this string of self-flagellating adjectives.
“Sometimes I think I have Tourette’s Syndrome. I’ll read something I’ve said and think,
why the hell did I say that?”
Up there on her list of regrets is an aside in which she’s dismissed her 200 cigarettes
costar Courtney Love as a sellout. Though Ricci says that her comment was edited to
sound disparaging, she nonetheless put in an apology call to Love, dialing the number
with a trembling hand. “I was so afraid,” says Ricci, who was relieved to find Love an
Understanding media consultant. “She gave me all this advice. She said ‘You know,
you don’t have to be interesting. It’s their job to make you interesting.’ And I thought,
Oh, that’s right.”
For the next several months, Ricci will be residing in London, playing Katrina Van
Tassel to Johnny Depp’s Ichabod Crane in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. But beofore
the Paramount execs would ok Ricci for her first big-budget commercial project in
three years, she says, producer Scott Rudin (who knew her from the Addams Family
franchise) had to vouch for her psychological well being. “Because of interviews
they’d read, the studio wanted to know if I was this dark personality, if I was stable,”
she says “And what I thought was funny was that it was people from inside the
business who believed those interviews were correct.”
In 1997’s The Ice Storm, Ricci portrayed Wendy Hood, a gloomy adolescent who finds
refuge from her sadly splintering family by coming on to the neighborhood boys. It
was a startling departure from her “Oh Casper!” days, and the critics were justified in
marveling over how every line of dialogue that spilled from Ricci’s frowning-cherub
mouth was a revelation. Her most-oft-cited big moment was the Dominatrix vibe she
brought to the scene in which she corners a very terrified young lad in a bathroom and
a bargain: “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Ricci added to her growing
demonology by bragging to journalists that the strangely knowing performance was
the result of her tapping into her own perverted sexuality. But director Ang Lee says
that on that day, the origins of her fury were more mundane.
“She was under a lot of pressure because she was studying for her exams,” recalls
Lee, who says that his job wasn’t really to direct her as much as to “capture” her
roiling, adolescent angst. “Right while we were lighting the scene, her tutor started
complaining that she didn’t do her lesson right, and she really got worked up. I wanted
to kill the tutor- but it ended up being good for the movie.”
Because Ricci has never taken a single acting lesson, she’s unlikely to talk loftily about
craft or motivation. Instead, she subscribes to this six-word dramatic philosophy: “I
just do what I’m told.” For someone so gifted, this creed renders her ability to be
compelling onscreen even more intriguing. Is she a prodigy? Is she a savant? Most
likely, it’s that she’s relying on a technique she’s long since forgotten learning, the
rules of her vocation having been drummed into her since age nine. That was when
Cher battled it out with then director Frank Oz (Richard Benjamin later replaced him) to
get Ricci cast in Mermaids, opposite her and Winona Ryder.
“It was my first movie, so it was really exciting.” Says Ricci, who reminisces almost
lyrically about her debut, of the thrill of being carried around by “like, twenty-year-old
guy production assistants” and of the vanilla~y scent of Cher’s perfume. But her older
costar supplies a slightly different version of the story, in which in which two leading
ladies took a talented pip-squeak under their wings and tried to mold her into a solid
scene partner.
“I don’t know how professional she was, but if you worked with her, she picked things
up right away.” Says Cher, who’d take Ricci home for sleep-overs or invite her into her
trailer to watch video’s. But Cher could also be a scorching disciplinarian. “One time, I
really got pissed because she was being a total little brat. And I took her aside and
said, ‘Look, miss, you’d better get your ass in shape. And you’d better do it right now,
because this shit won’t fly. Just because you’ve got some bug up your ass today, you
cannot just leave [Winona] high and dry.’ So she kind of hopped to it right away.”
Almost a decade and nineteen movies later, Ricci still loves the feeling of arriving on a
new set. “I like the effort it takes to make people like me,” she says about the rush she
gets from strategizing how to ingratiate herself to strangers. “Of trying to figure out
their sense of humor or what favor I can do for them that they’ll appreciate or what side
of me they’ll like more.” Ricci pauses, then turns bright red. “Basically I’m like…a
whore. I’ll give people whatever they want so they’ll like me.”
Because of her direct gaze and her air of self-possession, Ricci’s always being
described as an old soul. But at this moment, she seems just like every other
eighteen-year-old. Constantly trying on and discarding new personae, hoping to find
one that fits. For example, she carries what she calls her “white-trash passport.” Which
features a satanic looking mug shot of documenting her one-time-infatuation with
bleached hair and smudgy eye makeup. These days, however, she wears her natural
brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, revealing a satiny complexion and Italian-Irish
features so classically pretty that she could have modeled for a 16th-century artist.
Once a vocal fan of the East Coast, she now extols the virtues of Los Angeles, where
she was born just before Valentine’s Day, in 1980. Six months ago, she moved to a
Hollywood Hills rental with 27-year-old boyfriend, Matthew Frauman, and now entire
evenings are planned around the television reruns. “Friends at 11, then Mad About
You, then Law and Order,” she recites as if she’s the first neo-nester to reject wild
times for pleasures that don’t require a fake I.D. “I moved here because I wanted a
better lifestyle. I wanted to get away from New York, where you stay out all night.”
On another day, when Ricci and Frauman were walking through Beverly Hills, Frauman
used his long, skinny body to act out the armistice between the couples rottweiler
puppy and house cat. It was a blip-length bit of sidewalk theater, but one can’t help but
think that for a sought-after starlet her age, Ricci has made an unusually sane decision:
falling for the not-yet-known nice guy in threadbare corduroys, instead of the jerk with
the high Q-rating who can’t stop fussing with his hair.
“I can judge a person by how they treat Matthew,” Ricci says later, when asked if their
fame differential has an effect on their relationship. “Like, if I’m introduced to them and
they don’t even acknowledge that he’s standing there, obviously they’re really fake
and I don’t want anything to do with them.”
For all the ways Ricci charges through life like a sherman tank, at certain times she
wishes someone else would take the wheel. “I’m a girl, and I’m really paranoid, and I
don’t like don’t like being by myself,” she says, confessing to a bit of anxiety over the
fact that the Sleepy Hollow brass expect her to live alone in London. “I want to be
afforded the same respect as an adult. But I feel like calling them up and saying, ‘Look,
I’m eighteen. You’d better assign me a partner, or at least find me a hotel where
someone from the front desk can come and find my dead body."
Back on Spago’s central patio, Ricci is puffing away on a cigarette and wondering why
authority figures are never around when you need them. She says, for example, that
she starved herself down to skin and bones on the set of the 1995 coming-of-age
movie Now and Then, and that practically no one—Not even producer Demi Moore,
who had dealt with her own weight issues in the past—confronted her about her obvious
eating disorder. “I was trying to get attention, to get someone to do something
for me that showed they actually cared,” says Ricci. Help arrived in the form of her
sister Pia, who showed up on location and had a fit at the sight of her withered sibling.
“She just freaked out, screaming at me and crying,” says Ricci. “As soon as I got back
home, I started eating again.
When Buffalo 66 and The Opposite Of Sex were released, reviewers made much of
Ricci’s defiant voluptuousness—that she was all soft hips and tummy, and that she
insisted on being taken as sexy on her own terms. In reality, her attitude is lodged
somewhere between yearning to be as svelte as the next A-list actress and knowing
that for her, it isn’t worth the sacrifice. Take, for example, her response when asked
who’s body type she covets. “I would love to be Calista Flockhart,” Ricci says, “But I
Can’t be—and I’m aware of that fact.” Forget giving her a chance to come up with a
less frightening ideal. “That’s the way my mother looks,” she says stubbornly. “And
isn’t that what it’s all about? Being raised to want to look like your mother?”
A few days later, Ricci is drinking coffee and a Diet Coke at an outdoor café’ on sunset
Boulevard. As the sun sets, the temperature begins to drop, and Ricci pulls the hood of
her faded blue sweatshirt low on her forehead and ties the neck string tightly. With
those expressive, street-urchin eyes peering at you from across the table, it’s easy to
understand why directors are so fond of shooting her in close-up. “We have a saying
that the face is not just a face, but a reflection of the mind.” Says Ang Lee. “Christina
may or may not know it, but that is her power.”
And does that power have an expiration date? “She’s going to last forever and ever.”
Waters predicts. “She’s an original, the real thing. She’ll be the big, BIG star of a lot of
strange movies.”
Where does Ricci see herself in the year 2020? “I have no idea,” She says, in a tone
flat enough to indicate that she dosen’t want to be confused with showbiz’s current
crop of junior career planners, who’ve mapped out their futures: from Hot New Face to
gravity-induced move to behind the camera. “I’ll be 40, Which is scary.” She
contemplates in silence for a few seconds. “I’ll be a bitter, bitter old actress,” she
concludes. “I’m already leaning that way—it’s just my personality.”