Profile: Chloë Sevigny
The PROVOKR fave stars in Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship
“Just having a command of the language was a new thing for me,” said Chloë Sevigny at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where her latest film, Love & Friendship, premiered. It’s based on an 18th-century Jane Austen novella, which has been adapted by the ever-civilized and playful Whit Stillman (Metropolitan; Barcelona) and was released in theaters in May. “I’ve never done period like that before,” Sevigny explained. “My character is an American in England, and she’s married to a very respectable man played by Stephen Frye. She lives vicariously through her girlfriend, Lady Susan, played by Kate Beckinsale. Lady Susan is a bit of a bad girl and has a reputation, and I think we all have girlfriends that we love and adore and are wild, and we kind of live out our fantasies through them and their brazenness. So I kind of related to my character in that way, because I have girlfriends who are so outspoken, bright and witty. My best friend, Natasha Lyonne, for instance. I’m always so enamored with her and how she can control herself in situations.”
This isn’t the first time Sevigny has worked with Stillman, or with her co-star Beckinsale, for that matter. The actresses played the leads in Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, a 1998 comedy about two club-frequenting young women in the early ’80s, when the Studio 54 era was fading out. The Last Days of Disco was cast at a time when Sevigny was in her downtown-indie-actress heyday, and Beckinsale, a British newcomer, followed her lead. With Love & Friendship, their roles have largely reversed, with Beckinsale now the well-traveled Austen thespian and Sevigny acting as her down-to-earth American support.
Even though the formalities of period filmmaking may be new to the 41-year-old Sevigny, she’s rarely walked away from a challenge, and has been unusually fearless in her work. That’s just the way she is: As a high-schooler from prim Darien, Connecticut, in the 1990s, Sevigny would escape by train to New York and soon became a fixture in the East Village bohemian scene. She became an intern at Sassy magazine and friends with a (very) young screenwriter named Harmony Korine, which led to her first film role, as the lead in the controversial Larry Clark film, Kids, in 1995, which Korine had scripted. The movie, in which New York teens did drugs and had lots of sex (and spread HIV), shocked many and was released without a rating to avoid the NC-17 the MPAA gave it. But it launched the careers of both Sevigny and Korine, who were a couple for several years and made two more avant-garde films together, Gummo (1997) and Julien Donkey-boy (1999).
The movie that changed everything for Sevigny was Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), in which she played Lana Tisdel, the real-life girlfriend of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), a transgender man who was brutally murdered in a hate crime. Her sensitive performance earned her an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress (Swank went on to win Best Actress) and opened up opportunities to work with a host of great directors, such as Lars von Trier (Dogville and Mandalay), Woody Allen (Melinda and Melinda), David Fincher (Zodiac), Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers) and Mary Harron (American Psycho).
Sevigny’s devotion to her art has not always brought good fortune, however. For writer-director-star Vincent Gallo and The Brown Bunny (2003), she did a sex scene at the end of the film in which she gave Gallo an unsimulated, onscreen blow-job. The movie screened at Cannes and was met with derision; Gallo re-cut it (though he left the sex scene intact), and it bombed. Sevigny’s agents dumped her, and some in the industry felt her career was over. But she rebounded with gusto, and remained steadfast in defending the film. Her work in TV since then, in Portlandia and American Horror Story and especially the fundamentalist Mormon bigamy drama, Big Love, for which she won a Golden Globe, further strengthened her reputation. Her independent spirit and solid work ethic has made her a star. In an Interview magazine article last year, American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy asked Sevigny, who has modeled, designed her own lines of high-fashion clothing and graced many a best-dressed list, what it takes to be a style icon. “You just have to dress yourself,” she responded. “There are so many actresses floating around who have people picking out their outfits for them. That’s hard for me to wrap my head around or celebrate. To be a true icon, you have to have style emanating from you. And you have to have figured it out on your own and have a point of view, a perspective, and be able to translate it in some personal way.”
