What a Trip It Has Been

Actress Hope Davis is sitting in a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan discussing the food she eats, why she eats it, what it reminds her of. Unlike most actors, it’s not a one-way street. She wants your opinions of these matters as well.

Bacon: “You don’t mind if I handle all the bacon, do you? I’m a little fussy about my bacon. I don’t like it all burned and crunchy. I don’t like to eat carbon.”

Oatmeal: “Did you read the book ‘Angela’s Ashes’? This oatmeal reminds me of it. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s real. It’s not fiction. He speaks in the voice of a child. But they eat a lot of bread. Like this would be a good meal for them.”

Anyone who has seen the 30-year-old Davis in “The Daytrippers” wouldn’t recognize her in real life. In the movie, she plays a deeply devoted but deeply incurious Long Island wife of a book editor who finds what may be a love letter in his laundry and brings it to her family (Pat McNamara and Anne Meara are her parents, and Parker Posey and Liev Schreiber are her sister and her sister’s boyfriend). Together they decide to drive into Manhattan to confront her husband, played by Stanley Tucci, with it at work. In the process, family bonds are strained and then broken.

Although Davis mentions her mother frequently in conversation--her father died just recently--it’s hard to imagine her running home at the first signs of domestic discord. Or being oblivious to what’s going on around her. According to “Daytrippers” writer-director Greg Mottola, who was introduced to Davis through actor Campbell Scott, who also appears in the film, her insights about people helped shape the “Daytrippers” script. In fact, he wrote the part for her.

“I wrote the first draft of the script, and Hope was one of the first people I gave it to,” he says. “As it turns out, Hope’s criticism, besides [producers] Steven Soderbergh’s and Nancy Tenenbaum’s, was the criticism I took most seriously. She was just incredibly savvy. At this point, I’d probably give her anything I wrote even if there wasn’t a part for her, to get her feedback.”

Davis was savvy enough--and secure enough as an actress--to realize that although her character is at the center of the movie, the other roles are showier. Her father is long-suffering. Her mother is a control freak. Her rebellious sister is frustrated by her boyfriend’s eagerness to please her mother. As these prickly personalities wrestle in the family station wagon, the camera occasionally cuts away to Davis staring pensively out the window. She brings the audience back to the problem at hand.

“Any actor’s temptation would be to try to compete with the one-liners that all the other characters in the car get to do,” Mottola says. “And the key to this character was although she doesn’t have that many lines, she has to hold the audience through her facial expression, her posture or the quality of her voice. It’s not apparent what she’s thinking. This character is meant to be a little bit of a mystery--why does she bring this note to her mother? She’s a person in denial, and I really wanted to avoid any kind of melodramatic explanation of her character through what she says.”

“Everyone wonders whether that was hard or if it was a drag,” Davis says, setting aside her oatmeal. “It was kind of a blessing, because I hadn’t had that much film experience and I was nervous. It was really nice to experiment with what I could do just with my face.”

The movie, which took 16 days to shoot, was filmed more than two years ago. The financing (initially $60,000) came essentially from Soderbergh, Tenenbaum and Scott. According to Mottola, it attracted the interest of numerous investors. One of them, a “semi-big” distributor, made a deal for it but then backed out. The filmmakers decided to finish it on their own (the finished product cost $500,000).

Then they hit the festival circuit. They couldn’t get the film into Sundance, but they did get it into Slamdance in 1996, where it won the grand jury prize. It was shown in Cannes, and eventually a domestic distributor, CFP, stepped up, but until now the film has been much more appreciated abroad than at home. It even won the Audience Award at the Athens Film Festival in 1996. The tyranny of the family must resonate well overseas.

“It’s going to have a Jerry Lewis career, which is kind of scary,” Mottola says.

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The same cannot be said of Davis, although it remains to be seen what kind of career she will have. She got her start in her hometown of Tenafly, N.J., performing plays with neighbor Mira Sorvino. Though Davis continued to act throughout high school, she didn’t know if she wanted to make a career of it. She went to Vassar College and majored in cognitive science because, she says, “if I was going to a liberal arts school, I wanted to get a real education. It’s kind of good in this profession to start out with a brain.”

After graduation, Davis studied acting in London and then went to Chicago, figuring she would try to accumulate credits there before tackling New York. Her first job was a Chicago production of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” directed by Joel Schumacher. He subsequently cast her in “Flatliners” and the abortive TV series “2000 Malibu Road.”

“What I really wanted to have was an ice princess,” says Schumacher. “Hope had very long blond hair and was so patrician-looking and so WASP-y and had this beautiful body and these gorgeous legs and was an extraordinary actress. She was staggering.”

“I feel like I owe a lot to Joel,” Davis says. “I think he was a little sad that I didn’t become an instant movie star.”

“I think she is a star,” he insists. “What makes a star with the public has nothing to do with acting. She’s a character actress, which is the greatest thing you can be. She played an aggressively hysterical psychotic in ‘2000 Malibu Road,’ and she was brilliant. I think she can do anything.”

Of course, there are people in the movie industry who don’t have time for star acting.

“It’s a cruel business,” Davis says. “I’ll never forget, I had this one audition in Chicago. It was for a horror film or something, and there was this really angry casting director. And after my audition, he sat me down and told me why I would never be successful. He talked about what about my face didn’t work, how I carried myself like a classical leading lady but I looked like something else. It took me a year to let that go.”

After three years in Chicago, armed with an agent and a resume, Davis returned to New York. There the sorts of qualities that inspired Schumacher were noticed by others, particularly playwright Nicky Silver, who wrote a part for her in “The Food Chain” in 1995 after she had appeared with great success in a play of his called “Pterodactyls.”

Her performance won accolades from New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who wrote, “There’s no one quite like her onstage these days. She has a swan-like, anemic beauty that is also absurdly cartoonish.”

“You get someone like Ben on your side, you feel like you should send them thank-you notes,” Davis says.

Not all of Davis’ work has earned such praise, especially her film work.

She was nervous about doing “The Daytrippers” because many of her previous roles had been so insignificant. Blink and you’ll miss her in “Home Alone,” where she played a French airline ticket agent, and “Kiss of Death,” where Nicolas Cage literally bench-presses her. It’s hard even to call these parts, although she says a rival actress ran into her one day and insisted on identifying her with one of them.

“She introduced me to this friend of hers,” Davis says. “She said, ‘Oh, this is Hope Davis. You might remember her as Nicolas Cage’s barbell in ‘Kiss of Death.’ ” She said it so sweetly that I didn’t know what to do.”

More recently, Davis has found satisfaction in independent films. In addition to “The Daytrippers,” she has several other indies in the can--”Guy,” “Next Stop, Wonderland” and “The Myth of Fingerprints,” which received strong critical praise at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Next up will be Tucci’s new movie, a farce set aboard a ship during the 1930s. Kevin Costner is considering casting her in “The Postman.” And Mottola wants to use her again, too.

He says, “I’m always thinking as I’m writing my new script, ‘What completely different part do I want to have Hope play?’ ”

Whatever it is, he’ll have to get in line.