‘Opposite’ Attracts Her

Seated in a busy bar after a day of interviews, Christina Ricci sips a Coke and thinks about a cigarette. Ricci, of course, is best known as the stone-faced little girl Wednesday in the Addams family films. Only now she’s no longer a little girl. She doesn’t look like one, and she has the jaded, slightly knowing air of a modern teenager. She’s 18.

Asked what she thinks of the Sundance Film Festival, Ricci says, “I thought it would be everybody and everything on Main Street and everyone seeing movies and partying and schmoozing.”

It’s not, especially for someone who has movies to promote, in her case “Buffalo 66” and “The Opposite of Sex.” Ricci is this year’s Parker Posey or last year’s Lili Taylor--a high-profile, ubiquitous poster girl for independent films, although unlike those actresses, Ricci has a big-studio pedigree.

In addition to “The Addams Family” and “Addams Family Values,” she has appeared in “Casper,” “Now and Then,” “Mermaids” and “The Ice Storm.” Her Sundance films mark her transition not only to indie movies but also to who she really is, or at least who she’s supposed to be.

In “Buffalo 66” and especially in “The Opposite of Sex,” which opens Friday, she plays angry and alienated.

“I’m a teenager,” she says in January during the Sundance Festival. “I’m supposed to be angry and alienated. I just figure as I change, the roles will change. Hopefully I won’t be doing the angst girl when I’m 20.”

In the Addams family films, Ricci’s development was arrested, both emotionally and physically (she was trussed up to rein in her blossoming body). Yet Ricci, unlike a lot of actors relentlessly linked to a particular part, doesn’t resent Wednesday.

“I love that character,” Ricci says. “I was so lucky to get it. I would have to say my two favorite characters I’ve ever played would have to be Wednesday and this one [Dedee Truitt in “The Opposite of Sex”]. Just because of the things I got to say and the attitudes I got to have. You can’t do that in life. I can never just be myself and say to someone, ‘I hate you; get out of my face,’ like Dedee can or Wednesday would.”

Dedee sends up political correctness, especially sexual orientation. (She does a fair amount of gay bashing.) She crashes in on her gay stepbrother, seduces his current lover, steals his dead lover’s ashes (and $10,000), gets pregnant, runs off with a cretinous boy from back home and generally drags everyone down with her.

“She’s actually really very close to the character Dedee, in a much more socially responsible way,” says “Opposite of Sex” director-screenwriter Don Roos, who had Ricci as a house guest for six weeks after the shoot was over. “She doesn’t create emotional or romantic havoc wherever she goes. But she’s very honest. She’s not at all into being politically correct. She has a lot of impatience with people’s stupidity. And she says what she thinks.”

In “Buffalo 66,” set for a July release, these qualities are not so much on display. Here she plays a blond bimbo-like tap-dancing student who is kidnapped by an ex-con (Vincent Gallo), forced to play his wife during a bizarre visit to his out-of-it parents and then willingly follows him from bowling alley to fast-food joint to crummy hotel. Her outfit is down to here and up to there.

“The first time my mother saw me in my ‘Buffalo 66’ wardrobe, she cried uncontrollably,” Ricci says. “I was like, ‘Mom, it’s OK, it’s not that low, it’s not that short.’ She was just shocked by it, I guess.”

Ricci says her outfit as originally scripted was jeans and a shirt, but then Gallo, the director, co-screenwriter and co-star, had “this vision.” Ricci disputed this vision, and finally he agreed to add two inches to the bottom.

This episode suggests that Ricci can take care of herself, and to some degree she can, although she’s still subject to the tyranny of adolescence. She says that while shooting Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm,” her first teen angst role, she became terribly angry and depressed.

Kevin Kline, who plays her hapless father in the film, took her under his wing, which extended not only over the shoot but also over the promotional tour that followed.

“When we went to Cannes, I had no idea what to do, and he held my hand and walked with me, and he’s like, ‘OK, we’re going to turn to the right and wave, smile, nod, turn to the left, waving, smiling, moving ahead,’ ” she says. “At the New York Film Festival, my shoes were too big for me, and I kept falling on the stairs, so after the first time I did it he would wait for me and take my arm before we went. He made me feel really--I don’t know. He’s really warm. I respond to that.”

Ricci also seems to excite brotherly responses from other actors. She and Timothy Hutton, whom she met at Sundance, spent the festival barging in on each other’s interviews and roughhousing--the over-large jacket that Ricci wears to the interview belongs to her boyfriend, because Hutton ripped the sleeve off of her own.

It’s tempting to compare the two actors, because Hutton was around the same age Ricci is now when he was thrust into prominence with his Oscar-winningrole in “Ordinary People.”

For Ricci, the resemblance stops there. She says that men have it easier, because the system seems to single them out, whereas women tend to emerge in groups.

Asked if this is a function of the kind of parts written for women, Ricci says, “Of course, but things are changing.”

Ricci has a slew of hip films coming out--Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” with Johnny Depp (also opening Friday), John Waters’ “Pecker” with Eddie Furlong, Morgan J. Freeman’s “Desert Blue” with her friend Brendan Sexton III, Risa Bramon Garcia’s “200 Cigarettes” with Courtney Love.

She’s no longer accompanied on sets by her sister and two brothers. Her mother still reads her scripts but does not vet them. She’s bought a place of her own in lower Manhattan. She’s enrolling at Columbia University next fall and rewriting a script for Michael Stipe’s Single Cell Productions. She has two agents at ICM, a literary agent, an accountant and a publicist. She has ambitions to direct someday.

To hear her tell it, the only thing she’s missing are good adult roles.

“I’m not the first choice for anything yet,” she says. “I’m always sort of the backup. I think people are [reluctant] to put me in adult roles. They still think I look too young if they haven’t seen me. I don’t have that MTV marketability.”