Growing, No Pains

Anna Paquin is a normal teenager--she swears it.

It’s just her life that’s “pretty strange,” she says. Like any 16-year-old, she hangs out with packs of friends from school, has a boyfriend--”Most people do,” she casually affirms--and e-mails her buddies back home in New Zealand from her new home in Los Angeles. She just happens to have an Oscar hidden in the back of her closet and a new movie in which she goes toe to toe with Sean Penn.

She is equally enthusiastic about relating the thrill of being a member of the high school class of 2000 as she is describing why she would choose to portray Donna, a sexually aware teenage runaway who plays a pivotal role in the final scene of “Hurlyburly.” Both, she says, “are just so cool.”

Anyone who remembers the young girl who mothered the flock of geese in 1996’s “Fly Away Home” or her first role in “The Piano,” for which she won a supporting actress Oscar at age 11--and few can forget her youthful gasps of joy when she went up to accept the award--might be surprised to see a hard-living yet still somehow sweet Paquin command the screen in “Hurlyburly.”

In it, her character is disturbingly grown-up--and her dialogue is as frank as anything on a Kenneth Starr grand jury tape. But she denies it’s any part of a grand plan to help her transition from child actress to adult roles.

“I’m not really terribly conscious of the opinions of others. They are just the stories I want to tell at the time,” says Paquin, sounding her age, plus about 20 years or so. “It’s weird to think about how you are perceived. I have no idea how people see me.”

Yes, the teenager is “an adult in a kid’s body,” confirms Julie Yorn, Paquin’s manager. “She’s very wise for a person of her age. Her analysis of material, and her response to material, far surpasses her chronological age. She’s drawn to great words. The role wasn’t adult to her. It was just smart.”

She wanted to be in “Hurlyburly,” the current film version of the David Rabe play, because it had a “great cast”--besides Penn, Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palminteri and Garry Shandling star in the ensemble piece--and a “great script,” Paquin says. “Who could say no? Who would not want to do that?

“Besides, I’m kind of past goslings,” says Paquin, laughing, as she flaps her arms to imitate how she taught geese to spread their wings in “Fly Away Home.” “That was fun when I was 12. I loved that film, because I was a kid. But I’m not a kid now.”

These days, she is a junior at a private high school; Paquin will only admit to getting “just normal grades,” yet follows that with another one of those wiser-than-her-years statements, mildly disguised in teen-speak. “They make sure you do all of your work and stuff,” she says. “I want to be one of those people who is completely well-educated, you know?”

Then the totally teenage Paquin pops up again. One of the better things about her new school is its coed student population. Back in New Zealand, she went to a private school with 1,100 girls. “Boys have stopped being something that you think, ‘Eee-ew, gross,’ ” she says, giggling.

She moved to Los Angeles over the summer with her mother--her parents have been separated for some time--because “14 hours in an airplane is not pleasant,” she says in her charming New Zealand accent. Of course, the reason she needs to be here is for her work, and there is plenty of it.

She portrays Diane Lane’s daughter in the ‘60s period piece “A Walk on the Moon,” coming from Miramax early this year (though it was completed a couple of years ago). She plays Freddie Prinze Jr.’s younger sister in “She’s All That,” another Miramax film to be released in the spring that Paquin describes as “a high school romantic comedy thing.”

And right now, she’s working on an independent film, tentatively titled “All the Rage,” which also features Joan Allen, Gary Sinise and Jeff Daniels and has “a complicated plot line about bad things happening when too many guns are around,” she says.

The goal, Yorn says, is for Paquin to have “a diversified body of work out there” and to continue to work with talented people. Because school is her first priority, she has the luxury of working only when the material is “fantastic,” Yorn adds.

Her parents allow her to choose her roles, but she says she’d pay attention to them if they ever had a problem with her playing a particular part. “But I don’t want to do anything really weird, well not yet anyway,” Paquin says while methodically shredding a napkin into perfect squares. “But, of course, if they had some objection, they have a lot more life experience, so I would listen.”

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To hear Paquin tell it, she’s an accidental actress. She happened into the profession when she tagged along with neighbor kids who were on their way to an open audition for “The Piano,” and she beat out 5,000 girls for the role of Holly Hunter’s daughter in the Jane Campion film.

She hasn’t had any formal training and can’t explain her acting technique. “How would I explain to you what I really do?” she asks. “I don’t really know.”

In an interview, the little girl from “The Piano” is nowhere in sight. Instead, a relatively tall (5 feet, 5 inches and then some, with the aid of clunky shoes), slightly built young woman sits across the table simply clad in a gray sweater and flared jeans. When considering a question, she often strokes her lightly brushed long brown hair. Her gaze is mesmerizing; those soulful dark brown eyes make you want to believe every word she says.

Anthony Drazan, the co-producer-director of “Hurlyburly,” says that Paquin possesses a “certain spirit or mystique,” a natural maturity and power that come across searingly on screen. When asked if he thinks portraying the streetwise Donna in his film will help her make the leap to more adult roles, he says, “I think Anna will help Anna make the leap. I don’t think anyone is going to have to do anything. Her talent is immense.”

Faced with the same question, Paquin, free of makeup and any attitude, just shrugs and gives a Zen-like response: “Who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow?” she says. “Things that are gonna happen are gonna happen--things that completely change your life. But it doesn’t matter. That’s the way things are. You can’t try and control everything.”

What she can control is her life away from Hollywood. She’s intent on being perceived as “normal.” Yes, her friends think it’s weird that she goes off to meet a reporter by herself at a Santa Monica cafe, followed by a day of press interviews for “Hurlyburly.” “But it’s just my life, you know?” she says. “No one’s life is the same as any other person’s anyway.”

“Most teenagers want to feel normal,” Yorn says. “When you win an Oscar at the age she won one at, you have to figure out a way to still be normal. She is really gifted. She is really smart. At the end of the day, she also wants to be a normal teenager.”

Without the movies, her life would still be chugging along. “I’d be doing whatever 16-year-olds do,” Paquin says. In her case, that means shopping at vintage clothing stores instead of malls, listening to your “basic alternative rock” and spending plenty of time on the telephone. College, too, is looming in the background, although she hasn’t come to grips with it yet.

She makes the whoosh sign across the top of her head, as if the concept of college has blown right past her. “I have to start thinking about where I want to go,” she says, with fake fear in her voice. “I have no idea.” She has a 21-year-old brother at Harvard and an 18-year-old sister who still goes to school in New Zealand.

She does know she wants to pause long enough in her seemingly serendipitous pursuit of stardom to have a traditional college experience. “I want to go away and have the whole, like, campus thing and study what I want to study,” she says.

For now, she says she likes living in Los Angeles and putting an eclectic stamp on her bedroom. She collects old treasures, including the cello she’s played for seven years. A dressmaking mannequin from around the 1920s stands in a corner of her room, modeling a prom dress from the ‘50s. An old quilt covers her bed, while photographs she took of Venice Beach for a class at school are scattered around the room, she says.

And that Oscar in the closet? “It’s as good a place as any to keep it,” Paquin says. “I don’t want to look at it every day. It doesn’t mean a lot, except it means that I get to do what I like to do more than I would have otherwise. When people come in to my bedroom, I don’t want it to look like I’ve built a shrine to me.”*