Teen Queen Graduates From Mamet University

Not many actresses can claim to have done Shakespeare and co-starred with Freddie Prinze Jr. Or worked with David Mamet before they were 20. Or left their college dorm in order to present an award on national television.

But, then, not many actresses are Julia Stiles, she of the unconventional looks and, more important, the unconventional range of movies: Michael Almereyda’s “Hamlet,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” the upcoming “O” (for “Othello”) and “State and Main,” which opened last week and teams the 19-year-old actress with members of what might be called Team Mamet--William H. Macy, Ricky Jay, Rebecca Pidgeon and Alec Baldwin.

When a Hollywood movie crew comes to a small Vermont village--clearly intent on snookering the townsfolk--one of the more formidable residents they meet is Stiles’ teenage waitress. She always seems to be in the right place at the right time. She always seems to know what someone else needs to know.

“I’d say she’s resourceful,” Stiles said of her character, Carla Taylor. “She’s very resourceful. Maybe not conniving, but very much in control of the situation. And you can tell she’s wanting to reap the benefits of these movie people coming to her small town. And I like that about her. She’s not being used and abused.”

Being used and abused is generally what the teen genre is about--sometimes you’re on-screen, sometimes you’re just in the audience. Stiles has been an actress since she was 12 and now attends Columbia University in Manhattan. But she was also in this year’s “Down to You,” with Prinze, one of those movies that, right or wrong, define the category. It made a mint. But wasn’t exactly what its makers--some of them--intended.

“You mean artistically?” she asked. “Yeah. It definitely took on a life of its own. Everyone expected it to be something different.” And to make a lot less money than it did.

“The good thing about the fad in teen movies now,” Stiles said, “is that there’s a lot to choose from, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a lot of variety. I think the teenage, adolescent, post-adolescent, whatever age is such a potent time; there’s so much Hollywood could milk in terms of that, out of that age group, things to talk about, stories to tell. But it’s become a big marketing thing, where they just want to stick to the same formula. But that’s the way it is.”

“10 Things I Hate About You,” the “Clueless” of 1999, was different. Stiles played Kat--based on Kate in “The Taming of the Shrew”--and represented a species of headstrong, opinionated, sarcastic, teenage female heroine that’s usually anathema to producers of high school movies.

“But I was really lucky with ’10 Things,’ ” Stiles said. “That part was very refreshing, but it was thanks to Karen McCullah-Lutz and Kirsten Smith, who wrote a really great script.”

Stiles, who does some writing, knows something about scripts. “Whenever you’re watching a movie and you hear someone saying some awful piece of dialogue, it’s because the writer wrote it for the audience instead of the actor,” she said. “They wrote it to feed some sort of information to the audience, whereas they should have been thinking what the character would have naturally said.”

Bad dialogue happens, she said, “usually because they’re trying to manipulate an effect. Say they want the effect to be that two people fall in love. Instead of letting that organically happen, they just say, ‘I love you.’ ”

Cheating? “Yeah!”

The texture of dialogue is one thing; content is another. The question is, what was the atmosphere on “State and Main,” which walks a fine line between satire and derision in its portrayal of small-town America?

“I think everybody deferred to King Mamet, you know what I mean?” Stiles said, smiling. “I think everyone had so much respect, at least I did, for his ability. I trusted him completely, and that’s so rare in filmmaking, to be able to just say, ‘I know that you know what you’re doing, and if there’s ever a question you’ll answer it.’ ”

Does she now feel like a member of the Mamet repertory company? “I hope so,” she said. “He doesn’t really write for young people that much, so I was lucky to get this part, but I hope so. Definitely.”

And, again, it’s all about the writing. “He’s such a skilled writer that he took care of a lot of problems before anyone even arrived on the set,” Stiles said. “And it’s so refreshing to read a script and go, you know, ‘This works and I don’t have to fix anything.’ I didn’t have to change any of the dialogue to make it sound realistic. That’s his specialty. And, in terms of the comedy and making fun of people in Hollywood, the whole time I was thinking, ‘I’ve run into people like that!’

“And, you know, I have run into people like that.”