That Girl’s Gone

“I get these comments, ‘Oh my God, you’re so much prettier in person,’ says Juliette Lewis, who looks so much prettier in person than she does on screen.

“It’s kind of a backhanded compliment. ‘Oh, so I’ve been ugly all this time in film.’ But I never played the vanity girl, so I don’t mind. I’d rather be the rebel, be harsh.” There is nothing rebellious or harsh about Lewis, at least at the moment. She is promoting a new HBO movie called “Hysterical Blindness,” directed by Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding”) and airing tonight, about a pair of “Jersey girls” on the other side of 25 who wonder where their youth--and their youthful aspirations--went. Lewis plays a happy-go-lucky single mom and long-suffering friend of Uma Thurman, who’s very tall, very permed and very blocked emotionally. It’s a sidekick role, but Lewis makes the most of it--without, as many actresses would, making too much of it. It is possible to be too New Jersey.

“It could be really kitsch and cliche because you’re dealing with two things: Jersey accents and the ‘80s,” Lewis says.

“There are some traps there. I never like people to think about the technique or the accents. I just want people to feel me, so to speak, just to feel the person. But you don’t want to go too small because the people are really colorful. I was looking at Uma and me, and I could almost smell our hair.

“Here are the facets of Beth,” she continues, describing her character. “She had a child at 17, so she’s kind of stunted; she’s still like a teenager. ‘I just want to have fun, what are we going to do?’ So she has that thing of being a teenager and not knowing her level of responsibility yet.”

“She just embodied the part, literally,” says Nair, laughing. “Tube tops and miniskirts--she just carried it off with such elan.”

Lewis is best known as Nick Nolte’s daughter in Martin Scorsese’s remake of “Cape Fear” (1991), in particular for a scene in which Robert De Niro, playing an ex-con who is terrorizing her family, sticks his fingers in her mouth. It’s one of the most erotic and disturbing screen moments in memory, and earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.

The 29-year-old Lewis, who was raised in the San Fernando Valley--her parents are actor Geoffrey Lewis and Glenis Batley--has been acting since she was 12. She became legally emancipated at 14 and performed in such films as “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” (1989) and “Crooked Hearts” (1991).

Although she appeared in a variety of films after “Cape Fear,” including Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives” (1992), “That Night” (1993), “Kalifornia” (1993), and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” (1993), it’s her role as gun moll Mallory Knox in Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” (1994) that cemented her image as a kind of cinematic loose cannon. It’s an image that has dogged her for years, professionally and personally.

“I think only narrow-minded people would think that, because for the most part, other actors and filmmakers have gone, ‘Oh, you’ve done complicated work’ and have given me respect,” she says. “I can’t say for certain [that she’s been typecast]. Maybe studio people. They want predictability, what’s comfortable, and I’m always trying to do something different.”

Nair says a notion of Lewis based solely on her “Killers” role is “such a limited vision of what Juliette Lewis can do. It’s laziness on the part of directors. I’m not trying to sound gooey about her, but she can carry anything off because she’s so thoughtful and she has a process and she’s so experienced. She makes it all look totally effortless. I’d like to see her in a corset with an accent. That’s a stretch, you’d think, but she can do it.”

With big-screen nihilism on the wane toward the end of the ‘90s, Lewis fell off the radar screen, displaced by less-threatening ingenues like Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett. She may have been able to present herself in a different light to directors and executives who had pigeonholed her as a punk, but she says she wouldn’t play the publicity game--though she was in the public eye because of a long relationship with Brad Pitt. A session in rehab and an 18-month acting sabbatical probably didn’t help her case either.

“I always think the work should speak for itself and people should see that more than see what you’re wearing,” Lewis says.

“I never wore the right things or said the right things. So now even though I’m in a second chapter of a career, whatever you want to call it, it has to be about performance and material. Even 10 years ago, there was less of this ‘Do ABCD and you become a star.’ There’s this socialite school practically. I would flunk out of that school. So I just have to get good work.”

She starred in the 1999 Garry Marshall comedy “The Other Sister” and a year later appeared in “The Way of the Gun,” the directing debut of “The Usual Suspects” writer Christopher McQuarrie, which starred Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe. “I’ve done a couple of movies [recently]. Some haven’t gotten distribution. ‘The Way of the Gun’ was in theaters for about a second.”

Lewis says that she first heard of the role in the HBO project during a conversation with Thurman at a party about three years ago. Thurman asked Lewis if she wanted to do a table reading. Although that never happened, Thurman didn’t forget about her. As it turns out, Nair also had Lewis in mind, independently of Thurman, who had been shepherding the project and is one of its producers.

Now Lewis probably will be offered nothing but airhead roles. It would be the path of least resistance for studios, especially since she has a slightly spacey quality. (“Lamentably,” Nair says of the impression she gives. “But she isn’t.”) Now that she’s 29--a fact she brings up more than once--Lewis is eager for more adult roles, perhaps in keeping with her settled personal life, which seemed to suffer in the expectations game the same way her career did.

“I think when I was younger I could give the appearance of being aloof or disaffected,” she says. “I was shy. I felt good for the most part in front of the camera, even though I was self-critical. But since I’ve grown, I’m not aloof; I’m expressive. It’s probably been the problem. I’m married now [to pro skateboarder Steve Berra, for three years], but for a while I just scared guys away. I would just say what I felt. I didn’t play the game. I always thought, ‘God, I should have been mysterious.’ Actually, mysterious is boring.

“I don’t want to be mysterious. It’s too much work. I would be right in his face, ‘God, I like you. We should hang out.’ And then you don’t get the phone call.”

Nair thinks that Lewis will be getting calls in the wake of “Hysterical Blindness.” Among the ones Lewis would like to receive would be an offer to do a romantic comedy although obviously it wouldn’t be conventionally warm and fuzzy. But it wouldn’t be some sort of renegade romance either.

“People don’t know that I’m a very lighthearted person and very positive,” Lewis says. “But you must know that it will be my own take on it. And I don’t mean neurotic. It’ll be my own version. I have my own idiosyncrasies, so they’ll come out somewhere.”

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“Hysterical Blindness” airs Sunday at 9:30 p.m. on HBO. The network has rated it TV-14.

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John Clark is a regular contributor to Calendar.