She’s got acting in her veins
“I am not a very serious person,” Eva Amurri confesses. “I am definitely a goofball.”
Make that a goofball with an “imagination that tends to run away with me a lot. That’s why I love acting so much, why I get this great joy from it, because I get completely immerged in whatever I am doing.”
The 19-year-old daughter of Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon and Italian director Franco Amurri was so eager to play the role of Cassandra -- a Christian high school’s “bad girl” in the comedy “Saved!” -- that she flew herself out from New York to Los Angeles to audition.
With her spiky hair, short skirts and big black boots, the chain-smoking Cassandra, who happens to be Jewish, loves to shock her fellow classmates, especially when she pretends she’s possessed by the devil.
“What’s interesting about her,” Amurri explains, “is that in the end Cassandra is the one who exhibits these ‘Christian characterizations,’ meaning accepting people around you for who they are.”
From an early age, Amurri accompanied her parents to sets. “I would just sit there all day and be happy and watch every take. They always knew I was interested in acting.”
She made her debut in a tiny role in stepfather Tim Robbins’ 1992 political satire “Bob Roberts” and then played her mother as a little girl in 1995’s “Dead Man Walking.” She’s also appeared with her mom on NBC’s “Friends” and in the feature comedy “The Banger Sisters.”
Amurri just completed her freshman year at Brown University, but she hasn’t put her career on hold.
“The thought of not acting for four years straight -- I just can’t think that way. I am trying to act in the summers, but if I have to take a semester or two off I am totally willing to do that!”
-- Susan King
