Julia Stiles: The Latest Stiles

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/08/05/julia-stiles-the-latest-stiles/

Hey gang! Work and real life got the better of me last month. But things seem to be calming down, so I’m back at Le Blog. I’m going to have to ease into things as work ramps down and blogging ramps back up. To that end, here’s a profile on actress Julia Stiles from the July 2000 issue of Movieline magazine that I intended to run last month. Enjoy!

Julia Stiles has a face as wide open as the ocean. Sometimes her features seem calm and welcoming, other times they turn distant and cold. Especially the eyes–born and raised in Manhattan, Stiles knows how to look right through you. “I learned it early,” she says proudly. “By the time I was 10, I could walk around by myself and no one would bother me because I had on my killer look.” Seated in a downtown New York restaurant (near the apartment she shares with her parents and three siblings), Stiles demonstrates the transformation for me, changing from a gorgeous 19-year-old to a New York hard case in a matter of seconds. “You see?” she says, going back to adorable. “My parents’ friends used to give them a hard time about raising us kids in the city. They’d tell them we needed a backyard to play in. Well, that’s bullshit, because I learned how to create a backyard in my head.”

It’s nice to know that Stiles has parents. She was so self-possessed in her best known film, 10 Things I Hate About You, it seemed like she’d been deposited, fully formed, right onto the screen. Stiles has known since forever that she wanted to be an actress. When she was 11, she wrote a letter to the head of the famed La Mama Theater requesting an audition, and within months, she was performing in avant-garde plays, most of which she didn’t understand. Soon she began to get small parts in movies (she was Harrison Ford’s daughter in The Devil’s Own) and even got the lead in the stylish indie Wicked. Stiles remembers those years as a time of rejection and soul searching. Her parents (“hippies who worried to death about me but are now so proud”) kept telling her she could just stop and save herself from agonies like getting close to a part and then losing it, but she kept at it. The payoff was winning a starring role in the NBC miniseries The ’60s and the lead in the popular (especially on video) 10 Things I Hate About You an updated, high school version of The Taming of the Shrew. After that she seemed to work nonstop. She starred opposite Freddie Prinze Jr. in the love story Down to You. She played Ophelia opposite Ethan Hawke in the updated film version of Hamlet. She’ll be seen as “Desi” (the Desdemona character) in the updated film version of Othello (titled O) this fall and she’ll appear in David Mamet’s ensemble film State and Main in the winter. Next month she stars in the interracial love story Save the Last Dance. For a teenager, Stiles seems to have chosen her scripts especially well, and she brings a sophistication to her work that is often far beyond the material. When I tell her this, she is literally speechless. “Really?” she finally says, for the first time sounding her age.

So what will Stiles do as a follow-up to this whirlwind year she’s had? Try theater? Tackle a grown-up role? No, she’s going to college in New York this fall and plans to take classes in English, anthropology and Latin American studies. “I can’t wait,” she gushes. “Classes, papers to write, studying all night…” She makes this sound like a dream come true.

“Won’t that stuff be kind of a letdown after the rush of stardom?” I ask.

Stiles waves the notion aside. “Believe me, I’m so excited about living in the dorm, about being around kids my own age, about making friends that will be around for awhile. I can always make movies in the summer.”

If you think I’m gonna burst her bubble, think again. “What are you reading now?” I ask instead.

“I just finished a book called Life After God by Douglas Coupland. The weird thing is that I tried to read it in Spanish, because I’d been in Costa Rica. I’m not sure if got it all.” Stiles says this as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.

I decide to stick to movies. “Having played Ophelia, in Hamlet,” I say, “what kind of psychotropic drugs do you think they’d have her on if she was alive today?”

Stiles laughs. “They’d put her on antidepressants, definitely. Yes, Prozac for Ophelia. But I think she’d have an eating disorder, too, because she’s so quiet and into herself I imagine her sitting in her room, taking diet pills and vomiting.”

“Can you relate to that?”

“You’ll never find me vomiting in my room,” says Stiles. “My mom has really helped me with that. I have contempt for all the bullshit that’s put on young girls, and I hate how self-absorbed young girls can become. I’m a victim of it, too, bur we get so worried about how we seem to other people, and that seems like a bourgeois problem to me, I was with Habitat for Humanity in Costa Rica.