Premiere article about Claire Danes
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She slips off her black platform sandals, revealing perfectly proportioned toes
that
look as cute and helpless as five newborns lying
in a hospital nursery. Her skin,
pale and smooth, has been carefully protected from
the elements. But Claire
Danes's piggies have just reached the end of their
pampered existence. Indeed, her
feet are in for a character-building (if not
fungus-building) experience.
It's a hot day after the Fourth of July, and Danes has
come to a bowling alley sockless.
There's nothing to come between her feet and the gym
floors and shower stalls of all
who've bowled before her. But Danes seems oblivious to
the risk factor. She unties
the laces on the pair of scuffed, size-seven shoes
she's just rented from the tattooed
guy behind the counter (a glass case containing
bowling pins autographed by
Janeane Garofalo and other celebs who've played here).
She slides her naked foot
into the red-and-white athletic shoe. "Nope," she says
cheerfully, pulling it off without
untying the laces, "too big."
The bowling alley-OPEN 24 HOURS-is located in a seedy,
sunbaked corner of
Hollywood. Inside, the place is eerily empty: There
are no raucous barflies, no Fred
Flintstone-style league bowlers. The only sound comes
from a small TV set that's
broadcasting a Dodgers-A's baseball game, which no one
seems to be watching.
The big fella behind the counter pulls out a pair of
size six-and-a-halfs and sprays
them with disinfectant before handing the shoes to the
young actress. Bingo. "Those'll
work just fine," she says, selecting a special
featherweight ball from behind the
counter and heading over to the lanes. Suddenly, a
faint look of dismay comes over
her face, but it's not the panicked realization one
would expect. "I hope we can have
fun here," she says. "I'm thinking it's going to be a
challenge."
In her cutoff khaki pants and blue-and-white striped
sailor shirt, Danes wanders out to
the mouth of lane twenty, looks around, and
tentatively rolls her little black ball down
the floor and into the gutter. It's only her first
shot, but already she looks mortified.
She's still a little annoyed and disappointed by her
Fourth of July festivities. "Yesterday I had a
very patriotic Independence Day and went to see Armageddon, which was
repugnant and misogynistic," she says. "My most memorable Fourth was when I was
six years old and we were living in New
York. My dad had built this little boat called the
Winslow Homer, and my parents decided to pack it full of picnic stuff and take
it out on the river for a ride. The whole family piled in, and after a few
hours, this big wave came crashing over the front and we capsized. We were all
floating in the river, and we had to be rescued by
the Coast Guard. I just remember being so cold and so
embarrassed." The one characteristic that Danes has in common with most
teenagers is that she's able to experience almost any situation-even family
catastrophe-as an occasion for humiliation.
Between gutter balls, Danes dutifully tries to work
herself into the proper state of
wackiness. Bowling, after all, is an activity-like New
Year's Eve or bachelor
parties-where the pressure to have a rip-roarin' good
time is palpable and
oppressive. "Everyone always has fun bowling," she
says, a little unconvincingly.
Pointing out a cloth banner that says NO GAMBLING OR
TANK TOPS!, she places a
handful of vending-machine candy on the scoring table
to use as gambling chips. She
makes funny faces after her bad shots, and pops little
celebratory kicks whenever she
knocks down a few pins.
Just as the place begins to fill up, Danes loses the
first game 27 to 42. She points out
three young, strike-throwing dudes-one of whom is
sporting the dreaded tank top-a
few lanes down. "I keep seeing them look over here,"
she says. "They're all such good
bowlers. They're probably talking about how terrible
we are." Overcome with
embarrassment, she's strangely oblivious to her
celebrity.
But Danes thrives under pressure. As the bowling
sharks look on, she throws two
consecutive spares. Each time, she does three perfect
pirouettes on the shiny floor
before returning to the scorer's table. "I think I'm
becoming addicted to coffee now,"
she says. "Last summer I went on tour with my
boyfriend [Australian singer-songwriter
Ben Lee], and we would both be lying in the back of
the Buick while his manager
drove us around the country. Since he played at night,
we both became really fond of these
sleeping pills. We were like two little crackheads in
the back, sleeping and kicking each other for
room on the seat. It got pretty violent at times."
Danes is very aware of
her performance today: She's tired of being thought of as Saint Claire. And
right now, as she starts to take control of her future as an adult, she is also
feeling
particularly carpe diem about enjoying what little
is left of her youth. She strides up to take her last
shot and throws the ball so hard that
it bounces toward the pins. Strike! She dances around
the shiny wood floor. Then she
stops twirling and pretends to narrate the kind of
ham-fisted observation she's come
to expect in pieces like this: " . . . the stark
contrast between the graceful dance
juxtaposed with the utterly graceless act of bowling .
. ."
A heightened self-consciousness pervades
everything Danes does. Whether it's
something as silly as a bowling match or as
serious as reflecting on the hazards
of growing up in Hollywood, she manages to be an
active participant while still
providing a steady stream of astute background
commentary. In a sense, she is the
omniscient narrator of her own existence.
It was Danes's ability to be awkward so naturally that
made her the prototypical '90s
teen on My So-Called Life, the one-season-and-out high
school drama that MTV
won't let die. She went on to imbue her characters in
Little Women, Home for the
Holidays, and William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet
with unexpected depth and
intensity. Young audiences continue to respond to her
as a more authentic role model
than the Spice Girls' school of saccharine
empowerment, reflected in movies such as
Clueless. Danes's popularity seems to stem more from
girls' relating to her than
idolizing her. It's all about the integrity of her
persona, not the size of her role (small, in
the case of John Grisham's The Rainmaker and U-Turn)
or the success of the project
(nonexistent, in the case of Les Miserables and Polish
Wedding).
But with her upcoming pair of star turns as reckless,
feisty iconoclasts, Danes is ready
to expose the she-devil within. In Brokedown Palace,
due early next year, she plays a
wander lusty American who travels to Thailand with her
best friend (The Last Days of
Disco's Kate Beckinsale) and gets thrown in prison on
drug charges. To
counterbalance the Sturm und Drang of her third-world
incarceration, she just
completed her first glamour-girl job, reprising Peggy
Lipton's sex-kitten crime solver in
the movie version of The Mod Squad.
"She's iconographic," says Laura Ziskin, president of
Fox 2000, which is releasing
Brokedown Palace. "Young women identify with her.
She's complicated; you see her
working it out onscreen, and that's very much what is
appropriate for her age. It's not
even like she's been in all that much, but she got
traction right away. She engaged."
Ever since 1996's Romeo & Juliet reintroduced
Hollywood to the moneymaking potential of the youth audience, Danes has been
thought of as the Meryl Streep or Jodie Foster of her generation-studied,
serious, and intense. "On Polish Wedding we used to say, 'Claire's the most
immature 35-year-old I've ever met,' " jokes actor Daniel Lapaine, who also
worked with her on Brokedown Palace. "In life she can be a bit like a teenage
Hamlet," says Romeo & Juliet director Baz Luhrmann.
"Everything is 'To be or not to be?' and 'What's the
point?' And that's not in the
negative sense. Claire is very probing-you don't get
off lightly with her. She's not
someone who goes, 'I'm a vessel. Fill me.' She's very
strong in her need to question,
to analyze, to challenge."
But even for Danes, all that maturity and
self-reflection can become tiresome. She has
spent a good part of her teenage years surrounded by
adults-working with them on
sets, being managed by them. Now, however, her
full-time companion is no longer her
mother but the 21-year-old Lee. The two movies she
just completed-Brokedown
Palace and The Mod Squad-were her first without Mom
standing by on the set. She
bought her first home, a SoHo loft, which she has
spent several months remodeling.
And, taking a cue from her Home for the Holidays
director, Jodie Foster, she's
decided to put her career on hold and trade in a
rented Beverly Hills pool house for a
shared dorm room in Connecticut, where she'll attend
Yale University in the fall. She's
determined to step off the fast track, learn about the
world beyond the movie set, and
occupy herself with having some frivolous fun-a
terrifying prospect to Danes, whose
precollege mantra is, "I'm just so nervous!" On the
verge of being thrown in with a
bunch of kids her own age-many of whom probably spent
the summer working at the
local Ben & Jerry's-Danes is finally learning how to
act her age and enjoy i
During the three-month shoot of Brokedown Palace in
the Philippines, Danes got
a crash course in third-world misery. Because of
the script's tourist-deterring
elements, the filmmakers were told they didn't stand a
chance of getting permission to
shoot in Thailand. Manila turned out to be a cheaper
alternative. The shoot was
plagued with malaria and hepatitis outbreaks, and
production had to be shut down for several
sick days. "It was just so hard," Danes says, now
comfortably ensconced at a Beverly Hills
lunch joint, where she's gobbling up a plate of
extra-rare ahi. "The place just fucking smelled
of cockroaches. There's no sewage system in Manila,
and people have nothing there. People
with, like, no arms, no legs, no eyes, no teeth. We
shot in a real [psychiatric] hospital, so takes
would be interrupted by wailing women-like, 'Cut!
Screaming person.' Rats were
everywhere."
Amid the difficult working conditions, Danes
discovered her power on the set, and how to
use it. She says she knew the experience would be
her own Outward Bound-style rude
awakening. "I totally tested myself," she says. "I
wanted to see if I could survive the worst, and I
did. I didn't have to do it in such a harsh way,
but I was being very dramatic."
What attracted her to the role was the complex
friendship between her character,
Alice, and Darlene, Alice's high school best friend.
What she didn't expect was that
she'd take such a hands-on role in shaping the final
film. When the original director,
Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress), dropped out
because the studio was insisting
he cast a known actress (namely Liv Tyler) in the
best-friend role, Danes became the
only tentpole holding up the production. At that
point, she involved herself in the search
for a new director and costar. They settled on
Jonathan Kap lan-the man who directed
Jodie Foster to her first Oscar, in The
Accused-because of his widely acknowledged
ability to get good performances out of women and
because of his hippie-
backpacker street cred. "He totally got that the title
came from a Grateful Dead song,"
says producer Adam Fields (Great Balls of Fire), who
came up with the idea for the
film while traveling in Thailand. "No one else ever
asked; no one ever questioned it."
Still, not all was mellow when it came to dealing with
Fox. There were battles over the
phone from Manila. "I knew what story I wanted to
tell, and I knew the best way to tell
it," Danes recalls. "I didn't want it to be about two
hot chicks in Thailand wearing tank
tops in prison. It very well could have been like
that."
The other major point of contention was how the movie
should end. There was
disagreement over whether to keep the ending as
scripted-not entirely heartwarming.
"Power was just up for grabs on the other side of the
world, so I was like, 'Oh, all right,
I'll take it,' " says Danes. "I was on the phone with
the studio about script changes. I
was like, 'Wow! This is not acting.' But nobody else
was an eighteen-year-old girl, so
that really gives you the upper hand."
In reality, the power structure on the set was
dictated by Hollywood convention-the
top-billed star tends to get the juiciest role. "I was
the fiery, sexy, cool character, and
[Kate] was the bookworm, and that was no fun," says
Danes. "She's complicated.
She's prickly. She's a good writer, too, and if there
was a problem with the script, I
could really work with her to make it better."
Danes had a girlish admiration for the 25-year-old
Beckinsale, and she went into the
project hoping they would become good friends. "That
was wrong," she says, still
visibly wounded. "We didn't." (Beckinsale declined to
be interviewed for this story.)
The strife during filming helped Danes get into the
mind-set of a prisoner. "Claire had
this good idea where she saw the movie as a
challenge," says Bill Pullman, who plays
the girls' scrappy lawyer. "She had a sense of being
alone in tough circumstances,
where betrayal is a constant, like in prison, and I
think she used the circumstances to
amplify [what her character was going through]."
Near the end of the shoot, Danes finally broke down,
in
a moment that could have been created by David
Cronenberg. "I had all these defenses up throughout
filming, but in the last week I just started to
crumble,"
she says. "I was on the phone to Ben at four in the
morning and I saw a cockroach on the wall. Then I saw
another one crawling toward me, and I just started
screaming like a maniac. I was afraid to move. And
Ben was like, 'Just turn on the lights.' Finally,
after half
an hour of discussing the situation, I went screaming
into the bedroom and turned on every light and ran
back panting, 'I did it, I did it.' I was so afraid. I
was
going to have the hotel staff turn the lights on for
me,
but I braved it. I didn't sleep the entire night."
Oddly enough, Danes claims she was most upset by
the prospect of leaving the chaos of Manila and
returning to the comforts of her so-called life. "I
was in
prison; I really felt like I was," she says, in a rare
show
of teenage hyperbole. "It's really hard to leave
prison
once you've been in it. You don't wanna go, 'cause you
feel comfortable in this safe
place."
Back in New York, she was still unable to shake the
experience. "I was very
aggressive, and I just felt like a cowboy or
something," Danes says. "I remember we
were at Moomba [the West Village restaurant-lounge],
and somebody called Ben a
fuckin' asshole. And I turned to [the guy] and yelled
at him, like, in front of my parents. I
almost got into three fights that week."
Danes has a habit of playing armchair psychologist to
herself. "I think [being
imprisoned] is such a great metaphor," she says, with
a slightly self-mocking smirk.
"Like, adulthood is so frightening, it's tempting to
just check yourself into a hospital. It's
like, 'No thanks. I'm gonna just sit here in this
closed space and not leave. Retard my
growth a little bit.' "
Her first growth-prevention measure was to take a lead
role in The Mod Squad, an
adaptation of the '60s TV show about a trio of hip and
groovy ex-criminals who
become undercover cops. The movie, which costars Omar
Epps (Scream 2) and
Giovanni Ribisi (Saving Private Ryan) as her partners
in crime-stopping, is a whiffle
ball of a campy action flick-a far cry from Danes's
usual tragic heroines.
Writer-director Scott Silver (johns) was surprised
that she was even interested. "When
her agent said, 'How about Claire?' " Silver recalls,
"I was like, 'Claire would never do
this movie. Why would she do The Mod Squad?' But when
Claire did become
involved, she gave the movie a legitimacy. Now you
know it's not going to be some
sort of cheesy remake."
Danes admits she had to lighten up. "I needed to have
a little frivolity in my life," she
says. "When people found out I was doing Mod Squad,
they were so appalled. So I
thought, If I'm getting this reaction for even
flirting with the idea of doing this movie, I
absolutely should. It's like, Do you really think I'm
that earnest, that serious? I can be
camp."
But learning to be frivolous took some work. "It made
me feel really insecure," Danes
says, twirling a stick-straight strand of blond hair
around her index finger. "It was like,
Who am I to be playing the ultrahip California girl?
So I spent the first three weeks
feeling very unworthy and nervous, but by the end I
was starting to believe."
Growing up in the avant-garde art world of 1980s SoHo, Danes saw herself
as
something of a pariah. "In junior high I was so
damaged because I couldn't relate
to people," she says in what could be a
voice-over for My So-Called Life. "All of
a sudden I didn't get along with anybody. I didn't
like anybody. And every school I went
to, there was another girl who would persecute me. I
assumed it would be that way
forever."
She and her older brother, Asa, were raised in a
nurturing bo hemian household-their
mother, Carla, ran a preschool (she's now an art
student); their father, Chris, was a
photographer (he's now a computer consultant). Outside
those comforting walls, New
York was a constant threat to Danes's sense of
security. "I was chased a couple of
times," she says, opening a packet of sugar and
sucking it off her finger. "The first
time, it happened in the subway, which is probably why
I don't ride it now. I heard
footsteps behind me, and they started to go faster,
and I started to go faster, and it
was like, Am I really being chased? And I truly was. I
started running, and then he ran
after me and started, like, groping my ass and stuff.
So I hopped into a subway car
and the doors closed on him. I walked home with such
fury. I've been flashed so many
times: some guy jerking off in front of my friend and
I . . . It's weird. I expected things
like that to happen."
Which may be why her concerns about financial security
kicked in at such a young
age. "When I was about six or seven, I knew that
acting was my calling," she told Pre
miere in 1996. "Then I realized actors don't make any
money, and I decided to be a
therapist and live in California and work in theater
workshops on the side. I thought
about it seriously for a good amount of time, until I
decided I've gotta be true to my art,
money or no money."
From that point on, Danes approached her craft with a
fierce determination. She
enrolled at a performing-arts school and spent her
weekends taking classes at the
Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she was the one
ten-year-old who always
showed up to class early. "She was very analytical,"
says Tim Martin Crouse, her main
drama teacher at the Institute. "Yet she was very free
in the sense of [experimenting as
an actress]. It was clear to me she was serious about
having an acting career. She
just ate up any information I could give her about any
of the career stuff."
She couldn't have chosen a better calling card for
herself
than the role of Angela Chase, in My So-Called Life.
In
1995 Danes scored an auspicious first-movie lead,
signing on to play Juliet opposite Leonardo
DiCaprio's
Romeo in Luhrmann's modernized version of the
Shakespeare tragedy. Although the movie launched her
nascent career, the four-month Mexico City shoot was
marked by a kind of reckless mayhem-a crew member
was even kidnapped during the production. "It was
really
hard," Danes says. "I freaked out a little while
ago when I
thought about what I was like then and the things
that were
expected of me. I wanted to rush back to that
place and
hold my hand and baby-sit myself. . . . I
realized that bad
things happen, that people hurt other people. I
became
very disillusioned." She pauses to take a sip of
her
coffee. "Whenever you lose your innocence, it's
traumatic
and painful."
Danes's painful rite of passage, however, is what made
her Juliet iconic to so many young women. As a result,
she has shot to the head of a
class of rising actresses-Christina Ricci, Neve
Campbell, Anna Paquin, Kirsten Dunst,
Natalie Portman-who are reaping the benefits of Holly
wood's current youthquake and
the sudden availability of more substantial roles for
young actresses than ever before.
Danes seized the opportunity to work with such
directors as Bille August (Les
Miserables), Oliver Stone (U-Turn), and Francis Ford
Coppola (The Rainmaker).
Sometimes the roles looked better on paper than
onscreen. "I was the damsel in
distress," she says of her Rainmaker turn as an abused
wife who falls for Matt
Damon's do-gooder attorney. "My character was limited.
I didn't need to do anything
but be desirable and abused."
Apparently, she had desirability to spare, which
overflowed into a short-lived
off-camera romance with Damon. Now their lives are
intertwined again. "Well, he's
going out with my friend," Danes says of Damon's
liaison with her Little Women costar
Winona Ryder. "It's cool. They're both wonderful
people. So yeah, I'm very, uh, happy
for him right now." She does a giant roll of the eyes.
"It's weird."
Such one-degree-of-separation snafus are unavoidable
when you're part of
Hollywood's teen elite. Danes constantly alternates
between being completely blasé
about her celebrity and being very aware of its
potential to corrupt. "I feel it's a service
I do: I supply this fantasy to the world." And the
fantasy is? "Last year I was voted one
of the cleanest celebrities [in a poll by Bioré,
makers of the nose-pore strip].
Sometimes you are just so shocked at people's
perceptions of you!"
While supplying that fantasy has brought her more
wealth and success than most
nineteen-year-olds would know what to do with (she
made $2 million for The Mod
Squad), Danes's heightened awareness of the dangers of
her situation is what keeps
her sane. "I don't want to commit suicide," she says.
"I wanna enjoy my time here and
just try to avoid as much suffering as possible."
[to be continued]