Los Angeles Magazine
February 1, 2004
BY: Amy Wallace
Los Angeles is an actor’s town. Some 40,000 actors call L.A. home. But more than their numbers, it is their hunger, their flair, and most of all their ability to face rejection daily and yet still reinvent themselves that fuel this city and make it unlike any other. Whether character actors or A-listers, newcomers or old-timers, the finest performers — like Patricia Clarkson and Benicio Del Toro — help us see ourselves in ways we never imagined.
Inside: How to survive a terrible audition, how to get Del Toro drunk, and how to turn Clarkson on.
PATRICIA CLARKSON
PATRICIA CLARKSON is telling what turns her on. “Talent is a very potent aphrodisiac,” she says. “When someone is incredibly gifted. I find them incredibly sexy.” The actress takes her time with the word, lingering on the s, letting it build to a hiss, then finishing with a rush of breath. Pier throaty voice, like her laugh, can sometimes be sharp, clipped, Imagine Katharine Hepburn, but born and raised in New Orleans. There are also times, like this afternoon, when her voice — as slow, sweet, and sticky as molasses — can fill a room.
She’s talking about the party scene in Y Tu Mama Tambien, when the three main characters dance and drink together on the beach. She loves this scene, she says, because of its sexual energy. “There’s nothing coy, nothing premeditated, nothing arch. There’s no negligee in the scene. No teddy. It’s about sex,” she says, and this time the word pops like a bottle rocket. “It’s not about tits and ass. There’s no tease. It’s messy It’s a little nasty. And it’s on the edge, though it’s not about doing something taboo just for the sake of being taboo. That drives me crazy you know?”
For years Clarkson was relegated to roles as the wife, the mother, and the girlfriend in films like The Untouchables and Jumanji. The worst thing about this, she says, is that “when you’re playing just these archetypal roles, you’re often not shot from the waist down.” Clarkson believes in the body — its gestures, its frailties, its power to convey.
“I’m a very physical actress. But only with High Art did people get to see me as a physical presence,” she says, referring to her breakthrough performance as Ally Sheedy’s manipulative German girlfriend in the 1998 indie. “Close-ups have their power, but” — here the molasses starts flowing again — “I lo-o-o-ve a big long shot. Set the camera up in the next house over and shoot me.”
Clarkson, who is 44 and known to her friends as Patti, appeared in three films that were released last year (not to mention her regular stint as Aunt Sarah on HBO’s Six Feet Under). In All the Real Girls, she was a professional clown. In Pieces of April, she was a woman in the terminal stages of cancer who reluctantly reconnects with her errant daughter. In The Station Agent, she was a recluse who, while grieving over the death of her son and the end of her marriage, befriends two other lonelyhearts, both of them younger men. “I got to be the chick in that one,” she says. In the coming year, she has four more movies: a horror film (The Woods), an experimental thriller directed by Lars yon Trier (Dogville), a contemporary drama about a Hollywood love triangle (The Dying Gaul), and a movie about Olympic hockey (Miracle). Yes, she acknowledges, she plays wives in two of the four, but wives who are “alive, sparkly, real, detailed.”
Today, though, the actress is thinking about other people’s movies. Asked to choose five favorite scenes, she admits she’s had trouble. There are six videocassettes on the table in front of her and about a dozen more performances she admires — George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, Peter Sellers in The Party, Morgan Freeman in Street Smart — that she’d also like to mention. Sitting in the conference room of the Santa Monica apartment building that is her temporary home, the longtime Manhattan resident twists her red-blond hair into a rope with one hand. “That Stephen King movie, Misery, with Kathy Bates. I could have picked her, too.”
