High above the LA skyline, in a luxury suite at the Mondrian hotel, Chloë
Sevigny leans forward on the uncomfortably minimalist sofa and takes a sip
of tea. Today, she is looking pure Rive Gauche: vintage polka-dot Cacharel
dress, immaculate 1940s T-bar pumps, sleekly swept-up hair. “I thought I’d
better be a bit put-together for the European press,” she deadpans.
It’s the sort of left-field look you expect of Sevigny. Always ahead of
the game when it comes to fashion, she is an eternal trendsetter, known as
much for her maverick dress sense as for her acting. It is this unerring
ability to make a look her own that has seen her chosen as a face for the
likes of Miu Miu, H&M and Louis Vuitton, as well as Mac’s Viva Glam
range.
What this pedigree doesn’t prepare you for, however, is her self-deprecating
humour. Before we meet, I’m fully expecting her to be an aloof, detached,
slightly miserable fashionista. But, in the flesh, Sevigny laughs at herself
almost constantly, and in a throaty voice that makes her sound a little bit
like Mae West. “I only smoke when I drink, but I’ll smoke a whole pack and
be more hungover from the smoking than the booze,” she says. “Disgusting!”
In the 12 years since she first hit the big screen (playing a schoolgirl with
Aids in Kids), Sevigny has consistently been anything but predictable,
acting in the hilarious hick movie Gummo, dating Hilary Swank in the
bloke-bird drama Boys Don’t Cry and, more recently, driving her husband to
Viagra to satisfy her — and his other two wives — in the television polygamy
comedy drama Big Love. But the oddball roles have done nothing to dent her
appeal. I tell her that someone recently described her as “sexier than Paris
Hilton”. Sevigny laughs at the bizarre comparison. “Well, I don’t find
trashy sexy, so I’ll try to take that as a compliment. I think it’s sexy to
be a little bit mysterious.”
Mysterious in photos, perhaps, but amazingly honest face to face. Most
actresses are trained never to divulge their true feelings. Sevigny clearly
couldn’t give a monkey’s about media rules. I ask who’s the cooler of her
two famous exes, Jarvis Cocker and Paul Kaye. “They’re both cool in their
own way,” she says. “Paul could be a bit of a nutter in person, but so
charming. We don’t speak any more. I’m not very good at keeping in touch
with exes. When I fall in love, I fall hard, and I feel that a little bit of
me is still in love with all of my exes. I always think, maybe I should
still be with them.” She chuckles. “I don’t think their wives would like
that very much!”
Sevigny, 32, grew up in the small-town environment of Darien, Connecticut, but
she credits her family with her fashion sense. “My father was very stylish
and my mother took me thrifting. It was very frugal, so I guess I had to
find little treasures. My elder brother was into skate-punk, so I wanted to
be like him. Because the town was all homogenised blonde, blue-eyed preppy
girls, I wanted to be able to identify with reject, misfit kids from other
towns. Your outfits were your flag — or something.” She laughs again,
checking herself for pretentiousness. At 14, Sevigny turned up for the first
day of school in “wing-tip, steel-toe Dr Martens, striped stockings, a
turtleneck and mini-miniskirt”. Did she pull? “No! The boys were like,
‘Ee-yew — Pippi Longstocking!”
But her look got her noticed. At 18, on a trip to New York, she was spotted by
a magazine editor, who offered her work experience, then modelling
assignments. She appeared in videos for the Lemonheads and Sonic Youth, and
ended up as the face of X-girl, the urban-clothing line created by the Sonic
Youth front woman, Kim Gordon. In 1994, the novelist Jay McInerney dubbed
the 20-year-old Sevigny “the coolest girl in the world” in a defining piece
in The New Yorker. It was her offbeat sense of style that caught the
attention of Larry Clark, who cast her in Kids. She became known for playing
kooky, troubled young women, drawing on her own turbulent adolescence for
inspiration.
Sevigny admits that she’s never been “a good drug user”, but says that as a
17-year-old, she smoked so much pot and took so many hallucinogens that her
parents sent her to AA. “I had a great family life — I would
never want it to look as if it reflected on them. I think I was very bored,”
she says. “And I did just love taking hallucinogens. I probably
shouldn’t promote that in a newspaper. But I often feel it’s because I
experimented when I was younger that I have no interest as an adult. I know
a lot of adults who didn’t, and it’s much more dangerous when you start
experimenting as an adult . . . But I have never snorted anything, and even
as a kid, if I smoked a lot of pot, my heart would pump and I would think I
was going to have a heart attack, so I’ve always thought if I did cocaine I
would have a heart attack.”
Sevigny’s acting has won respect on the independent film scene, but her latest
film, Zodiac, in which she plays the naff-dressing, spooked wife of the
real-life serial-killer sleuth Robert Graysmith, is her first blockbuster.
“It’s exciting,” she says. “There are ads everywhere —
on the radio, in magazines.” The thriller doesn’t just creep out its
audience. “I read Zodiac Unmasked [Graysmith’s book] to see what my husband
was getting into. I did get quite scared and had to put it down,” she
shudders. “I don’t bring it home — I’m not one of those
actors. Although I did a play about teenage girls who killed another girl,
and I had to sodomise a girl with a tyre iron every night on stage,” she
says, without batting an eyelid. “So I started going to church again.”
You wonder if Sevigny ever thinks about doing the Hollywood sell-out, getting
a Porsche and a nose job. “I want a Porsche,” she says excitedly. “A white
1980s Porsche, like a cocaine dealer!”
But, unlike so many Hollywood starlets, she has always resisted the temptation
to get herself cut to fit. “You see some girls up close and they look like
androids, their skin all bleached and pulled. It starts to look puffy and
weird. Luckily, age hasn’t set in yet, but I’ll be working with older
actresses and think, would I be able to resist a little shot of Restylane?”
Even on the inside, though, the actress is clearly no Ashlee Simpson. “She’s
really perky, isn’t she? My mum always wishes I was perky. ‘Can’t you be
more bubbly, Chloë, more animated?’ No, sorry . . .” So she doesn’t do perky
at all, then? “Well, I did buy short shorts with words on the bum.” They
don’t say “Babe”, do they? “They say ‘The end’. From the end of the
Hamptons, the less fancy part. I thought, I have to have those.”
That’s Chloë Sevigny: style with a twist — from top to bottom.
Zodiac is out on May 18
