I meet her in London, where she is promoting her new film, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. She is by turns fragile and spiky, and you can’t take your eyes off her. She possesses both the trashy sex appeal of Courtney Love and the imperious hauteur of Uma Thurman.
It was the same last month, when she appeared on the red carpet at the Cannes film festival for the premiere of Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. She prowled around with the glamorously wasted look she does so well — all glitter, tattoos, heels and that ever-present cigarette — signing random autographs, draping herself around anonymous bad boys and working it for the baying paparazzi.
Some have described her as Italy’s answer to Angelina Jolie but, in truth, she has many more strings to her bow. Jolie merely has a blood fetish and sleeps with women. It goes without saying that Argento has slept with women (“Sexuality is a vast concept. I cannot say if I am straight or gay”) and, although she has never admitted to a taste for human blood, her father, the horror auteur Dario Argento, has cast her as a variety of sexy paraplegics and evil virgins in his movies.
By nine, she had written three novels and seen her boho parents carted off by the police in the dead of night for marijuana possession. By 19, she was a professional boxer, and by 21, she had won two Davids, the Italian film awards. She stopped boxing when she broke her nose, but that didn’t matter too much, because Dolce & Gabbana were clamouring to get her on the catwalk. Her sullen sexuality and effortless cool give her fashion currency. She has just won a contract to be the face of the jeans brand Miss Sixty.
Someone once said interviewing her was like grabbing a broken bottle. That may not be quite true, but she obviously engages deeply in the projects she gets involved in. Even her tattoos are clearly more than superficial decoration. One of them, etched on her ribs, reads “Anna”, a memento mori for the sister who died a few years ago. Another, beneath her navel, depicts a winged angel. “Every few years,” she has said, “I feel the urge to mark myself and mark the passages, as if my body was a map and every scar will always be with me, and every scar tells you where I’ve been, like an animal.”
Not only does she star in The Heart ... , she directed it and wrote the screenplay, too. A hard-core Oliver Twist for the 21st century, the film is based on an autobiographical novel by JT LeRoy, the cult American author and former rent boy with young Andy Warhol looks and a girl’s voice, who draws famous and damaged people (such as Winona Ryder and Marianne Faithfull) to him like a gonzo Pied Piper of Hamelin.
“It used to be, ‘Don’t wash your dirty clothes in public,’” Argento says in her husky smoker’s voice. “But now people are becoming more courageous — like JT. There’s a strength about fragile things. When you know this glass is crystal,” she picks one up off the hotel table, “you treat it with a certain ... It’s a way to say, ‘Look, I’m fragile, don’t hurt me.’”
Directing a macho camera crew in Tennessee, where The Heart ... was filmed, while acting the role of Sarah, the truck-stop hooker and junkie mother to her ill-used son, Jeremiah, was not an easy feat for a twentysomething to pull off. “I would drive myself crazy to play my character. I wouldn’t sleep or wash. It was summer, and I would lock myself in a car with the heater blasting. I would drive myself crazy so you could see it in my eyes. But to direct a crew while you ’re crazy like that, it’s not the easiest thing.”
Listening to her talking about film (“Porno moves me so much more than movies like Gone with the Wind”) and past boyfriends (“Actors are very dull lovers,” she says of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, with whom she had an affair), you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of her. Yet Argento, who today counts Marilyn Manson and Dennis Hopper among her friends, wasn’t always so comfortable in her skin.
“Ever since I can remember, I didn’t fit in, I didn’t have friends. I would throw smoke bombs, go out at five in the morning and throw water at people. Everyone at school thought I was something out of The Addams Family.”
She exhales a line of smoke and shrugs. “Everyone wants to be a freak now.” She’s right. These days, the most fashionable clubland flyers specify a crowd made up of “queers, tranny fags, freaks and their friends”. When she calls LeRoy “a freak”, it’s one of the biggest accolades she can give. “Le freak, c’est chic,” she says, with a sudden foxy smile and her first real attempt at eye contact.
This proves true later that evening, when Argento DJs at a voyeuristic party for The Heart ... Alongside the club kids and Leigh Bowery lookalikes, starstruck Argento groupies include Tracey Emin, the aristocrat photographer Johnny Shand Kydd and Vivienne Westwood’s son, Ben.
Argento prides herself on her ability to play both weird and sexy. At 23, she directed and acted in the controversial Scarlet Diva — a kind of X-rated La Dolce Vita. She came to wider attention when she played a busty babe alongside Vin Diesel in xXx, but returned to the indie fold to play a character closely resembling Courtney Love in Last Days, a movie inspired by Kurt Cobain, which opens here in September. And she has just finished filming Sofia Coppola’s 18th-century epic about Marie Antoinette.
For her part, she tries to keep life simple. “I still live in a kind of squat in Rome that I’ve had since I was 20. The heater breaks every day. I’m not very good at the bourgeois life. I don’t have a passion for furniture. I don’t have a passion for buying.”
She does, however, have a passion for her three-year-old daughter, Anna Lou, and musician boyfriend, Marco — “the first person in my life who calms me down. All my love affairs, until recently, were pretty tragic, and I’m not into that any more”. Motherhood, too, has softened her. Anna Lou, she says, is “my best-ever creation. I’ve become a better person since she arrived”.
Still, it seems unlikely that she’ll lose her edge. She refuses to be pinned down, always striving for the new, the challenging, the ludicrous. At the end of the interview, she says that the only downer about doing The Heart ... was that she had to turn down a role in Bertrand Bonello’s movie Tiresia. “It’s about a transsexual who is kidnapped by a guy, and she can’t take hormones, so she starts to grow a beard again. Bertrand wanted me to play the role. It was the most flattering thing.”
You wouldn’t hear Jennifer Aniston saying that.
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is released on July 15
