Life After 13

Posted on April 11, 2006 | From YEN Magazine | Previous

Three years ago, Nikki Reed’s diary would have read like this. ‘It’s 4.25am on a school day. Thirteen-year-old Nikki’s alarm wakes her. She makes her ritual call to Brenda, her best friend, and they arrange to meet halfway down the block. Five minutes later they’re at Nikki’s house starting their routine of breakfast and a four-hour hair and make-up marathon. Everyone else is still sleeping.’ “You know, we actually used to iron our hair until it was falling out of our scalps,” Nikki recalls. “I don’t understand how my lips didn’t fall off, I wore soooo much make-up.”

Back in 2001, Nikki had just started at a new school in LA, and was being bullied by a pack of vicious mini-Britneys. To fit in, she joined a crystal-meth-pushing clique, slipping on her dirtiest hipsters, biting her lip through the required body piercings (13 in all) and blowing her way through the boys. It was this experience that would change her life. She opened up about what she was going through to Catherine Hardwicke, her Hollywood art director dad’s girlfriend, a film production designer. With Catherine’s support, the 13-year-old turned her life into a movie as a form of therapy. And with its depression and drug-induced violence-for-fun, Thirteen was never going to be just another teen movie. Especially not with the nasty, no-getting-away-from-it reality of its stars – actual teens playing teens in a way the rule-makers deemed X-rated.

Nikki, now 16, is in her apartment making pancakes with a girlfriend and stuffing her face with sweet things. “Can I have another cheesecake bite?” she says. “These Sara Lee cheesecake bites are absolutely brilliant – you should buy them.” I ask her if she normally eats like this. “I’m the worst,” she says, talking me through her freezer, a teen dream zone of Häagen Dazs and pizza. She even has her favourite ice cream store on speed dial for 2am deliveries.

We start talking about welfare workers. Because Nikki and her co-star, Evan Rachel Wood, are only roughly half the age of Kip Pardue, who plays Evan’s neighbour Luke in Thirteen, they had to have welfare workers present on set for the scene where the girls together try to seduce Pardue. Nikki says, “Our welfare worker – I hate that word – had to watch. There are so many rules. You can’t touch butt, you can’t touch nipple, but you can touch around it.” But it could’ve been worse. “God knows what would have happened if two girls were put in a situation where it was like, ‘It’s all for the love of acting!’”

Nikki also teaches me some teen slang, although she relies more on her girlfriend because she says, “I haven’t been to school in so long I don’t know what’s hip any more.” Cool is “gangsta”; a trendy girl is “tore up”; and girls who show their G-strings above their hipsters are “hoochies.”

Nikki is Jewish on her dad’s side and Cherokee-Italian on her mother’s. Her mum is an always-broke at-home hairdresser, while her dad worked on such movies as Minority Report and Fight Club. Her parents divorced when she was two and she spent most of her childhood toing and froing between them. “I didn’t really have much of a childhood,” she says. “I never really had a normal group of friends.” She blames this on her parents. “It sucks. If I have children I want them to have more consistency. Not to move around, not to go to five different elementary schools.” She sounds raw and faintly angry.

I ask her when she started drinking and smoking. “ Probably around 12 or 13. Not that that’s abnormal,” she says defensively. It was around this time that Nikki also went into therapy. The sex, drugs and wild lifestyle had become too out of control for her parents to bear. “On one hand, I probably went to therapy because my parents wanted me to go and it was their way of being good parents. And then, on the other hand, I guess it was beneficial,” she says, sounding unconvinced. “If you put in a lot of time and energy and actually really want to go, then you’ll get something out of it, but I don’t think a 12-year-old girl’s capable of doing that.”

Nikki counts Catherine Hardwicke and Holly Hunter (who played her adoptive mum in Thirteen) as her two best friends. Catherine is a kind of surrogate-mum-meets-best-friend, who treats her like an equal and who Nikki describes as “way cooler than a stepmum.” Holly is a “goofball” who Nikki goes to premieres with. Nikki says of her, “She’s like my mentor – we talk all the time.” Nikki says she doesn’t get on with girls her own age because they’re, “Worried about boys and school, but I’m worried about paying my bills and rent.” Other friends include her older brother Nathan, who is at college, and Victor Rasuk, who stars in her next movie Lords of Dogtown. Like Nikki, Victor was an untrained actor who had his Thirteen moment with cult teen indie movie Raising Victor Vargas. Nikki talks about Victor frequently, telling me, “I try to surround myself with people like Victor”, “Sorry to keep bringing up Victor”, and even, “I’m getting back into gymnastics, Victor told me that I really should.”

Nikki currently lives alone in her “very adult” Santa Monica apartment. Strictly speaking it’s illegal because she’s only 16, but she says she needs her independence. She’s gone from obsessing over her lipgloss to flipping out over a speck of dust. “I use my vacuum four times a day, and towels have to be hung a certain way.” She says her interest in fashion has changed since she left school. “Maybe it’s because of Dogtown, but I have more of a bohemian style. My wardrobe consists of like two pairs of plain jeans and white and black wifebeaters”. She doesn’t wear make-up any more, wears glasses instead of contact lenses, and doesn’t smoke or do drugs. She says, “I’m starting a new life right now and I just want to shed everything.” She’s also planning on getting out of LA to go to college in New York (where “ nobody gives a shit what they wear and what they look like” ) to study film.

She can see herself starring in Jane Austen-style period dramas in the near future, but in the meantime she’s renting old movies back-to-back to brush up on her film knowledge. “I didn’t grow up like Victor and Evan, studying acting my whole life and wanting to do this, so now I have to do all that research.” She doesn’t need to be quite so anxious, though. Nikki’s the only teen star to share an agent with Tom Cruise. And the agent only takes on people who are going to be white hot.

Nikki’s next movie, Lords of Dogtown, is inspired by the Sean Penn-narrated documentary Dogtown and Z Boys, about the early skateboarders in ‘70s California. Heath Ledger and John Robinson play dreamy, strawberry blonde LA skate rats. The movie also stars Johnny Knoxville, and Victor Rasuk as wonderkid Tony Alva. Nikki plays Tony’s kid sister, Cathy, and had to learn how to skate ‘70s-style for the role. “I really didn’t end up being that good,” she apologises. “Actually, I knew how to stand on a board,” she jokes. Cathy has two of the boys after her. I drool jealously and she says, “I can’t complain. I’m newly single.” She was dating a Hawaiian boy called DJ for two years. “It was like we were married,” she says. This is the boy Nikki recently described as being “the best boyfriend in the world.” Now Nikki says, “We’re different people. I’m working on my career right now.” It’s the only Hollywood cliché she uses in the entire interview.

Nikki is finding Hollywood a lot like high school. “Everyone is really immature and it’s all about themselves and never about caring about other people,” she says emotionally. “I’m tired of having to worry about who to trust and what to say and what to wear. I just want to be myself.” She says the media can be manipulative. “After Thirteen I did a lot interviews and it broke my heart to see that I could do an interview with a woman who I thought was really cool, was in her mid-20s, and we could hang out and I could tell her everything. And then to read a 10-page article where I was completely bashed.”

I wonder how Nikki is coping with being a celebrity. “I’m not a celebrity,” she insists. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that right now. Part of me hopes I won’t grow up regretting not doing it the regular way, finishing school and starting acting later, like Holly did. Part of me feels like I might miss out on both,” she says, sounding neurotic, which she admits she is.

One perk of being famous, she says, is she gets to meet her idols, like Chloe Sevigny, Salma Hayek and Samantha Morton. And, at a recent party, she saw her favourite band, the Black Eyed Peas, play. Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were also at the party. She hopes they use their fame “wisely” and “maybe actually do something besides porn.” What does she think of the Hiltons’ forthcoming make-up and clothing lines? “They have a make-up and clothing line?” she asks in shock. Will girls buy it? “I think that half of America will buy it,” she says sadly.

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