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Nikki Reed, No Longer Thirteen

Articles > Nikki Reed, No Longer Thirteen
- Posted on August 16, 2006 | From Now Playing Magazine | Previous Next

Nikki Reed is no longer the messed-up young girl from Thirteen, the breakthrough film that she co-authored with director Catherine Hardwicke, based on her own slippery-slope experiences of an emancipated adolescence. Of course, she never really was that girl, as she’s quick to point out.

Reed’s most recent film, writer-director Nick Guthe’s irreverent dramedy Mini’s First Time, may have already come and gone from the box office (it will soon see release on DVD this fall), but Reed herself stands poised to make a full-frontal assault on Hollywood, continuing to write and produce a number of her own projects.

With a hollowed-out conscience and eyes that are deep pools of unspoken emotional neediness, Reed plays the title character in Mini’s First Time, a high school girl with a swallowed loathing for her embittered, gold-digging mother, a failed actress named Diane (Carrie-Anne Moss). Seeking ever-escalating thrills, Mini gets a job with an upscale escort service, where a fling lands her in the lap, literally, of her stepfather Martin (Alec Baldwin). Figuring they’re not really related, she goes with the flow, and the two strike up an affair. This soon leads to darker schemes, as the two plot to push Diane out of the picture by making it look like she’s going insane.

While not without some flourishes of accompanying depth, it’s a full-on, junior sexpot-type role, something with which Reed — who’s a refreshingly unguarded and thoughtful, well spoken interview — seems more than a little uncomfortable. “After something like Thirteen, it’s very easy to be handed $10 million scripts for Fourteen or Fifteen, but people aren’t so quick to hop on the bandwagon if it’s not a done deal,” she says over coffee and cake, her reward for an early morning call for a full day’s slate of interviews at a Beverly Hills hotel. “ People don’t want to take risks; that’s the bottom line in this business. And I’m young and I’m a female. We also can’t pretend like those aren’t huge factors. And I’m trying my best — at least as a person and an individual — not to use my sexuality as a means to gain power. So I try to go into all these situations as respectful as possible and be taken seriously, and then I do something like Mini’s and I’m sitting in a red bikini on the poster, and it’s just gold. But Nikki is not Mini. It’s funny how when Charlize Theron plays a serial killer it’s very obviously a character, but there’s no possible way I could be anyone other than the girl in that movie, according to some people.”

“I haven’t really been given the opportunity to stretch in other stuff, and that’s unfortunate,” Reed continues. “It makes me really sad… what I’ve already been told, that actually hurts my feelings. Doesn’t that sound so childish? I get some scripts and my agent says, ‘You should read this if you like it, but you can’t go in and even meet on it because they don’t want to meet you.’ And I think that’s so ignorant. I don’t want to use the word naïve because I don’t think that it’s strong enough.”

In the interim, Reed takes meetings with folks that do want to meet with her, but doesn’t go out of her way to work just for a full résumé’s sake. “I stick to projects that have some sort of integrity,” she says, “because I want people to respect me when I come out and say, ‘This is a project that I’ve written, and I took a chance on you guys as first-time writer-directors, now you take a chance again on me.’” Reed likes her small screen work on The O.C., both for the reliability it provides (“I like it because I can stay at home and drive myself to work everyday and sleep in my own bed,” she says, “and I think that’s what everyone craves in their life — some form of consistency” ) as well as the visibility — especially important since she abhors the Hollywood party circuit. She has a script set in New Zealand in both the 1960s and ’80s, and wants to make that her next big personal project. With a little luck, Reed’s determination will pay off. She certainly has the perspicacity and doggedness required of the most successful actor-producers, her youth notwithstanding.

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