Coping with the Hollywood Crush

Posted on July 08, 2007 | From http://www.filmstew.com/showArticle.aspx?ContentID=16044 | Previous

Unlike Lindsay, Paris and Britney, 19-year-old Nikki Reed is anything but a party girl. But because she is so good at playing one on film, it has led some in Tinseltown to mistake her for just that.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007 at 2:50 PM By Brent Simon

Hoping for new challenges Nikki Reed is no longer the messed-up young girl from Thirteen, the breakthrough film which 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. Refreshingly unguarded during a recent sit-down chat at a Los Angeles hotel, Reed has a sly, astute and furtively confidential tone — when she appends a questioning “you know” to the end of a sentence, it’s not some vacuous, Valley Girl vernacular, but rather an intimate, imploring solicitation of deeper agreement and common ground. Reed’s most recent film, the glossy thriller Cherry Crush, hits DVD July 3rd. With a Kevin Smith CW TV pilot (Reaper *) and a couple more indies in the can – the family comedy drama Familiar Strangers and the drama Privileged - the 19-year-old Reed stands poised to make a full-frontal assault on Hollywood at some point, continuing perhaps to write and produce a number of her own projects.

Other than Thirteen, the best showcase so far for Reed’s acting talents is arguably Mini's First Time, available on DVD. With a hollowed out conscience and eyes that are deep pools of unspoken emotional neediness, Reed plays the title character of 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, in a role given perhaps unfortunate new spin by his recent real-life travails). Mini goes with the flow, and the two strike up an affair. This soon leads to darker schemes, as the pair 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 thoughtful, well spoken interview, one that actually addresses questions asked, which is sometimes a rarity for younger actors on the social-climbing circuit — 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. “ People don’t want to take risks; that’s the bottom line in this business.”

“I’m young and I’m a female; we can’t pretend those aren’t huge factors,” she continues. “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.” There is indeed another kind of typecasting in Hollywood, the type that is held not by fans but rather by industry producers, directors and even some casting directors. Mention the name Nikki Reed and chances are most narrow thinking creative types will immediately conjure up an image from Mini’s First Time or Thirteen or Cherry Crush. “I haven’t really been given the opportunity to stretch in other stuff, and that’s unfortunate,” Reed bemoans. “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.” “For some reason I walk into a room and there’s absolutely no way that I’m not Mini in Mini’s First Time or Eve Zamora in Thirteen, when I couldn’t be more different from both of those people,” she continues. “When we promoted Thirteen we stressed and stressed and stressed that my character that I played was not based on myself but the other girl was, but for some reason this still doesn’t stick.”

“I’m very fortunate and very happy to be where I’m at, and very proud of the choices that I’ve made, but it’s hurt my feelings — to walk into a room of producers and say here’s why I love this role and here’s why I can play this and have them say, ‘No, but it was nice meeting you. We’ll call you when we have [a part for] Angelina Jolie’s little sister.’ I don’t think that’s very fair. But certainly I respect their decisions.” 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 have no ego,” she says. “If someone tells me they don’t see me in that part, I ask them to let me read, because I would rather be able to show them that I can as opposed to just being told that they don’t think that I can. I also try stick to projects that have some sort of integrity,” she continues, “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 enjoys her small screen work on projects like Reaper and The O.C., both for the reliability it provides as well as the visibility, especially important since she abhors the Hollywood party circuit. She has a script set in New Zealand spanning the 1960s to the ’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 finely honed doggedness required of the most successful actor-producers, her youth notwithstanding. “I never planned on being an actor,” Reed insists. “To this day I’m embarrassed when I speak to journalists because I don’t have a library full of films that I seen in my house, because I don’t know that much about films, to be honest with you. I’d much rather talk about books, because film doesn’t have that kind of effect on me as it does on other people who maybe became actors because of specific movies they’ve seen, things that meant the world to them and inspired them.” “I didn’t know I was going to act until four years ago,” she continues. “I kept changing my mind. I did Thirteen and then was like, ‘Whoah, that was cool, what a funny mistake.’ And then all of a sudden I moved out and couldn’t go back to school and that was my only choice. And so I acted to pay the bills. Now I’m acting because I enjoy it. And that’s all I can say about it, because it’s not going to be the rest of my life.”

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