A recent afternoon found her in a New York City coffee shop, discussing her role as the volatile, heroin-addicted lesbian supermodel Gia Carangi in HBO's biopic Gia. Her hair, which had been shaved for the scenes depicting Gia's death from AIDS in 1986, was still very short. She thinks she'll probably shave her head again someday, because she loved being bald; it made her feel stronger. Women kept wanting to touch it, and it became this very sexual thing, having no hair. This is not the first time she has been cast in a gender-preference-ambiguous part. In Foxfire, for example, she plays a stranger in town around whom a group of teen girls coalesce to take off their shirts and give each other tattoos. She believes that she gets these parts because she loves women, and not in a way that's superficial. She has noticed that while her sex scenes with men always get cut, her sex scenes with women always stay in.
Her manner as she recounted these details was intelligent and straightforward, but there was an air about her. That air suggested that, her straightforwardness notwithstanding, there were some thoughts orbiting around in her formerly bald head that you don't get to know about. Her name, translated from various Romance languages, forms the first three words of Curtis Lee's one and only Top Forty hit, which was produced by Phil Spector and rose to number seven in July of 1961, fourteen years before her birth. If you have a 1992 Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, you can look it up on page 272. If you don't, here's a hint for you: "Pretty Little Angel Eyes."
Her previous credits include Playing God and Hackers. She met her husbandJonny Lee Miller, while costarring with him in the latter, but she doesn't want to talk about her marriage. Her father is Jon voight, and he sometimes calls her Jellybean, for some reason. Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, sometimes calls her Bunny. When she was younger, she had an obsessive crush on Mr. Spock. She has a mouth you can't take your eyes off, but her favorite feature is her forearms, the way the veins show and their shape. She always felt she looked like a Muppet. She's got a few tattoos herself.
Asked if she has any scars, she exhibits a recent one on her hand that she got being stupid with a knife on-set and a fainter one just below her jawline on the left side. I'm not really clear how she got this, except that it's from a boyfriend who cut her when she was about fourteen, but it wasn't bad, it was an experiment, and anyway, he has more scars than she does. Asked what kind of experiment, she says, "See? You're the one getting the subject back to sex." This seemed like a kind of oblique response. In fact, she's got more mystique than you generally expect to find in a young woman her age. However, you shouldn't think she's all about tattoos and knives and scars, although she did use to have a snake named Harry Dean Stanton. She's also mushy and really close to her mom and has poetry books and lace nightgowns and wants to cook and learn French. She likes and owns a lot of lingerie, but she doesn't always wear it. In a relationship, she wears ordinary underwear and saves the fancy stuff to cheer herself up. She fears being buried alive and becoming the kind of person who dresses her dog in clothes.
If she were going to place a personal ad, it would read, "Leave me alone." Or it might say, "Looking for a very secret, very straight night of reckless abandon to do all the things I've never done before. Shock me and keep it private." She is very left-handed, and this makes it difficult for her to use scissors. This may be why she collects knives and other kinds of bladed weapons. If she were going to be a bladed weapon, it would be this kind she read about once that has hooks in it that manipulate your opponent's blade and trick him into letting go of it. Her other hobby is learning to play the drums. She is studying film at NYU. She knows how to tango.
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