Silverstone, Suvari rejected typecasting and labels
’90s teen icons Silverstone, Suvari reject typecasting, both onscreen ... and off
Don’t even think about asking Alicia Silverstone and Mena Suvari about growing up as 1990s teen sex symbols. Tiptoe near the topic, and Silverstone makes it witheringly clear that proceeding further would be, as Cher Horowitz of Clueless would groan, a major party foul.
Fair enough. Both started acting at 15, catapulted into success — Silverstone in The Crush (1993) and those Aerosmith music videos, Suvari in the 1999 twofer American Pie and American Beauty — and spent the next decade fighting to prove they were more than just babelicious blondes.
Suvari rejected shallow-hottie parts for a curio cabinet of addicts, oddballs, demon hunters and hitand-run killers. Silverstone agonized over her choices until her agent ordered her to accept only jobs she loved, a strategy that’s paid off with a fascinating string of arthouse flicks, including Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Now their paths are intersecting in the new TV show American Woman, which is, appropriately, about rejecting sexist, superficial typecasting in everyday life. (The show airs in the U.S. on the Paramount Network. It is not yet available to Canadian viewers.)
Silverstone returns to her Clueless Beverly Hills fiefdom to play a restless 1975 mom named Bonnie, who’s radicalized into secondwave feminism when she discovers her husband having an affair. Suvari plays Bonnie’s best friend Kathleen, a rich girl with a weakness for diet pills and dudes who want to spend her daddy’s money. Together, these two unlikely icons of female liberation learn how to fend for themselves in an era when women still can’t get a bank loan without a man’s signature.
“You only work when American is in the title,” jokes Silverstone to Suvari in a Los Angeles office decorated like a desert cabin with faux cacti and a fireplace.
Deadpans Suvari, “It’s in my contract.”
At least American Woman is about tearing up outdated contracts, like Bonnie’s trophy-wife rules. “Her job is to look fabulous and have his drink waiting for him when he walks in the door,” says Silverstone. And if her husband cheats, “her job was to go: ‘Absolutely. Yes. Of course.’ She has no skills. She has no way of surviving.
“When you think of the ’70s, you think of bell bottoms, but you don’t think of the cultural period,” says Silverstone. Sure, women like Bonnie had witnessed the Summer of Love and the 1968 Miss America protests, but they’d been allowed to get their own credit cards for only a year. (American Woman opens with Bonnie wheedling a delicate department store purchase she has to put on her husband’s account.) “It’s so much still the ’50s,” Silverstone says. “It’s just two years post-Roe versus Wade.”
Her own mom was a Bonnie. “Super-traditional and very much 1950s,” says Silverstone. “She still looks like this cute little Laura Ashley thing.” So was Suvari’s, a mother of four who married at 20 and had to grapple with getting her first job after a divorce.
“When my parents split up, that was my glimpse into whatever that structure was,” Suvari says. “A woman coming into her own later in life. These were some of the things that my mom would have come up against.”
Growing up, Silverstone and Suvari knew they wanted more control over their futures. Early commercials and modelling gigs taught them they could make their own money. “I didn’t want to ever have anybody tell me, ‘You have to do this because you owe me,’” says Silverstone. “There’s a firecracker inside that I think must be born of the times.” (The day after the interview, Silverstone filed for divorce from her husband of almost 13 years, and in the conversation she referred to him as “my son’s dad and my dear, dear friend.”)
“I knew (Silverstone) was down to take on this role of this really strong, powerful woman,” says American Woman co-executive producer Kyle Richards. “And Mena completely blew me away. When you see the show, you realize it’s such a perfect fit.”
Richards is best known as one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and her late mother was literally Bonnie — the series is based on Richards’ childhood memories. Walking onto the set of her youth has been both surreal and energizing. “Watching it, I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve come so far — and we have so much more work to do with equal pay and the #MeToo movement.”
“It feels extremely period and extremely contemporary,” says Silverstone. In American Woman’s pilot episode, Suvari’s Kathleen beams at the idea of a costume party where she can dress up like her hero, Wonder Woman (Linda Carter, not Gal Gadot). Later, Bonnie’s philandering spouse, played by James Tupper, spots a feminist on the news and snarls, “I feel like you women have it pretty good — why complain?” It’s a stance adopted by today’s sham gender theorists.
Girl power must have felt so awesome, right, back when MTV was constantly celebrating Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani and Silverstone herself, bungee jumping off a bridge in Aerosmith’s Cryin’ video while giving the camera the finger?
“I didn’t remember it like that,” Silverstone says. Suvari nods. “Yeah, it wasn’t that great.”
Right. So many of their female co-stars and contemporaries aren’t sitting here today because of drugs, tabloids or both. That Suvari and Silverstone are is a testament to their strength. Even the roles that turned them into icons fumbled with how to combine teen coolness with women’s lib. In Amy Heckerling ’s original Clueless script, Cher launches into a diatribe against lazy male fashion with the mock-apologia, “I don’t mean to sound like a raging feminist, but …” The filmed version tweaked the line to “I don’t want to be a traitor to my generation.”
Silverstone and Suvari didn’t meet until 2004, on the Queen Latifah comedy Beauty Shop. In their one scene together, Suvari slaps Silverstone’s boyfriend’s ass, and Silverstone spins around and growls, “Since when are two airbags for breasts real?”
“She’s sent me some photos of us over the years,” sighs Suvari. “She looks great. I look horrible. This hairdo. That hair colour.”
“You look great,” says Silverstone. “I looked crazy,” says Suvari. On the American Woman set, Silverstone, a 20-year vegan and champion of animal rights who’s written two books of health advice, packed macrobiotic lunches to share with Suvari. (Today, her bag has three thermoses: a juice, a smoothie and “some kind of soup.”) Shortly afterward, Suvari also went vegan and rid her closet of leather, wool, fur and silk. Both ask their hair and makeup teams to use only cruelty-free products.
Their shared passion still allows them individual style. This grey afternoon, Suvari’s chosen an ankle-length floral dress, and Silverstone’s in a grungy red flannel and boots she could have swiped from the Cryin’ shoot.
Should the show get a second season, Suvari’s been eyeing a purple crocheted crop top and bell bottom set that her character hasn’t had a chance to wear. Kathleen and Bonnie, however, do love their fur coats. For her character’s sake, Silverstone agreed to try on a vintage fur — at least a used jacket is less harmful to the Earth, she figured — but when she slipped it on, “my whole being just died.”
“I can’t believe you even tried that,” says Suvari.
“A dead creature on your body is the most unattractive thing,” says Silverstone. “Then we put on this fake one and it looked amazing. So, done!”
Yet when they promoted American Woman at Cannes, Suvari let it slip that Silverstone loves to watch MMA. Bloody humans, it turns out, are fine.
“I just started liking it!” says Silverstone. “I don’t want anybody to win.”
“It is weird, right?” laughs Suvari.
“There’s so many vegan MMA fighters!”
“There’s the connection!” “They don’t do it because they love animals or the Earth. They do it because they know they’ll have a better performance,” says Silverstone. “I sometimes think I’d like to go to an actual fight in the ring, but it wouldn’t make any sense to anyone that I was there.”
Why not? She and Suvari have spent more than half their lives in the spotlight, navigating a difficult course that’s made them tough and confident. They ’re sure of themselves and what kind of parts they’re ready to play. These American women can do whatever they want.