South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
SHE KNOWS HER WORTH
Juliette Lewis — rock star, former child actor and self-described ‘imagination freak fairy’ — has discovered how to regenerate
Lately, Juliette Lewis has been thinking about being invincible. She’s not, of course — witness the soft knee brace encircling her right leg. Coming off a challenging shoot for the breakout Showtime psychological thriller “Yellowjackets” amid COVID-19 isolation in Canada, Lewis made a beeline for a sunny getaway and promptly overdid it physically. She tore her ACL and meniscus, injuries common in athletes but in her case stemming from the years she spent doing exuberant stage dives and high kicks with her rock band, Juliette and the Licks.
Invincibility was one of the theme words she gave to Cubs the Poet, a family member who writes poems on the spot.
“Too much vigor and enthusiasm,” she told him, describing why she was now limping around New Orleans, where she was filming the reboot of “Queer as Folk.”
“And then not enough stretching. Although that doesn’t sound as cool.” She laughed, and he typed up her poem.
Lewis, 48, has been working since she was a teenager, making her mark in films like “Cape Fear” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”
“I find myself, at midlife, where I can come into a space and I know my worth,” she said. Her boundaries, though, have needed fine-tuning. “Only recently, I was like, life-work balance? That’s an amazing concept. I didn’t even know there was a name for it. I thought it was just like, work your (butt) off until you crash and burn, and then take some time off to heal your body and mind.”
But, she added, she wasn’t complaining about the job. “This industry has fed me. There’s no other place for me as a little imagination freak fairy.”
That “Yellowjackets” is set partly in the ’90s, the decade in which Lewis ascended in Hollywood, at a moment when the culture seems to be getting frank about how women were (mis)treated then, has given the show an added dimension. The mechanics of celebrity and the limits imposed on young women — “If you had brown hair, you’re a moody, sarcastic teen. If you have blond hair, you’re an airhead, pretty girl,” as Lewis put it — nearly drove her out of the business. (Martin Scorsese, who cast her in “Cape Fear,” saved her.) It’s only now, in her 40s, that she’s found a part that smartly interrogates what expectations were placed on teenagers then, and how they must recuperate as adults.
As a performer, Lewis has also had her share of invincible moments: youthful characters who traded in adolescent bravado until things came crashing down, often brutally. She’s back mining that territory now, from the other side, in “Yellowjackets,” in which her character, Natalie, a high
school soccer star, survives a plane crash in a remote wilderness with some teammates. The show toggles between the violent aftermath of the crash, following the teenagers in flashbacks to the ’90s, and the present day, with Lewis and co-stars Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey and Tawny Cypress unpacking the trauma as adults. (Sophie Thatcher plays Natalie as a teenager.)
“Natalie is written as that, I guess, toxic strength,” Lewis said. “But she completely devolves to where she goes into weakness and propitiation around the girls, and it’s strange where she ends up. I didn’t see it coming.”
In long, late night chats, the 40-something co-stars talked about the gendered power dynamics of the
’90s.
“We were all sharing horror stories about that time — the sexism, misogyny,” said Lynskey,
44, who made her debut with “Heavenly Creatures” in 1994.
“When we all started out, I think we were sold this story about ‘you have until you’re 40,’ ” she added. “I didn’t see very many older women who were having magnificent careers.” Streaming has changed that to some degree, but, Lynskey said, “it does take a lot of tenacity to keep hanging in and believe that you don’t have a finite amount of time.”
Lewis earned an Oscar nomination at 19, holding the screen opposite Robert De Niro in “Cape Fear,” and soon followed it with a genre-busting performance as a wild murderess in Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.”
“It’s become a Halloween cute-costume thing,” she said. “Every Halloween, people on social media send me ‘Natural Born Killers’ pictures.”
By the time Lewis was 14, she had an agent and began booking sitcoms. She’d been a faltering student.
“Finding this purpose of storytelling and oh, if you live in your imagination, there’s this space for it — it actually kept me out of trouble,” she said.
That came later, by her early 20s, when the demands of fame caught up with her, and she felt at odds with the image that was expected of her.
“I was so into trying to do things on my own terms,” she said. “I wore a swap meet headdress I got for $15 in the Valley to the Golden Globes. But in photo shoots, that’s where I had times where I’d be crying in the bathroom because of the pressure.”
She developed a drug addiction. “It was hard. I had an implosion,” she said. At 22, she took two years off and got sober. The pause damaged her career trajectory, she said.
But in her 30s, she spun away from acting again, to focus on Juliette and the Licks. She had been a closet songwriter and vocalist.
“When I hit 30, I was like, oh, that thing you were so in love with, you haven’t done it. You’re 30. What are you doing?” She spent nearly six years touring in grungy fashion.
“Juliette came in blazing, on fire, committed, determined to be a rock star,” said Linda Perry, who produced Lewis’ first EP. “She was not an actress becoming a singer. She was a rock star stepping into her rightful position.”
When the band first dissolved a decade ago, her screen career picked back up. Castmates and directors seem awed by her ability to conjure unpredictability, especially in the grinding business of ensemble-TV production.
“She’s like a live wire when she’s working,” said Karyn Kusama, an executive producer of “Yellowjackets” who also directed its first episode. “She’s one of the more instinctive and instinctual actors I’ve ever worked with. I learned pretty quickly on the pilot, I was never going to get the same take twice.”
Lynskey recalled a scene late in the season. Their characters “have this antagonistic sort of relationship; there’s a lot of sniping back and forth,” she said. But in one take, “I made this choice to look at her and just check in if she’s OK, and the moment I looked at her, she burst into tears. That’s how present she is, how on the verge of emotion she is, at all times.”