THE SILVER LINING
Silverstone, who has spent the past two decades maintaining a low-wattage career, now pops up everywhere, writes Margy Rochlin
ALICIA Silverstone leaned out of the upstairs window of her double-storey house in a woody section of the Hollywood Hills. Toothpaste spilling from her mouth, she shouted cheerfully,
“Be down soon. I’m brushing my teeth!”
She recently returned from Montreal, where she had shot a horror film directed by the Austrian team of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (Goodnight Mommy), and this morning she is collecting belongings from the floor that she wanted to bring to the Pacific Palisades-based set of Judy Small, a low-budget comedy. “Script,” she says aloud. “Wallet. Shoes. When I’m in a rush,” she adds.
The array of rumpled blouses and hastily discarded jackets is a far cry from the computerised closet Silverstone is indelibly associated with, the one that was colour-coded, organised by season and programmed to mix and match outfits. Such is the enduring power of her performance as Cher Horowitz in the 1995 coming-of-age teenage comedy, Clueless. Made for a modest $12-million, the film grossed more than $56-million at the US box office, and generated a wave of teenage girl copycat movies and predictions of superstar status for Silverstone. What followed instead was an entertainment industry chain reaction: some big pay-days, a few box office failures and a “whodoes-she-think-she-is?” backlash. And even though Silverstone has spent the last two decades maintaining a steady, low-wattage career filled with roles in small films, television and theatre, she is still one of those actors who make people wonder if she’s even acting anymore.
But Silverstone, now 41, suddenly seems to be everywhere. Last year alone, she appeared in four movies, including playing a bespectacled mom in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long
Haul. Though not given much dialogue in the recently released Book Club, she still radiated Silverstonian charm as a doting daughter hovering over her widowed mom (Diane Keaton). Last week, she returned to a starring role when American Woman, her new television series on Paramount Network, made its US debut.
Set in Beverly Hills circa 1970s, American Woman is loosely based on the early childhood memories of Kyle Richards, a former child star (Little House on the Prairie) and now a secondcareer reality star on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Silverstone plays Bonnie Nolan, a mother of two who kicks out her philandering husband and is determined, with no marketable skills, to support herself and her family.
The daughter of immigrants from England, Monty Silverstone, a real estate investor, and Didi, a former flight attendant, Silverstone worked as a model from age 8 to 12. She used her pay cheques for acting classes and was discovered at a Los Angeles-based summer acting workshop. Soon she secured an agent, a Domino’s Pizza commercial, a guest spot on The Wonder Years, a failed pilot called Me and Nick, and, despite her scant filmography, a central role in The Crush, a psychological thriller in which she played a deranged teenage seductress.
In 1993, Marty Callner was 20 minutes into a multiplex screening of The Crush when he knew he’d found a luminous heroine to star in a trio of Aerosmith videos he was directing. “It wasn’t just that she was extremely photogenic, beautiful – she had ‘It’, the right sass and body language,” Callner said.
The videos would reboot Aerosmith’s flagging popularity, transform Silverstone into a
MTV video star and inspire
Amy Heckerling, the director of Clueless, to give Callner a call asking what she was like to work with.
Heckerling had been struggling to find an actress who could recite snarky, entitled dialogue, but make it sound sweet. But when Heckerling met Silverstone, she knew she was sitting across from her perfect Cher. “We were at a restaurant, and when she got her drink, she leaned her head over into her straw, the way a little kid does,” said Heckerling. “I found her totally endearing.”
Film critics, audiences and movie executives alike fell in love with Silverstone, too. Not yet in her 20s, she and her First Kiss Productions company were bequeathed a $10 million development deal to produce two films at Columbia Pictures. Then the romance soured as quickly as it began. When the only result of
her deal was Excess Baggage, a negatively reviewed crime comedy starring Silverstone and Benicio Del Toro, she was excoriated in the media. In 1996, her appearance at the Oscars set off a run of cruel body-shaming. Cast as Batgirl in Batman and Robin, Silverstone found herself serenaded with the TV show’s theme song by paparazzi, who replaced “Batman” with “Fatgirl”.
Today, when asked whose advice she sought in the hopes of navigating her way through such unsteady waters, Silverstone wrinkled her expressive brow. “People I’d talk to? That would be nobody,” Silverstone said.
“Now I talk to everybody about everything – but I was so isolated back then.” – New York Times