Fighting back
Teen star Chloe Grace Moretz takes on an alien invasion in The 5th Wave, opening today
“I’VE HAD BIG dreams since I was 5,” Chloe Grace Moretz said. “I memorised my older brother’s lines, and then asked my mother when I would get my own scripts.”
Her old brother Trevor attended the Professional Performing Arts School in New York, but it was Moretz who really got the acting bug. “I’d act for anyone who would pull up a chair and watch me,” she recalled. “It just made me crazy happy.”
At 11 she decided to get serious about it. “Basically I told my mother that I was going to be an actress,” she said. “I was that sure of my future. For me, this was it.”
How did her mother feel about that? “She actually believed me,” the young actress said.
That was only seven years ago. As Moretz - whose name is pronounced MORE-etz - sat for an interview in a Los Angeles hotel on a rainy weekday afternoon, however, she already rated as one of Hollywood’s hottest young stars.
The interview took place around New Year’s, and Moretz reported that she makes the same resolutions every year. “I always look back on the past year and see the pros and the cons,” she said. “I just try to not repeat the cons and enhance the pros.”
It’s mostly pros. Moretz
will turn 19 on February 10, and already she’s worked with such industry heavy hitters as Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Martin Scorsese and Denzel Washington. Not to mention the Muppets. She’s played everything from the ultra-violent, foulmouthed Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass (2010) to a high-school student cursed with telekinetic powers in Carrie (2013), from a young girl teetering between life and death in If I Stay to a teen call girl in The Equalizer (2014). Not to mention a newsgirl in Muppets Most Wanted (2014). “I’ve done about 40 characters now,” she said, “if you count the little stuff - and I do.”
‘THIS FELT VERY REALISTIC’
Next up is The 5th Wave, based on Rick Yancey’s 2013 best-seller, opening today in the UAE. If it succeeds, Moretz will have a new franchise of her own: Yancey has written two sequels, The Infinite Sea (2014) and The Last Star, which is set for release on May 24.
The film, directed by J Blakeson, also stars Maria Bello, Ron Livingston and Liev Schreiber. Moretz plays Cassie Sullivan, a highschool student whose life is shattered by an invasion of aliens from outer space. Four waves of increasingly devastating attacks leave most of Earth destroyed and kill everyone else in Cassie’s family except her younger brother, who then goes missing.
“I play a young woman who basically faces her worst fears,” Moretz said.
“She loses almost everyone she loves, and must hang onto the idea that she can find her little brother. She vows to do everything and anything to get him back.
“This felt very realistic to me,” she said. “I have brothers. I’d do everything in my power to fight for my family.”
Moretz read Yancey’s book three times to get into character.
“You have the aliens and the explosions,” she said, “but to me this is a book, and now a movie, about family, friendship and humanity.
“It also asks, `Who do you trust?’”
Cassie isn’t Hit-Girl or a teenage version of a Linda Hamilton or Sigourney Weaver character. She’s an everyday young woman thrown into a world of earthquakes, tsunamis, electromagnetic pulses and epidemics. “It was a big deal for me that, despite these natural disasters, Cassie remain a normal, average teenage girl,” Moretz said. “She doesn’t choose to go down this path of saving people. She’s thrown into the deep end and must fight to survive.
“I believe it’s a huge deal for young women to see this type of girl step into the action,” she continued. “I can look at Cassie and say, `Oh, that’s me, I’m that girl. I’m not extraordinary, but, if push comes to shove, then I know I will find the courage.’”
It’s also significant to her that Cassie doesn’t need a boyfriend to fight alongside her. “Instead of a girl fighting for love, she’s fighting for the life of her brother and her own life,” Moretz said.
Given her background in the Kick-Ass movies, the challenge for Moretz was not handling the action scenes in
The 5th Wave, but rather scaling down her performance to a more realistic level. “The action in this movie was me trying to unremember everything I knew about action,” she said with a laugh. “I had to pretend that I was someone who never did action before. I had to learn a whole new set of skills, which was to appear unskilled.”
The film was shot in her native Georgia, but the forest settings didn’t have much feeling of home.
“It was freezing and raining,” Moretz recalled. “There I was running around in thin jackets and these little shoes.”
Even so, she relished the challenge of the role. “There is a big moment in this movie where it’s life and death - I see death coming to me,” Moretz said. “That’s very hard to portray. It was emotionally strenuous, but I welcomed it. I enjoy a challenge.”
‘I WANT TO SURPRISE PEOPLE’
Natives of Atlanta, Moretz and her four older brothers came from a medical family, the children of a nurse and a doctor. When her brother Trevor was accepted into the performing-arts high school in New York, Moretz and her mother accompanied him there. Her brother acted awhile as Trevor Duke, but lately has worked more as a producer under the name Trevor-Duke Moretz. His sister, on the other hand, has thought of little but acting since then. She made her professional debut with a two-episode stint on The Guardian (2004), and then moved to the big screen for The Amityville Horror (2005). Kick-Ass made her a budding star, and she went on to such films as (500) Days of Summer (2009), Let Me In (2010), Texas Killing Fields (2011), Hugo (2011), Dark Shadows (2012), Carrie, Laggies (2014), Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), If I Stay and The Equalizer.
Her performance in The Equalizer as a battered teen call girl surprised some of her fans, but that’s OK with Moretz. “I want to surprise people,” she said. “I want to do dark roles. As long as I feel a personal connection to the character, then I’m ready to explore her world.”
She will be seen this summer in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, but the highestprofile project on her slate is a live-action version of The
Little Mermaid, for which she’ll soon go into training. “I’m not a good swimmer,” she admitted. “I can learn, because this is a very cool role.”
Fans don’t know much about Moretz’s private life, and she likes it that way. “What people should care about is what you do on screen,” she explained.
Moretz did add that there’s little in her offscreen life that would particularly interest her fans.
She doesn’t hang out with celebrities or hit the world’s hottest nightclubs. “I’ve had the same best friend since I was 10,” she said. “I like to keep it small when it comes to my little circle.
“My family has kept me really grounded,” the actress added. “I also know that there is so much for me to lose.”
“Most of all, I don’t see a point to being rude to my family or fans,” Moretz concluded. “I’m just like them on most days, sitting around in my old Rolling Stones T-shirt and dreaming big dreams.”