White House Cruella carves out a KILLER new career
She was at the heart of Donald Trump’s inner circle – but now Scots actress Louise Linton is stepping into a very different horror show...
THERE are those who felt the dying days of the Trump administration were rather like watching a Hollywood disaster movie. But just when it might seem safe to come out from behind the sofa, a trailer for one of the more outlandish spin-offs from that turbulent era has just hit our screens.
All things being equal, few would have paid much attention to the social media push for Me, You, Madness, a hare-brained tale of a bisexual sociopath, detailed breathlessly in official promotional puffs as ‘glamorous, irreverent and full of lip-smacking thrills’, were it not for one small detail.
The actor playing the female lead – ultrawealthy Malibu hedge fund manager Catherine Black – is none other than Louise Linton, the
Scottish wife of former president Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin.
The self-described ‘serial killer comedy’ has been bankrolled by Stormchaser Films, a company set up by Linton and backed by her fabulously wealthy husband, a former film producer and financier, to further her longheld ambition of making it big in movies.
According to a New York Times interview, this bizarre vanity project features a drugfuelled poolside orgy, more chainsaws and fake blood than a Hammer horror, Linton’s character ingesting a live spider, and her addiction to everything from cocaine and champagne to extreme violence and high fashion – with 42 outfit changes in a 98minute film.
‘You may think that I’m a materialistic, narcissistic, self-absorbed misanthrope. I don’t deny it,’ drawls Linton’s character in the trailer’s voiceover. ‘I’m addicted to fashion, the accumulation of money, exercise, and sex.’ The script apparently took Linton only a fortnight to write.
Linton herself calls the movie, which she says has been financed for an unknown sum by friends and family, ‘a potpourri of silliness’, inspired by classic femme fatale movies.
Judging by its trailer alone, critics fear the silliness may have slipped into the juvenile.
As one film critic wryly observed: ‘I’m all for female-forward movies but this trailer, billed as a “modern romantic comedy”, looks as hip as old boots.
‘Of course, trailers can be deceptive but this looks like an 11-year-old boy’s idea of sassy femininity – even her voice sounds botoxed.’
Perhaps the film will confound the doomsayers, but if its eye-popping three-minute trailer tells us anything, it is that Linton appears to have tired of her previous role as loyal wife to one of the US’s most powerful politicians.
Perhaps Louise Linton is relieved to be swapping life among the supporting cast of Washington’s staid political elite and now hopes to grab the limelight.
NOT that the Mnuchins have been shrinking violets since their marriage in 2017, which took place amid the pomp and ceremony of the White House and at which then-vice president Mike Pence officiated.
The starchiness of their official wedding portrait – Mnuchin stiffbacked in a penguin suit beside a curiously unsmiling bride – made for an odd-looking couple; he a 58-yearold, twice-divorced former hedge fund manager, she a twice-married C-list actress 18 years his junior.
Despite, or possibly because of this, the couple have been a source of endless fascination, and some irritation, to ordinary Americans.
Neither bows easily to criticism, and there has been plenty slung their way. Mnuchin, let us not forget, survived Trump – one of the few members of Cabinet to ride out his mercurial boss’s four tempestuous years in office.
Linton, too, has displayed impressive ‘bouncebackability’ given the number of times she has fallen from grace. In truth, even before she was cast as the First Lady of the Treasury, Linton, who was brought up in a castle, had a knack of rubbing others up the wrong way.
Her 2016 ghost-written memoir, In Congo’s Shadow: One Girl’s Perilous
Journey to the Heart of Africa, recounting her volunteer work in Zambia, was lambasted for its racial insensitivity and numerous discrepancies before it was swiftly pulled from sale.
A year later, she posted a photograph on Instagram of herself and her husband disembarking a military plane, adding hashtags to show off all her vastly expensive designer clothes, including £320 sunglasses and a £680 Hermes scarf.
When criticised, she lashed out with a furious, tone-deaf rant which led to her being dubbed by some members of the American press as the Marie Antoinette of Washington for her ostentatious lifestyle.
Linton also went viral when she posed for photos at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, clutching a sheet of freshly printed money while wearing long leather gloves – drawing comparisons with Darth Vader and Cruella de Vil.
To some, however, she will forever epitomise the Trump administration’s intellectual vacuity and narcissism. The Washington Post labelled her ‘the Trump administration’s resident super-villainess’.
LINTON found herself on the defensive following such faux pas, and having to apologise. After her Instagram misstep, she said she was ‘super duper sorry’, before relaunched her Instagram feed in 2018 with a focus on charity work, emphasising in particular her vegan credentials and pro-animal rights stance.
Not everyone was convinced. One American commentator cattily described the shift as her transformation from ‘Louise Linton, thirsty designer-label enthusiast adorned in diamonds and platinum, into Louise Linton, benevolent diplomat with a heart of gold’.
She once admitted that she found the transition to politician’s spouse far harder than she imagined, saying: ‘I didn’t know what I was allowed to be. You can’t wear this. You can’t do that. You start to feel a little nervous to do anything. I spent plenty of days in a curled-up little ball, just crying and not understanding.’
Linton is, perhaps understandably, a little wobbly about her film’s likely reception.
‘There will be people who love it and people who hate it,’ she conceded, although she claims making it gave her an ‘extraordinary sense of freedom and fun’.
That much is undeniable. Having written, directed, produced, edited, and starred in the film, about all she is not responsible for is writing and singing the theme tune.
Quite what Washington’s social elite, with whom she and her husband once daily rubbed shoulders, will make of the filmmaker’s creative use of gratuitous violence, nudity and lesbian sex is anybody’s guess.
Asked by a US newspaper if she thought the ultraconservative Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, would be likely to watch the film’s orgy scene, Linton demurred that it was ‘probably not their cup of tea’.
At least, her husband claims to like it, writing in an email: ‘I watched Louise create this film from first draft to final edit. I’m proud of her drive, tenacity, and spirit.
‘The movie is highly entertaining and very good fun.’
He should know how to spot a winner, surely. Before working for Trump, Mnuchin, who has three children from his two previous marriages, was a hedge fund manager and a Hollywood bigwig, producing movies including Suicide
Squad, Wonder Woman, The Legend of Tarzan and The LEGO Movie.
Like all production companies his firm, Dune Entertainment, has had its share of flops and box office hits.
Mnuchin met his third wife at a wedding reception in 2013 and the couple were engaged in November 2015. Friends were intrigued by this pairing of a driven young actress – who set up Stormchaser Films in 2012 – and the rather stiff and aloof banker, whose personal fortune is estimated at £320million.
In a recent interview, Linton explained why the marriage works: ‘I’m adventurous, I like change, I like to try different foods.
‘He’s very habitual, doesn’t like change and doesn’t like to try loads of different foods, but I always force him to. And he’s funnier than people would ever guess.’
To break the ice at parties, it is said, Mnuchin occasionally impersonates Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther films.
For all their larking around, the pair’s movie-making plans have also landed them in trouble. When her husband stepped down from his role at Dune to become Treasury Secretary, Linton was announced as the new CEO of Dune Entertainment.
Such was the firestorm around her appointment, however – with one senator asking if installing his wife in the job meant that Mnuchin had fully divested from the firm – that she was forced to resign just weeks later.
BUT the one place where she had her feet firmly under the table was with the Trump clan, speaking glowingly about her friendship with Melania Trump and becoming close to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.
‘Ivanka is the most amazing mother,’ she says. ‘I go over there and bring one of my dogs for the kids to play with. We’re two young women making our way in the world.
‘We sit there in sweatpants and have a glass of wine.’
With this portrait of ‘down-hominess’, one almost forgets the reality of her gilded life. When Mnuchin was appointed to run the Treasury, they upped sticks from their sumptuous pad in Los Angeles’ exclusive Bel Air neighbourhood to a £10million home in Washington DC’s equally rarefied Massachusetts Heights. It has nine bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, wine cellar, sauna and fitness room.
She embraced with alacrity the whirl of red carpet events, official appearances at the White House – and even a state banquet at Buckingham Palace – on her husband’s arm.
Privilege sits lightly on Louise Linton’s shoulders. Born into a wealthy Scottish family, her home was Melville Castle, near Edinburgh, and she was educated at St George’s School for Girls and Fettes College i n the city.
HEr childhood, she told a US magazine, was ‘idyllic... spent mostly outdoors with all the animals’. ‘My siblings and I zoomed around on little motorbikes, kayaked, fished, spent time racing through the woods shooting each other with BB guns. It was a very normal life,’ she said, without obvious irony.
‘The castle is magical and filled with so much history.’
Tragically, her mother, rachel Hay, died of cancer when Linton was 14, and not long afterwards she took a gap year to Zambia.
It was to provide her first brush with controversy, after she released a memoir in 2016 of her time in the country. In it Linton claimed she was caught up in a civil war and spent a night ‘hiding in the bush’ as Hutu rebels attacked the village.
‘I tried not to think what the rebels would do to the “skinny white Muzungu with long angel hair” if they found me,’ she wrote.
Her memoir was roundly panned, not least by the Zambian High Commission in London, for a number of inaccuracies and its promotion of the narrative of a ‘white saviour’.
It was withdrawn from sale shortly afterwards.
Linton’s film career, meanwhile, has been equally patchy. Since moving to the US after her gap year to study broadcast journalism at Pepperdine University, she made her way to Hollywood. But her dream of movie stardom has so far eluded her.
With her first venture, in the 2007 film Lions for Lambs, her scenes hit the cutting room floor and, despite small roles in horror films Cabin Fever and Intruder, she has yet to star in a blockbuster.
She may feel her time has come. Since his boss was forced to leave the White House, Mnuchin and his wife have relocated to Bel Air.
With politics in the shade and the glitz of Tinseltown beckoning, it seems inevitable Mnuchin will be lured back to film deals for now.
As for Linton, so often derided America’s comedy villainess, she has the chance to play the part on screen. Few get a second shot at stardom. Let’s hope she doesn’t blow it.