Mena Suvari is tired of pretending
Actor opens up about past that didn’t jibe with her Hollywood image in memoir
There are so many things Mena Suvari never wanted you to know. And there were ghosts of her past all over this town, willing to keep her secrets. Like the woman she ran into once at Whole Foods — a woman with whom she’d had a threesome.
“I was mortified, because I was famous then, and she knew me when I wasn’t,” recalls Suvari, one of the most popular young actors around the turn of the millennium. “… Our paths crossing again was uncomfortable and weird, and I found myself in a situation where I had to apologize.”
It wasn’t that she felt bad about sleeping with women, or doing it freely. It was that she’d spent so much of her life sacrificing her own desires to please men. In one toxic relationship, a boyfriend had pushed her to solicit women — including this one at the grocery store
— to participate in a porninspired menage a trois.
That sort of behavior didn’t jibe with the actor’s public image. In the two 1999 movies that made her famous — the teen comedy “American Pie” and the suburban drama “American Beauty” — the central narrative revolved around her characters’ virginity.
But it’s been two decades, and Suvari, now 42, says she is tired of pretending. So she’s written a memoir, “The Great Peace,” that will not only shatter her saccharine reputation but also, she hopes, free her from shame.
The book is a relic of Hollywood’s pre-#MeToo era, documenting the ways in which Suvari says she “looked like a Faberge egg on the outside but was hollow inside.”
She tells a story that is harrowing from the outset: At age 12, she writes, she was raped by her brother’s friend. After she moved to LA as a teenager, a photographer took — and kept, she alleges — naked underage snapshots of her. She writes that when she was 16, one of her representatives — 20 years her senior — would have sex with her and then remind her to learn her lines. She contracted herpes, she says.
She got married and divorced twice — first, when she was 21, to Robert Brinkmann, a 37-year old cinematographer she met during a movie shoot. Ten years later, she married Simone Sestito, an Italian concert promoter who, she claims, bled her financially and got physical with her during arguments. (In a statement, Sestito denied Suvari’s allegations.)
Suvari says she numbed her problems with marijuana and, at one point, meth. She grew critical of her body, getting breast implants only to have them surgically removed years later because they embarrassed her.
It was in 2018, when she was redecorating her home with her third husband, Mike Hope, that Suvari made a discovery that would lead to “The Great Peace.” While sifting
through an old storage unit, she stumbled across some artifacts from her adolescence, including a 50-page poetry binder, old photographs and a diary containing a suicide note she didn’t remember writing.
She knew she needed to do something with the material but wasn’t sure what. She felt as if every female actor had a perfume and a book and thought she should do something
“more creative.” But after Suvari toyed with various ideas — telling her story fictionally in the third person, publishing a poetry collection — she was persuaded by a friend to go the memoir route.
“Even that first draft was better than ones I get from people who write for a living,” says Ben Schafer, her editor at Hachette.
He adds, “I think she goes into places in this book that some people might not even talk about with their closest friends, or even with themselves.”
In Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty” Suvari played Angela, an alluring high school cheerleader whose best friend’s father, Lester (Kevin Spacey), develops a strong attraction to her. Lester’s fantasy of the girl — featuring Suvari splayed out nude in a bed of red rose petals — became one of the most enduring images from the movie.
Suvari recalls what she describes as an “odd” encounter with Spacey on the set of the Oscar-winning
picture. Before the two actors were set to film an intimate scene, “Kevin took me into a small room with a bed and we laid next to each other, me facing toward him while he held me lightly,” she writes.
“Lying there with Kevin was strange and eerie but also calm and peaceful, and as for his gentle caresses, I was so used to being open and eager for affection that it felt good to just be touched. Good and warm. I wasn’t sure if Kevin was interested in me or not. … I didn’t know how far he was going to take it or how I was going to react if he did go there. But he didn’t.”
Asked if she now views the encounter differently in light of the numerous men who have since come forward claiming Spacey sexually assaulted them, Suvari grows defensive.
“No. What do you mean?” she asks. “I talked about my time on the set of ‘American Beauty,’ so that was just part of my experience. It’s something that I feel so grateful to be a part of, and truly it was feeling lucky to have a job. I felt so connected, like I understood this character of Angela. To have the ability to step outside and be in that space really saved me.”
Suvari is still a working actor, appearing in everything from “American Horror Story” to Lifetime movies to an upcoming biopic where she’ll play Ronald Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman. Opening up about her past has allowed her to feel “more present” in her acting, she says, no longer “severely uncomfortable” at auditions or meetings.
“I have spent so much of my life feeling in the boat alone,” she says. “There were many moments where I felt like I had nowhere to go, like no one would understand. I was too embarrassed, so I stayed in bad situations. I’m sharing my story to help people like that know they don’t have to stay. If I can shave off a summer of suffering for someone, I want to.”