True to character
Actor-director grateful ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ still holds meaning for many 25 years after film’s release
J“I was a 17-year-old girl, auditioning for romantic comedies and commercials and TV shows and always being told, ‘You’re too serious.’ It was the first time that I had read a character in a teenage romantic comedy that spoke to me.”
— Julia Stiles on “10 Things I Hate About You”
ulia Stiles starts with a disclaimer: “I’m kind of like a bundle of emotions because I have a 5-month-old baby, and I went into directing my first movie.” Maybe you didn’t know Stiles had gotten into directing. Her feature, “Wish You Were Here,” doesn’t yet have a release date and has only been lightly covered. You definitely didn’t know about the baby because Stiles declined to do the standard-issue celebrity-birth promotion (post an announcement on Instagram to get aggregated by People magazine). She has been in the business for nearly three decades. It’s not that she doesn’t know the norms. But participating in the norms just because they’re the norms has never been her thing.
“I didn’t really talk about it,” she said of her latest pregnancy, though she was excited to talk about it now, about how being a parent (her older sons are 6 and 2) nourishes her work. “I think that actually being a mom is really great training for being a director,” she said. “You have to think 10 steps ahead but also be in the present moment. You have to be good at time management. You have to be sensitive to people’s needs and guide them, but also hold a boundary.”
On the second day of shooting, she said, her script supervisor told her to stop apologizing. “I wasn’t saying ‘sorry,’ ” Stiles said. “But she meant, ‘Just stop qualifying your opinions and your ideas. You don’t have to explain them. You’re the director.’ And she was totally right. I took it to heart, and I put on my big girl pants
and leaned into being a director as opposed to a people-pleasing actress.”
It’s strange to hear Stiles, 43, describe herself as struggling with this sort of thing — being unapologetic about her vision, holding the line against external pressures — given the role that launched her career. As the acid-tongued, defiant Kat Stratford in “10 Things I Hate About You,” Stiles provided, for a generation born just too late to be riot grrrls, a vision for how to be a cool teenage girl whose every move did not revolve around appeasing the appetites or fulfilling the fantasies of teenage boys.
Kat reads Sylvia Plath and rails against “the pathetic emptiness of meaningless, consumerdriven lives.” Popularity contests bore and disgust her; she only smiles when she feels like it. Kat is many things girls of the era (1999) were explicitly told they shouldn’t be (abrasive, outspoken) or couldn’t be (funny, intellectual) yet, in staying true to herself, she reaps the finest rewards (Sarah Lawrence College, Heath Ledger).
Unlike many cultural artifacts from that turnof-the-aughts time, “10 Things,” which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, feels fresh and vibrant. It’s a testament not just to the whip-smart script by Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith (the pair who would go on to write “Legally Blonde” and “She’s the Man,” among others) but also to the magnetism of the film’s leads — and what Stiles’ Kat came to mean for those who emulated her.
“Julia did such a magnificent job of embodying that, I think in large part just because she lived it genuinely,” said Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of her co-stars in “10 Things.” “She was not someone I would at all call a shrew” — as in the Shakespeare play “The Taming of the Shrew,” upon which “10 Things” was loosely based — “but someone I would call razorsharp.”
Larisa Oleynik, who played Kat’s kid sister, Bianca, recalls rewatching “10 Things” recently. “The thing I love so much — and I’m going to get emotional — is, she’s so earnest,” Oleynik said. “She’s so genuine. And to me, that is the most beautiful thing about Julia’s portrayal of that character. It is coming from a deeply heartfelt, vulnerable, sensitive, insanely intelligent place,” she said, while adding: “I don’t think anyone else would have been able to be that real.”
Stiles started acting as a 12-year-old in New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, but she had a hard time finding her place in film.
“I was a 17-year-old girl, auditioning for romantic comedies and commercials and TV shows and always being told, ‘You’re too serious,’ ” she said. “You know, ‘Smile. You’re too angsty.’ ” That changed when she read the “10 Things” script. “It was the first time that I had read a character in a teenage romantic comedy that spoke to me,” she said.
In her late teens and into her 20s, Stiles was on the receiving end of what could feel like an overwhelming amount of attention, both from the highbrow sect — she was crowned one-to-watch by Vanity Fair — and the teenage masses, winning back-toback MTV Movie Awards, including Best Kiss in 2001 alongside her “Save the Last Dance” co-star Sean Patrick Thomas.
“How did I handle it? I sometimes imploded,” she said. “I also rebelled against it, probably, by running in the other direction a little bit.” Rather than go all-in on acting to capitalize on whatever momentum she had from “10 Things,” Stiles attended Columbia University. “I went to college so that I could focus on other things. I would take time off from work … to not give it as much power.”
Stiles was in her dorm room freshman year when she was sent pages from “The Bourne Identity” script. All she could think was: Oh my God, I can’t do this because I’m going to miss my final exams. She took the part and lost all her credits from that semester. “But I was at least able to go and do the movie and still graduate.”
Today’s young stars can seem preternaturally-savvy, as if they were born with an innate understanding of how to pick projects and manage their brand across multiple platforms.
“I don’t know how strategic or conscious I was of, ‘This is what I’m going to do in my career,’ ” Stiles said.
She chose roles mostly on instinct, if they seemed like they’d be fun: more modern twists on Shakespearean classics (“O,” “Hamlet”); the well-it-seemed-progressive-at-the-time teen love story, “Save the Last Dance”; the midcentury feminist-awakening drama “Mona Lisa Smile.” Her part in the “Bourne” franchise, intended as a one-off, was brought back for the three subsequent installments, and her performance in the fifth season of “Dexter,” as a vengeance-seeking rape survivor, earned her an Emmy nomination.
With “Wish You Were Here,” Stiles is fulfilling an ambition she has had for ages. “It took a long time to find the right story to tell,” she said. The film, based on the novel by Renee Carlino, is about a woman who believes she has been unceremoniously dumped after a passionate first date, only to reconnect with the guy who ghosted her when she learns he’s terminally ill.
Kelsey Lynn Stokes, the script supervisor who told Stiles to stop apologizing while filming “Wish You Were Here,” was inspired to join the production because of her love for “10 Things I Hate About You.”
“She said that she was a teenager who was always told she was too much and too opinionated and too loud,” Stiles said. “She really loved my character, and that was very meaningful to me.”
Stiles’ recollection is that, as a young woman and an actor, she cared more about other people’s perceptions than Kat did. The character with whom she became instantly and eternally identified was, in fact, “a bit aspirational,” she said.
“Part of being an actor,” she said, “is you get to play out on screen all the things that you can’t really do in real life.”
In her 20s, Stiles said, she was apprehensive of whatever fame “10 Things” had brought her. From her present vantage point, she’s appreciative and at ease with what her early work still means to other people and grateful for it. “As a performer, to be in something that people are talking about 25 years later is very special and very meaningful.”
The experience of being known this way, for this long, isn’t one she anticipated or even prepared for.
“I feel like I’m still figuring it out, too.”