As a kid growing up in outer Los Angeles, Juliette Lake Lewis had a happy life. She spent hours riding her pony, playing with her many siblings and half-siblings, and was once spirited from school by her dad on the premise of seeing the dentist — only to end up at the cinema watching Star Wars. Her father, Geoffrey Lewis, was an actor, and her mother, Glenis Batley, was a graphic designer, and although the couple divorced when Lewis was 2, she lived with them both, on and off. Her parents helped cultivate “that sense of belief in one’s artistic abilities,” and before she had even hit her teens, she had narrowed down her career choices. When she grew up, she decided, she would either be a performance artist, a musician or an actor.
Now in her mid-30s, the all-singing, all-acting Lewis is two ambitions down — with one still to go. Sprawled before me in a London hotel, she has recently flown in from New York, and her body clock is out of whack; she has been up since 3am, and describes herself as “delirious.” Tired or not, she looks as she always has — both ordinary and extraordinary. She is only wearing light makeup, and her face is softer than on screen, but her eyes and lips pop with cartoon intensity.
She’s here to host the Vodafone Live Music Awards, and is vague about the prospect.
Her Valley-girl drawl makes every statement sound chewed-over and spat-out, and when I ask whether she was attracted by the chance to celebrate live acts, she looks at the PR women in the room, and says wide-eyed: “Is the event live?” A second later she understands the question, and talks excitedly about the Ting Tings and Primal Scream, who are both performing.
Over the past six years, Lewis has been establishing her band Juliette and the Licks; she says that music is “100 percent” her biggest love. The band has released two albums and an EP, and toured extensively, but the jury is still out on their work. There’s no doubting Lewis’ commitment. When she started, she wanted “to do everything that any young band would be doing”; her first UK gig was in a 100-capacity club. She kept coming back, “until I sold out the Astoria, and there’s something really gratifying about that, to work for it. Because the music had to stand on its own merit. I’m only good for about 100 tickets off the curiosity factor, and if you suck no one’s going to come back.” She is currently at work on the band’s third album, on which she plays keyboards “like a caveman.”
Lewis is certainly more respected for her music than actor-dilettantes such as Russell Crowe, but suspicions persist. Her songs are an angry mix of guitars and expletives (typical titles: Death of a Whore, Bullshit King), and the effect can seem like theatrical posturing. In many ways, this is unfair; if Lewis hadn’t started out as an actor, her musical career would probably be taken on face value, and judged pretty good. But she’s so strong on screen that people sometimes seem to feel cheated by her alternative career.
Lewis initially took up acting in her teens, and quickly realized that she was a natural. While “some people can’t connect with their own emotions,” she says, “that’s the thing that I started with from out of the womb. When I feel something, I feel it to the ninth power.” In her early TV roles, this skill wasn’t exactly appreciated. She was cast as a teenage daughter in the world’s most bizarre-sounding sitcom — the star was the ageing film-noir actor, Robert Mitchum — and the studio quickly “hired an acting teacher to essentially teach me how to act bad … Whether I was slouching, or putting my hair behind my ear, they’d have an acting teacher saying, ‘Don’t do that. Stand up straight. More energy. Smile.’”
She was seriously disillusioned until Martin Scorsese flew to the rescue, casting her opposite Robert De Niro in Cape Fear; aged 18, she received an Oscar nomination for the role. Over the next few years, she bounced from one prestigious part to another, with directors including Woody Allen, Lasse Hallstrom, Kathryn Bigelow and Oliver Stone.
In 1996, she hit a wall. Lewis says that, while she was a happy kid, “as a teenager I was severely, cripplingly dramatic and in search of self.” She felt that her emotions were too big for her, and had developed a serious drug problem by her early 20s. “I had too much energy, so I was actually trying to sedate it.” She ended up following the drug rehabilitation program, Narconon, run by the Church of Scientology.
Lewis has now been clean for 13 years, and her stint in rehab seems to have soldered her relationship with Scientology. She first encountered it as a child, through her parents, and I have been asked not to prepare questions on the subject, on the basis that it is “tired”; asking Lewis about another topic entirely, though, she jumps in.
“Oh, I thought you were going to go into Scientology and Tom Cruise. Which I don’t mind. I want you to know that he is not the representation of all things Scientology — I feel so bad for him, because that’s the responsibility that’s put on him.” Lewis says that she has never read a true word in the media about Scientology and that “it’s just really practical, applied religious philosophy. And you’ll get lost in the media with these fantastic, fantastical — is that a word? — stories of, like, aliens and, you know, gay cover-ups … The rumors, they’re astonishing. And they would be funny, if they weren’t so hurtful.”
One area where she agrees with Cruise is in her dislike of psychiatric drugs. I ask Lewis about her comment that she would happily see such drugs banned, and she says that she wants people “to look around our world, at whose pockets are getting fat off people being diagnosed with all these disorders, and why are there tonnes of them now? … I’m all for natural solutions. I’m for Eastern philosophies. Yoga is a good one.”
What about someone with schizophrenia, I venture, surely they need psychiatric drugs? She jumps in before I can finish. “Even for that … what I’m saying is so, like, for a schizophrenic, or somebody who’s deeply disturbed, I still am for alternate solutions. That’s where you’re getting into things like safe environments. There’s, like, animal therapy — there’s this whole theory of taking care of animals. Have you ever heard of it? I know this is going to sound so silly on this tape recorder. I don’t know all about it, but I’ve seen it with a mentally handicapped girl — because I had to play a mentally handicapped girl — and, you know, somebody’s having a tantrum and they’re out of their mind, and you’re basically distracting them from their pain.” She pauses. “I’m not going to fucking say it, because it’ll be like, ‘Yeah — [get better] through pets!’” I am relieved that she realizes how weak this sounds.
When it comes to politics, Lewis describes herself as “the biggest cynic of all time.” I ask what she thinks about McCain’s vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin, and she puts on a low voice, aping the Republican thought process: “‘We’ve got to do something. Let’s get a girl!’ On the one hand,” she continues, “you think, ‘Yay, the times they are a-changing, she’s female.’ But, oh no, she’s not pro-choice and she loves guns. What? Here’s what I’m saying. I am independent, to the truest, true, last little cell. I don’t trust politics.”
Lewis says that she has “a natural, innate rebellion, a defiance that my parents allowed in me, and I only have it more so in my 30s.” She calls herself a “man-loving feminist” and says that she wishes more women would concentrate on what they have to offer aside from their looks. “I want girls to start thinking about what they have to say, what do they have to contribute to their families, to other people, to society? … It’s fine if you want to be desirable to your man, that’s sweet. But when people are carving their skin and putting plastic, or whatever, synthetic balls in their chest, to be more desirable, against this fucking facade of ‘Oh no, it’s for me. It makes me feel good.’ Well, really?”
She says that her favorite female artists are Beth Ditto, Joan As Policewoman, PJ Harvey, and she has just recently finished acting in Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It!, in which she plays a roller-derby champion. (Roller derby is a US punk spectator sport, which involves women on rollerskates racing around a track). Lewis spent 12 hours a day on skates during the shoot, and plays a legendary competitor called Iron Maven, who bullies the main character, played by Ellen Page. She seems to have loved the whole experience, and says that Barrymore “really impressed me. She’s so visual and intelligent.”
A few years back, Lewis did an interview with the writer Chuck Palahniuk, in which she shared a range of questions that she’d devised to sound out a man she liked. I ask if I can put some to her, and she agrees. So, does she like asparagus? “Yes.” Would she say she’s won more fights than she’s lost? “I haven’t gotten into that many fights, so I would say it’s even.” Did you date an older man, and what did he teach you? “I was going to answer something, but I’m not going to have that answer in print,” she says. I laugh and she adds, “No! It wasn’t sexual. Wait, an older man,” she goes quiet. “Cause when I was a teenager I dated someone in their 20s, but looking back I don’t consider that older. He taught me honesty. Being honest in a relationship. And being really loving.” She seems slightly sad. She is almost certainly referring to Brad Pitt, whom she dated in her late teens.
Finally, I wonder whether she plans to fulfill that third ambition, and take up performance art. She laughs. “Well, when I say performance art, that’s such a scary phrase. What does that mean anyway? I saw some really bad performance art at a museum once where it was like someone brushing their teeth for 30 minutes … What I mean is a sense of dance, and physical interpretation. Like physicalizing my sound and my drama. I do this on stage anyway,” she pauses. “I cavort.” That she does. Perhaps Juliette Lewis has fulfilled all those childhood ambitions already.
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