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Articles Actress Gretchen Mol knows how to cool It Author: By Bob Strauss, Boston Globe Correspondent Date: SUNDAY, September 6, 1998 LOS ANGELES - Gretchen Mol is trying to deal with it. It being "It." "There is that element in this industry; a bandwagon or snowball effect," says the 25-year-old actress, who with her pale porcelain features and platinum ringlet hair resembles a '30s Hollywood glamour queen. "You start off with, maybe, a few great people who believe in you, and they really believe in you. Then that leads to other opportunities, but it has the ability to become less pure as the thing gets bigger and bigger. "But then you just have to go into the room that the bandwagon has opened for you - which you're happy for - and you prove it. You prove that it's not all about nothing." The hype has been partially engineered, partially accidental. When Mol signed on to make Rounders, opening Thursday at the Boston Film Festival and commercially on Friday, and Woody Allen's Celebrity, opening later this fall, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, her respective love interests in the films, had not yet become the hottest young actors in the known universe. When she posed for the cover of this month's issue of Vanity Fair - the one that asks if she's Hollywood's next "It" Girl - that was a much more calculated move. Hey, if you're the leading lady of the next Damon and DiCaprio movies, that's something to tell the world, isn't it? Maybe. Mol still has a few misgivings about accepting the most desirable celebrity placement the magazine industry can offer after only a handful of small parts in modest films (Spike Lee's Girl 6, Abel Ferrara's The Funeral, Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, the Beat Era oddity The Last Time I Committed Suicide). No, it's not because she wore a slip dress so sheer for that Annie Leibovitz cover shot that she might just as well have worn nothing at all. "I really do think it's a beautiful photograph; it is provocative, but I don't want to have to apologize for that," Mol says. "What I had a lot of questions about was whether the amount of work I've done merited a cover. You almost go, 'Why did this come to me?' It's such a difficult decision because it's so tempting on one hand, yet you know that there's going to be a backlash." A formidable crowd Or not, if Mol's work as Damon's law student girlfriend in Rounders impresses well enough. It better; as was the case with The Funeral and Brasco, she's not running with a glamorous but slack crowd in this study of pro poker experts directed by neo-noir specialist John Dahl (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction). Besides Damon, the cast includes such formidable hands as Edward Norton, John Turturro, John Malkovich, and Martin Landau. Even though her preppy Jo lives in a world quite different from the grungy, male-dominated, pseudo-legal poker clubs Damon's Mike and his ex-con buddy Worm (Norton) love to haunt, Mol's job was as tough as any of the guys'. "I was concerned that maybe, in a lot of the scenes, she's really angry with him and there's a lot of hurt," Mol says, referring to Jo's desire to keep Mike to his pledge to give up poker - which he's a genius at - and concentrate on the law books. "You didn't really see when things were good. I had to concentrate on that part of it, come from a place where she really cares about him and doesn't want to see him get hurt. "As soon as Worm gets out of jail, it sets up this whole triangle where Mike's being pulled in two different directions and he has two different worlds to choose from. So, if anything, every time he came home from a night out or whatever it was, I didn't want her to be standing up and berating him for that. It had to be about her concern that he was making the wrong choice." Mol's instincts were just what director Dahl hoped they would be. "After seeing about 60 young ladies [for the part], I think anybody in my position could see that there was something kind of special about Gretchen," he says. "There was something genuine, authentic; she has sort of a vulnerability to her, and a charm. A lot of people can act, but a lot of people don't have that extra thing." "Gretchen Mol is a very gifted and very available actress," adds Landau, an Oscar winner and acting teacher who counts among his students James Dean, Jack Nicholson, and Anjelica Huston. "Nothing but good things. I was really impressed." All very nice and actorly. But what did Mol think when, shortly after Rounders commenced filming in New York City late last year, Good Will Hunting opened and the Matt Damon bullet train to stardom took off? "It was interesting to see it as it was happening to Matt," she explains. "It seemed like it could be very overwhelming. But what I saw, and really admired and respected, was that his reaction was to just really buckle down and focus more on the work, the job at hand. That's important to do, it's what keeps you sane through this whole thing, and that was his natural instinct. It's almost safer there, in the work, because the rest of it is all very fly-by-night." Amusingly, Mol had just finished filming the aptly named Celebrity, in which she plays the girlfriend of a rising superstar - played by DiCaprio - when Titanic opened. Leo-mania already was gathering steam while the Allen film was being shot. But it was perhaps the last job in which DiCaprio would be treated like just another working actor. Cast of equals "It was kind of nice; I don't know what it would be like now," Mol recalls. "We were shooting in Manhattan, and Woody's sets are quintessentially New York sets. Everybody is put on the same level there; there are no wide trailers, no separate makeup artists, all of those little perks that you might get on another film, which is really refreshing because it starts everybody off in the same place. "It takes all the mystique and intimidation factors out of it. So when I was working with [DiCaprio], we were really able to improvise and be spontaneous and have a good time. That lust for life that I think you might associate with him is the same thing that he brings to his work, that carefree attitude he brings over so well." If Mol sounds unusually articulate for a young "It," chalk it up to heredity. Both her parents are educators. Her mother, whom she grew up with in Deep River, Conn., is an artist, but she wasn't the only one at home who encouraged Gretchen's early interest in self-expression. "My brother, Jim, was pursuing film," Mol explains. "He won a Presidential Scholar award for this incredible animated short. He also had a Super-8 camera, and I got a couple of parts in the three-minute movies he made with that. I was usually the girl who got stabbed to death. It was fun, but after a while I got sick of it and I was turning him down, looking for bigger and better roles." Mol laughs, but the roles came. Regional theater in Vermont, national commercials, studies at the William Esper Studio and American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Meanwhile, Jim attended NYU film school and Mol moved into a two-room flat in Hell's Kitchen, where she still resides. She did the coat check thing at a trendy Manhattan restaurant, met her agent there, and eventually got some decent TV work, including the first episode of ABC's Spin City. For a rising young actress, Mol's career, and life, has been unusually New York-centric for both personal and personal aesthetic reasons. She likes staying close to the folks and New England ("I love where I grew up, love the seasons, it's a special place") and has a jazz musician boyfriend, whom she declines to name. But New York is also where the edgy, mostly independent productions Mol gravitates toward are dominant. Upcoming pictures include Graceland with Harvey Keitel, Too Tired to Die with Mira Sorvino, Music from Another Room opposite Jude Law in Woody Allen's film that is being shot now. "I have a feeling that maintaining my residence in Manhattan has put me in contact with certain directors whose projects I find to be more interesting," Mol says. "Of course, in the beginning, you don't really have a career design. You have an idea of how you'd like things to go, but whatever comes to you is what you do. "But I definitely tried to put an energy out there, so that things that came were things I could feel really proud of. I still feel that way about the people that I've worked with." Sounds like she's got it, "It" and all of that or not. "You feel the pressure creeping in," she admits, "that you want to live up to the hype, or whatever it is, that's being put out there. But any time that happens, I push the feeling away because I don't want it to influence how I make my decisions. I'm not concerned with having to have a blockbuster out there."