INDIE UP FRONT
There's something glam about Gretchen
by Gregg Goldstein
It's a hot July evening on Staten Island, the New York City borough
that's home to the world's largest garbage dump, and the very last
place you'd expect to see an actress who's been hailed as the Next Big
Thing. So when Gretchen Mol is nowhere to be found on the location
site of Cherry Pink, an indie directed by Seinfeld's Jason Alexander,
you suspect she's reconsidered her latest career move and taken the
ferry back to Manhattan.
"She's off getting me food," says a crew member slouching on the curb.
"You think I'm kidding."
Kidding he's not. Still, when Mol - sporting tight green Capri pants
and a red Monroe-esque hairdo - finally saunters onto the set, it's
hard to believe she's anyone's delivery girl. Every inch the Hollywood
glamour queen, she's a perfect fit for her role as the lust object of
a Fifties teenager in this $3 million comedy-drama. But in real life,
the 25-year-old Connecticut native has none of the haughty attitude
her new hot status could easily inspire. "We didn't have air
conditioning on the set during the worst of the heat wave," she says
in an appealingly girlish voice. "A lot of things were off, but that
just brought everybody closer together."
Thanks to a big media push - she's on the cover of Vanity Fair's
September issue - and a non-stop work schedule, everybody's beginning
to feel a lot closer to this former waitress and coat-checker. In the
two years since her film debut as Girl 12 in Spike Lee's Girl 6, she's
appeared in The Last Time I Committed Suicide, The Funeral, the
student films Bleach and Too Tired To Die, and the unreleased Welcome
to Graceland - all of them indie to the core. Even her studio projects
have a quirky, cutting-edge quality - from Charlie Peters' Music From
Another Room (which opened in limited release this summer) to Tim
Robbins' upcoming take on the young Orson Welles, The Cradle Will Rock
(in which Mol does a cameo as Marion Davies, the vivacious blonde
actress who, off-screen, played mistress to William Randolph Hearst).
With her new roles, she's about to become the source of intense envy
among millions of teenagers. She plays the girlfriend of Matt Damon in
John Dahl's Rounders and of Leonardo DiCaprio in Woody Allen's
Celebrity. Working with these two matinee idols, however, made for two
very different experiences. "Matt and I didn't get really close," says
Gretchen. "There was an overwhelming thing going on; he was getting
Golden Globe nominations and all of that. What I learned from watching
him is that fame can be hard, because when it rains, it pours. When
you don't have it, you want that extra taste of popularity. Then, when
you finally get it, you can't enjoy it. I just wanted to say to Matt,
'Take a vacation. Go out with people you really trust, people who'll
love you forever.'"
DiCaprio, on the other hand, was a lot more fun to work with, perhaps
because he hadn't yet been hit by the full tidal wave of fame. "When I
was working with Leonardo, Titanic hadn't opened," Gretchen recalls.
"There were young girls waiting around to see him, but it wasn't that
thing yet. He was very entertaining on the set. There's all this
energy, and he's so funny that he has you giggling to the point where
you almost wet your pants. He did a great Michael Jackson
impersonation."
In Celebrity, Gretchen impersonates a "loser hanger-on" who engages in
a screaming match with her actor boyfriend (DiCaprio) at the same time
Kenneth Branagh, playing an Allen-like writer, tries to pitch him a
script. Awaiting instructions from Allen, Gretchen found that she
could barely understand a word he was saying, even though he was
standing no more than six feet away from her. "I could only hear the
first couple of lines, and then nothing. So I'd nod, 'Yeah, yeah &'
Now that I think about it, he was probably just saying anything that
came into his mind. Later, when I saw [Barbara Kopple's] documentary
about him, Wild Man Blues - where he said all that ridiculous stuff to
the foreigners who didn't understand English - I began to think that
he was totally f---ing with me."
That may have been the case, but Gretchen is nonetheless thrilled to
have been summoned to play the Thirties dancehall sweetheart of jazz
pianist Sean Penn in Allen's next film. After that, she'll reteam with
Abel Ferrara, who directed her in The Funeral, for the upcoming New
Rose Hotel. "I'll always do anything Abel wants me to do. Well, not
anything, because I know what anything could mean in an Abel Ferrara
movie," she says with a laugh, perhaps remembering the image of a
crazed Harvey Keitel forcing a woman to watch him masturbate in Bad
Lieutenant.
Whether it's the grit of Abel Ferrara or the glamour of Woody Allen,
Gretchen is committed to the indie ideal. "Independent film is like a
big family," she says. "You miss [Hollywood] opportunities by not
living in L.A., but New York is where I want to be. You don't feel
you're surrounded by superficiality here. In New York, everybody's
just trying to make a living, and trying to make the best movie
possible. And that keeps it real."
Gregg Goldstein is Senior Editor at Indie.
Glamourous Gretchen Connection: All About Mol! - Articles: INDIE January 1999 Unleashed June 1 1999
