YOUNG ACTRESS PUTS HER YALE EDUCATION ON HOLD FOR MOVIES
by Bart Mills

BOSTON HERALD--December 29, 1998

Jordana Brewster used her high school years to prepare for Yale, but she plays a far less studious high schooler in "The Faculty." "I'm the cheerleader, the popular, mean girl who gives out disses right and left," she said. Only 18, Brewster already knows how to convey a certain menace. She combines the challenging good looks of a killer cheerleader with the cracker jack mind of an Ivy Leaguer - though she deferred her entrance to college to give acting a full year of her attention. She follows "The Faculty" with a leading role in NBC's February miniseries "The 60's."

"The Faculty" co-stars Elijiah Wood and was directed by Robert Rodriguez and written by Kevin ("Scream") Williamson. She describes it as "a modern 'Breakfast Club,' where each kid has a role in the school - cheerleader, jock, drug dealer, loser - and then the teachers turn on them. The location was Austin, Texas, far from Brewster's New York City home. "It was the first time I was ever away from home alone for an extended time. On my first day I was so out of it that after Robert had shot five takes I piped up, 'Are we shooting yet?' "Later on, I mellowed out. I forgot I was doing a movie and it became fun. I got to spend all day embodying the kind of girl who used to terrorize me." It was nerves, not inexperience, that bothered Brewster in Austin, because she already had spent years facing cameras on the soaps "All My Children" and "As The World Turns." "But unlike movies, the soaps are all about turning out the work. People never see it twice. If you have a bad day, you can forgive yourself. The movies are different." Somewhere in between is a classy miniseries like "The 60's," in which she plays "a girl from an uptight family who gets involved with the antiwar movement. She eventually realizes that the movement treats women as puppets or errand girls." It's curious that Brewster should be playing a '60's rebel, because her grandfather, the late Kingman Brewster, was one of the era's leading establishment figures. He was president of Yale from 1963 to 1977 and later President Nixon's ambassador to Britain. Her father went to Yale, too, and that's also where her 1,300 on the SATs ticketed her, until her acting career intervened. In deferring her entrance and perhaps giving up Yale forever, she's taking a path different from Yale's most famous alumna, Jodie Foster". But she was already established when she went," Brewster said, "I'm not fulfilled yet in my acting career, despite all the work I've done. I didn't exactly get a normal high school experience while I was acting on soaps. I still had normal fr iendships, but I didn't have the kind of life experience I was looking forward to in college." She recalled her dilemma: "I was all set to go. I'd spoken to my assigned roommates and bought the refrigerator for my dorm room. Then I thought about how painful it would be to take four years off from acting."