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“I love chocolate,” confessed Mira Sorvino as she met us at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills munching on a perfect little confection.“I could give up maybe other kinds of sugar things, but never chocolate.” Sorvino’s career has been nothing short of sweet, albeit spiced with a variety of roles. Just 31, she’s already won an Oscar (Mighty Aphrodite), and garnered a Golden Globe nomination for the cable feature Norma Jean and Marilyn. With Oscar season here, we asked Sorvino about her take on the awards. “It’s nice and relaxed when you’re not involved in the competition yourself,” she allows. “I have to admit I haven’t watched a lot of movies recently. It’s part of a little break I was taking from thinking about my career that much.” Sorvino admits “When I’m not working, I really don’t obsess with what’s going on. I really have found the need to have down time...not to be on call all the time. Going to the movies sometimes keeps me in that head and I’d rather stay at home and watch a great old film that I haven’t seen than try to keep up with the weekly releases.” The last couple of years have been a whirlwind of nearly non-stop work for the New York native. Her most recent projects co-starred her with Val Kilmer in At First Sight and in the independent feature Lulu On The Bridge with Harvey Keitel. She will be featured in this summer’s much anticipated Spike Lee picture, Summer of Sam. Sorvino describes her character in Summer of Sam as an “Italian- American girl living in the Bronx in 1977 who’s married to a repeat philanderer (John Leguizamo) who loves disco.” She and Leguizamo play Hustle champs in the film, and they took two months of dance lessons to prep the part. The movie, which looks at the lives of several people affected by the macabre “Son of Sam” murders during a pivotal summer in New York, marks Sorvino’s most serious role in the past two years. Early buzz on the film compares it to Lee’s breakthrough Do the Right Thing. Do her recent choices indicate a turning point in her relatively short career? “I’m more focused on building a body of work that I’m really going to be able to live with and that suits my long-term goals as an actress. “I didn’t expect the movie stardom, at all. I just expected to be a movie actress. I grew up watching my father’s (Paul Sorvino) career which was a serious acting career. Not much glitz, but a lot of substance; I thought that was how my career would be.” Despite the Oscar and a diverse body of work (Mimic, The Replacement Killers, Romy and Michelles High School Reunion), Sorvino is realistic about Hollywood stardom. “There are a lot of terrific young leading ladies and we all want the same great roles and they’re not really there. That’s been a little bit frustrating.” “But I think it’s getting better and I’m excited about what’s going on right now,” she says with a high-calorie smile. |