Lipstick and Hollywood

She's been called 'the coolest girl in the world', but in this exclusive interview, Chloe Sevigny admits her latest film has left audiences decidedly hot under the collar

by Simon Mills

IT IS a scene straight out of Carrie Bradshaw's journal. The row of adjoining suites at Claridges in Mayfair, which a couple of weeks ago played host to Kate Moss's infamously raucous post-party party, has been transformed into a makeshift MAC cosmetics HQ for the day. Out in the hall, Linda Evangelista is taking a call on her cellphone, standing rigid and immaculate as a stylist teases her hair and tweaks her ceramic make-up. MAC representatives, all dressed in regulation black, buzz around, fielding phoned-in RSVPs, chasing celebrity guests and making table plans for their impending gala party.

I am here to talk lipstick with Chloe Sevigny, the actress, erstwhile It girl and New York style icon, who, along with Evangelista, Boy George, Missy Elliot and Christina Aguilera, is the face of MAC's new Viva Glam V lipstick and "lipglass".

Sevigny is not an obvious glamour girl. She has the kind of looks that cutting-edge fashion magazines find beguiling and the rest of us think challenging and unstarry; a lantern jaw on a longish face, perfect, almond-shaped blue eyes, and a chignon of shoulder-length, dishwater-blonde hair.

Her petulant paper-cut of a mouth, finished off with thin, Pat Butcher lips, certainly isn't the kind of luscious orifice that more conventional lipstick brands go for. She describes herself as "plain Jane, all American", and in pictures and on film she can appear, in turn, Park Avenue posh and trailer-park trashy. But we are dealing with the edgy end of the cosmetics market here, and Sevigny is engaging, whip-smart and fairly bursting with all-important attitude.

In a forthcoming film, Brown Bunny, her lips are this time put to work in the most seditiously graphic, sexually explicit manner imaginable. Her scene with co-star Vincent Gallo sent shock waves through audiences when it was previewed last year at Cannes. But more about that later.

Today, the former darling of thrift-store chic is dressed in black-suede court shoes, a black pencil skirt (vintage Azzedine Aliaia, her current obsession) and a simple white blouse. She talks at a confident, matter-of-fact lick in a deadpan timbre that creaks like a loose floorboard on every vowel sound. "My dear," says the 29-year-old when I ask her where all her wacky secondhand duds have gone. "I haven't shopped at the Salvation Army since high school." It's the kind of voice that would have sat well around a table at the Algonquin.

She is certainly a powerful emissary for the MAC Aids fund, which, in 10 years, has raised more than $32 million. Previous Viva Glam faces have included Elton John, Mary J Blige and Shirley Manson. It is fitting that Sevigny has been cast alongside such a disparate bunch of pop-culture characters because ever since childhood she has been highly individualistic.

Born in 1974, she grew up in the white picket-fenced, suburban town of Darian, Connecticut - "Aryan Darian", as she calls it, because residents were apparently discouraged from selling their houses to Jews. Clothes were always an important part of her life. "My mother had a big dressing-up box and I went through many different phases," she says. "Between the ages of five and seven, it was all about glamour - feather boas and all that stuff. Then I had a serious Little House on the Prairie phase. I slept in a white-cotton nightcap and wore little brown lace-up boots and cowboy-print dresses."

Her father, a liberal-minded accountant who later became a painter, would take her with him when commuting to work in New York. She soon had a taste for fast-moving urban life: becoming a skateboard kid, getting walk-on parts in rock videos, landing a job in a trendy magazine's fashion department and sampling the burgeoning New York rave scene. "I did all the looks: hippy, new wave with stripy tights, and the acid-house look, of course. I was very involved in rave culture," she says with a knowing grin.

Soon the press started to notice her; an understatement, actually. Her first major profile, in 1994, was a six-page job in The New Yorker, written by Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney, who dubbed her "the It girl, the coolest girl in the world".

But, being so cool, Sevigny wasn't particularly flattered by the attention. "I was worried because my father always had a subscription to the New Yorker, so I was a bit concerned when I heard it was coming out," she says. "But it could have been a lot worse, I suppose. The It girl label wasn't really a great compliment because, to me, an It girl was always a society girl who went to parties, did drugs and never really amounted to much. As a club-goer, I was always witnessing the scene from the edge, I was never high up in the club hierarchy.

I was more intent on trying to do something with my career, and I found the whole It girl thing a bit of an insult."

Sevigny began shaking off the dizzy tag with her debut film, eight years ago. She was the Aids-infected waif in Larry Clark's hyper-real film classic Kids, a part she landed by hanging out with its scriptwriter, Harmony Korine, in Washington Square. Korine, a friend of magician David Blaine, was a gonzo maverick who once embarked on an insane film project where he got himself into street fights, just to feel what it was like to be beaten up. Sevigny dated him for two years. "Harmony had a great influence on me," says Chloe. "I think he is an amazing filmmaker. I met him when I was a teenager and he was sort of like my personal film school. He wanted to change the face of cinema, and that suited me because I was an idealist and I wanted to change the world, too. Now I've grown up a bit and realised you can make more of an impact by reaching a wider audience."

The gritty, K-Mart vérité of Kids shocked conservative America and made an indie movie star of Sevigny. At the peak of Cool Britannia madness, she hung out in London and dated Jarvis Cocker. Since then, she has appeared in a plethora of zeitgeisty, controversial movies, including The Last Days of Disco, Party Monster and American Psycho. Her role in the gender-swap drama, Boys Don't Cry, earned her an Oscar nomination.

"It's not as if I court controversy," she says, slyly. "It just seems to follow me around. The projects I get interested in are the ones that challenge people. I know it seems like every film I get in involved with becomes controversial but, really, it's just that the controversial ones get more attention in the press."

Two of her latest films, Brown Bunny and Dogville, will do little to change her reputation. Dogville, a long, intense, experimental film, set in a fictional 1930s American town, starring her, Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany, was shot entirely on a darkened soundstage in Sweden. Streets, buildings and homes were represented by chalk outlines and the occasional theatrical prop. Made by the barmy Danish director Lars von Trier (Breaking The Waves, Dancer in The Dark, Dogma), the film's anti-American message did not win him any Oscar nominations. Sevigny, of course, thoroughly enjoyed working with him.

"We got on really well," she says. "He hardly directs you at all. It was a great experience." But von Trier likes to play mind games with his actors, putting them in uncomfortable situations, just so he can stand back and watch the sparks fly. "He played some trickery with Nicole, I think," says Sevigny. "He was spying on her or something ..." The story goes that, at their first meeting, von Trier told Kidman that a stack of porn mags in the back of his van belonged to Bettany and then left the beleaguered co-star to protest his innocence while secretly watching their shared embarrassment from a fire escape outside.

The criticism surrounding Dogville, however, is nothing to the savaging that Brown Bunny, directed by Vincent Gallo, received at Cannes last year. In the film, a pensive motorcycle road movie, Sevigny performs fellatio on Gallo in full view of the camera, for a long, drawn-out, buttock-clenching 10 minutes.

The scene sent critics crazy at a screening on the Croisette. It was clear that nothing had been faked. The fact that Gallo and Sevigny were rumoured to be intimate at the time did not deflect the critics, some of whom laughed, while others booed.

"I don't think I have to defend myself because the work speaks for itself," says Sevigny, bullishly. "There are a lot of misconceptions about the film. Most of the people who have been writing about it haven't even seen it. When people do see it, they will realise that the sex in the movie is not in any way gratuitous, that it is a truly heartbreaking movie. I am proud of it."

And with the mouth that caused mayhem at Cannes, she bids your reporter farewell and gets ready to launch a new lipstick.

Visit www.macaidsfund.org. Dogville is out now; Brown Bunny is due for release this year.