Lately, Juliette Lewis has been thinking about being invincible. She's not, of course – witness the soft knee brace encircling her right, faux-leather-clad leg. Coming off a challenging shoot for the breakout Showtime psychological thriller Yellowjackets amid Covid isolation in Canada, Lewis made a beeline for a sunny getaway and promptly overdid it physically. She tore her ACL and meniscus, injuries common in athletes but in her case stemming from the years she spent doing exuberant stage dives and high kicks with her rock band, Juliette and the Licks.
Invincibility was one of the theme words she gave to Cubs the Poet, a family member serving as the artist-in-residence at the Ace Hotel here; he writes poems on the spot. "Too much vigour and enthusiasm," she tells him, describing why she was now limping around New Orleans, where she was filming the reboot of Queer as Folk.
This industry has fed me. There's no other place for me as a little imagination freak fairy
“And then not enough stretching. Although that doesn’t sound as cool.” She laughs, and he types up her poem. Lewis is 48 and has been working since she was a teenager, making her mark in films such as Cape Fear and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
“I find myself, at midlife, where I can come into a space and I know my worth,” she says. Her boundaries, though, have needed fine-tuning. “Only recently, I was like, life-work balance? That’s an amazing concept. I didn’t even know there was a name for it. I thought it was just like, work your ass off until you crash and burn, and then take some time off to heal your body and mind.”
But, she adds, she is not complaining about the job. "This industry has fed me. There's no other place for me as a little imagination freak fairy." That Yellowjackets is set partly in the 1990s, the decade in which Lewis ascended in Hollywood, at a moment when the culture seems to be getting frank about how women were (mis)treated then, has given the show an added dimension. The mechanics of celebrity and the limits imposed on young women – "If you had brown hair, you're a moody, sarcastic teen. If you have blonde hair, you're an airhead, pretty girl," as Lewis puts it – nearly drove her out of the business. (Martin Scorsese, who cast her in Cape Fear, saved her.) It's only now, in her 40s, that she has found a part that smartly interrogates what expectations were placed on teenagers then, and how they must recuperate as adults.
Karyn Kusama, an executive producer of Yellowjackets, says she wasn't looking to hold up a 1990s rearview mirror with her cast, which includes Christina Ricci and Melanie Lynskey, but when it happened, it clicked with audiences. "Somehow we felt we owned their image," she says of her stars' early days, "and we didn't, we didn't own anything about that. Maybe that's what drove us crazy as a culture: We could never possess them in the way we wanted."
That may be especially true of Lewis, who resisted categorisation. “A director always wants someone who can go to the extreme, perhaps even in one scene. She has every box checked to do that,” says film-maker Tate Taylor, who cast her in his 2019 horror film, Ma. “She can scare the [expletive] out of you at the beginning of the scene and you think you’re going to be killed, and then at the end, she’s breaking your heart.
“The way she wears vulnerability is unlike anybody I’ve ever seen as an actress,” he adds. “You feel like a voyeur, observing her vulnerability.” He had wanted her for The Help, his 2011 Oscar-nominated period piece, he says, but she was busy touring Europe with her band.
As a performer, Lewis has also had her share of invincible moments: youthful characters who traded in adolescent bravado until things came crashing down, often brutally. She's back mining that territory now, from the other side, in Yellowjackets, in which her character, Natalie, a high school soccer star, survives a plane crash in a remote wilderness with some teammates. The show toggles between the violent aftermath of the crash, following the teenagers in flashbacks to the 1990s, and the present day, with Lewis and co-stars Ricci, Lynskey and Tawny Cypress unpacking the trauma as adults. (Sophie Thatcher plays Natalie as a teenager.)
“Natalie is written as that, I guess, toxic strength,” Lewis says. “But she completely devolves to where she goes into weakness and propitiation around the girls, and it’s strange where she ends up. I didn’t see it coming.” In long, late night chats, the 40-something co-stars talked about the gendered power dynamics of the 1990s.
“We were all sharing horror stories about that time – the sexism, misogyny,” says Lynskey, who is 44, who made her debut with Heavenly Creatures in 1994. “When we all started out, I think we were sold this story about ‘you have until you’re 40,’” she adds. “I didn’t see very many older women who were having magnificent careers.” Streaming has changed that to some degree, but, Lynskey says, “it does take a lot of tenacity to keep hanging in and believe that you don’t have a finite amount of time”.
Lewis earned an Oscar nomination at 19, holding the screen opposite Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, and soon followed it with a genre-busting performance as a wild murderess in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
Oliver Stone will rouse you like an Army sergeant. I found him equally insulting to the men as to the women
“It’s become a Halloween cute-costume thing,” she says. “Every Halloween, people on social media send me Natural Born Killers pictures.”
We are sipping coffee on the hotel’s roof deck, sitting together on a circular bed so she can better stretch out her injured leg. She kicks off her well-worn sneakers and points her toes like the dancer she trained to be in childhood. Lewis’ words spill out in kaleidoscopic fashion, accompanied by bursts of kinetic energy. She wiggles and flexes and twists her limbs like a pretzel as she tells anecdotes about Stone.
“He’ll rouse you like an Army sergeant,” she says. “I found him equally insulting to the men as to the women.” She notes that when she blanched at nudity in a sex scene, telling him it felt gratuitous, he agreed with her suggestion to cover up.
On sets, she had no problem speaking up for her creative needs, though as a teenager, "I wasn't easy," she says. Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange, who played her parents in Cape Fear, offered to take her to an amusement park as "family" bonding. Headstrong, she declined.
"Now, I'm like, you [expletive]. Why did you miss an opportunity to [expletive] hang with Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange? You teenage know-it-all." Her romance at the time with Brad Pitt, whom she met on a movie of the week, coincided with their transition out of anonymity. "You're both working out all your insecurities," she says.
She grew up around Los Angeles; her father was a character actor, often in Westerns. "Sometimes we had money, and sometimes we didn't," she says. In lieu of babysitters, he'd drop her off in the make-up trailer. Her parents split and raised their children – each had more from other relationships – in fairly bohemian fashion; her mother, a graphic and fine artist, was the kind of parent who had her daughter brushing with baking soda to avoid fluoride.
“My parents cultivated this rebel, meaning they cultivated the individual spirit.” (They studied Scientology, and Lewis has, too, but she doesn’t identify that way. “I’m a spiritualist,” she says.)
By the time Lewis was 14, she had an agent and began booking sitcoms. She’d been a faltering student. “Finding this purpose of storytelling and oh, if you live in your imagination, there’s this space for it – it actually kept me out of trouble,” she says. That came later, by her early 20s, when the demands of fame caught up with her, and she felt at odds with the image that was expected of her.
“I was so into trying to do things on my own terms,” she says. “I wore a swap meet headdress I got for $15 in the Valley to the Golden Globes. But in photo shoots, that’s where I had times where I’d be crying in the bathroom because of the pressure.”
She developed a drug addiction. “It was hard. I had an implosion,” she says. At 22, she took two years off and got sober. The pause damaged her career trajectory, she says. But in her 30s, she spun away from acting again, to focus on Juliette and the Licks. She had been a closet songwriter and vocalist.
"When I hit 30, I was like, oh, that thing you were so in love with, you haven't done it. You're 30. What are you doing?" She spent nearly six years touring in grungy fashion. "Juliette came in blazing, on fire, committed, determined to be a rock star," says Linda Perry (4 Non Blondes, Pink's Get the Party Started), who produced Lewis' first EP. "She was not an actress becoming a singer. She was a rock star stepping into her rightful position."
When the band first dissolved a decade ago, her screen career picked back up. Castmates and directors seem awed by her ability to conjure unpredictability, especially in the grinding business of ensemble-TV production. “She’s like a live wire when she’s working,” says Kusama, who directed the first episode of Yellowjackets.
“She’s one of the more instinctive and instinctual actors I’ve ever worked with. I learned pretty quickly on the pilot, I was never going to get the same take twice.”
Lynskey recalls a scene late in the season. Their characters “have this antagonistic sort of relationship; there’s a lot of sniping back and forth”, she says. But in one take, “I made this choice to look at her and just check in if she’s okay, and the moment I looked at her, she burst into tears. That’s how present she is, how on the verge of emotion she is, at all times.”
After a nearly 35-year career, Lewis knows what sustains. "I think what you learn through time is that you have the ability to regenerate, if you put your heart and mind to it," she says. "You have to apply discipline, and get out of your own way." – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
