Juliette Lewis...

The trouble with Juliette

A decade ago, she had Hollywood at her feet - and Brad Pitt on her arm. Then came a spectacular fall from grace. Now Juliette Lewis is back - and she's got something to sing about, as she tells Nick Duerden

17 July 2004

Here was a time when Juliette Lewis had it all. The natural heir to Jodie Foster's crown, she was a former child actress who acted nothing like a child actress should. She was all spice, no sugar, and determinedly so, delivering a string of performances that exuded daring, danger and an incipient promiscuity. Lewis was never exactly beautiful, but she was attractive in a prohibitive way that made her seem lethal, a bad girl whose badness ran deep. At 18, she'd been nominated for an Oscar for her role in Cape Fear, the film in which she very nearly acted Robert de Niro off the screen.

Afterwards, for a while at least, all was milk and honey: Woody Allen directed her in Husbands and Wives, and the memorable roles continued to follow, alongside Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?), and Gary Oldman (Romeo is Bleeding). After making Kalifornia in 1993 - a blip in her CV because it was, admittedly, rather krap - she began dating her co-star, Brad Pitt. Within a matter of months, they did what all famous couples must do when dating in the public arena: they got engaged.

A year later, Lewis established herself as one of the most arresting actresses of her generation when she played the tyrannically maladjusted Mallory Knox in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Stone's assertions that she had "tremendous instinct" and that she was "young, mean and hungry" were entirely correct. Her performance was so intense that it would overshadow all her future work. But if her career was progressing in leaps and bounds, then her personal life was beginning to unravel and, with it, any claim she may have had to mental stability. Pitt left her, and she quickly slid into a downward spiral of drink and drugs. Rehab followed, and she was forced to quit the film industry. Suddenly, Juliette Lewis no longer had it all. She was off the radar, and out of view. End of story - or almost.

After bingeing, mostly on cocaine, she promptly did something else famous people tend to do when things crumble: she turned to religion. In late 1996, she checked herself into Narconon, a rehabilitation centre with links to the Church of Scientology, the celebrity religion with which she rapidly became obsessed. Detox was as painful as detox always is, and for Lewis the process was an interminable one. Three years later, now finally clean and sober, she began the slow resumption of her day job. In 2001, she recalled those darkest days, saying: "There were times when I felt I was dying. For whatever reason, I felt so conflicted about myself. I had an incredible confidence about my talent on the one hand, but on the other, I felt really insecure about who I was as a person, and I didn't know how to articulate myself."

At 31, Juliette Lewis now says that all her "little tragedies and war stories" are behind her. "This industry can be full of heartbreak," she tells me, "but you just have to pull on through. In this business, there is always the road to sell out. You can do shitty-ass work and get paid a whole bunch of money, but I'm just not interested in that. I've achieved a certain level of credibility, and I want to maintain that. Sure, I've done some stupid popcorn movies recently ..." and here, you have to wonder whether she's referring to her role as the villain's girlfriend, Kitty, in the fun but ultimately fluffy Starsky & Hutch remake, "... but I've tried not to do too many of those. I've always been left-of-centre, and sometimes casting directors don't know what to do with me, but I do get respect for my talent." She begins to nod her head, and nod it vigorously. "That's the ... yeah, it is ... the important thing."

Today she is clean and healthy, and, like a reformed smoker, possesses the kind of zeal that suggests she has been to hell and back. Scientology seems to have been a crucial factor in her rehabilitation, so much so that she offers it nothing but praise: "It has made me more of an individual [and] revitalised everything good in me." And she happily returns the favour - regularly lining up on the endorsement podium alongside Cruise and Travolta at starry Scientologist events.

But there's another reason for her salvation, and it is one that she readily admits comes cloaked in cliché: rock'n'roll. "It saved my life!" is her succinct reading of the situation. Like Keanu Reeves, Russell Crowe and, well, like Jason Donovan before her, the actress has turned singer, with a band that goes by the name of Juliette Lewis And The Licks.

"My whole life I've wanted to be a rock star."

She says this, appropriately enough, while on board her tour bus which is right now pulling into an anonymous truck stop in Texas. Outside it's just endless dust and the occasional cactus. She and her band have been on the road for a week, playing a different city every night. The reception has been buoyant.

"I used to do musical workshops when I was little," she says, "and I was really drawn to jazz. My heroes were people like Billie Holiday, Rickie Lee Jones ... "

This is a somewhat surprising claim given that her début album, Like A Bolt Of Lightning, owes absolutely nothing to jazz. It is punk rock incarnate, and Lewis equal parts Iggy Pop and Courtney Love. She looks the part, too: tiny and taut, with raisins for eyes, her waif-like figure squeezed into barely a rumour of a vest, while the pallid complexion, framed by clearly un-Timotei'd hair, is all very reminiscent of that brief Nineties obsession with heroin chic. When she screams into the microphone, saliva flies in all directions and the veins on her neck protrude like a viper's nest. Her conviction is terrifying - almost, you could say, unhinged. But while the album is commendably authentic, it's going to take some time before she can even hope for credibility.

"You know what?" she begins. "I love the problem of whether or not we will be taken seriously. That's good, it plays into our hands because, let me tell you, there has never been an actor like me doing a band like this. Never! I've had to prove myself my whole life, I've never had anything easy, and I've always been the underdog. So I'm perfectly happy if people are suspicious of us. Bring it on! If the expectations are so super fricking low, then that makes it all the more easy to impress everyone." Here, she raises herself to her full height, nostrils flared. "This band is urgent, hungry, energetic. And the album is amazing. It's a punch in a face. I love it. I absolutely love it!"

Of this, I tell her, there is little doubt.

She laughs. "Oh, I'm cocky about it, I'm f cocky as hell! But then I have to be, because I have so much to prove!" She's shouting now, every word italised with its own exclamation mark. "When I perform live," she continues, "my entire goal is to inspire them [the audience]. I want people to leave the venue with some of my energy, I want them to feel elated. And if that means that ... that ... you know - if that means I have to roll around on the floor and give people the unexpected, then that is EXACTLY WHAT I'LL DO! I LOVE BEING UNPREDICTABLE!"

It is at this point that her manager, Jay, intervenes. He tells her that she is yelling, that she should lower her voice for the sake of her vocal chords. They've a show tonight, after all. Lewis's response to this paternal concern is near hysteria. She kicks back her head and laughs like a hyena, teeth everywhere.

"Jay is always telling me I yell when I talk!" she says. "Maybe I should whisper instead...?"

Inexplicably whispering myself now, I remind her of something she says on her band's website: "I live for the sweat I drip on-stage."

Immediately, the laughing hyena returns.

"I sure do!" she says, beginning again to holler. "I SWEAT A WHOLE LOT!"

This voluble actress's first taste of a film set came in 1975, just two years after her birth. Her father, the character actor Geoffrey Lewis, would take her to work with him, while mother Glenys Batley, a graphic artist, remained at their LA home to tend their youngest daughter's seven half-siblings. Her parents were clearly fond of wedlock: by the time Juliette came along, Lewis had already vowed to have and to hold four times, Batley three.

Lewis landed her first television role in a soap called Homefires when she was 12 and, two years later, she divorced her parents in order to sidestep child labour laws (apparently a common practice among precocious teen thespians). By now, she was acting full-time, dropping out of high school to do so. At 15, her parents already divorced, she went to live with her father's actress girlfriend Karen Black, the emblematic Seventies star of Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, and within months of emancipation from the fractured family home, was arrested for underage drinking.

Meanwhile, her career was blossoming. After a succession of cursory roles in limp late-Eighties comedies like My Stepmother Is An Alien and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Lewis hit her stride in Cape Fear. The next few years brought a whirlwind of critical acclaim, but her method-like approach to the unhinged characters she portrayed on screen was beginning to cause concern.

Her fall from grace came in 1996, when her relationship with Pitt foundered. She doesn't talk about her former boyfriend anymore - the subject is entirely off limits - but her last public statement on the matter was this: "I have never got over him and probably never will. I am resigned to the fact that I will always be in love with Brad."

Later that same year, while filming the Terms Of Endearment sequel The Evening Star with Shirley MacLaine, she checked into rehab for the slow, three-year path back to sobriety.

Then, in 1999 and newly evangelical about life, she met and married professional skateboarder Steve Berra, and began to audition for movies again. But reputations don't die easily in Hollywood, and producers were reluctant to hire her. She only managed eventually to land her comeback role, as a mentally challenged teenager in The Other Sister, when the director Garry Marshall and co-star Diane Keaton personally took responsibility for her. Lewis has enjoyed steady work ever since, but the films she has appeared in have been independently funded and, consequently, low-key. These days, she is as far removed from the A list as she has ever been.

"But that's OK, because I'm not interested in being A list," she says. Instead, she wants to be challenged in the roles she takes. "I get lots of offers to play the crazy girl, but I've done the crazy girl to death. I'd rather not repeat myself any more." To this end, she tells me that she has recently turned down a big part in a potential blockbuster, something that would have paid her a lot of money and raised her profile exponentially. But the role didn't appeal, and so she said no.

"I want to do something completely different, something like, I don't know - maybe a romantic comedy," she says, smiling broadly. "I can do it, really I can! Trouble is, it's going to take some convincing because, you know, I'm the crazy girl from Natural Born Killers."

Meantime, she will continue to act only in those projects she deems interesting. Her latest starring role is in the new "baguette" Western, Blueberry, alongside an intriguing cast which includes Eddie Izzard, French hearthrob Vincent Cassell, Michael Madsen, Djimon Hounsou, Ernest Borgnine and her father Geoffrey Lewis, which opens in the UK this week. And she has two film performances under her belt - one called Aurora Borealis, the other Grilled - both of which she hopes will secure a release some time soon. But, for the immediate future at least, Lewis wants mostly to concentrate on her music, and concentrate hard. Last year, she filed for divorce, and now wants to fill the gaping hole it has left in her existence. She claims the divorce is an amicable one, but when was the breakdown of a marriage ever truly amicable?

"Things are good right now," she says insistently. "Being in a band is just the best thing. I can't tell you how much fun being on the road is. In many ways, I'm having the time of my life."

A week earlier, her band played in Las Vegas. While there, they went to see something called the Ultimate Fighting Championships, where two men beat the living hell out of one another inside a cage. The girl from Natural Born Killers embraced it with a passion that her character from that film would applaud.

"Oh my God, it was awesome, amazing, I loved it!" she says, bouncing up and down. "See, I'm completely obsessed with masculine strength. As a female in this world, things for us women can get pretty oppressive at times, and so I find it really cathartic - and inspiring - to watch men fight. Why? Because it's so pure. The fighting breaks down exactly what you need in this world to survive: skill, endurance, intention. I just love that, don't you?"

"To see two men fight?" she says, temporarily whispering again, and sounding palpably turned on. "That's a beautiful, beautiful thing."

'Like A Bolt Of Lightning' will be available on import from 14 September. 'Blueberry' is released at cinemas on Friday

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Go ahead, punk ... make my day

Oscar nominee Juliette Lewis has reinvented herself - as a full-on rocker. Jonathan Heaf caught her act in Vegas. Striking a pose: Juliette Lewis and her band, the Licks


Sunday July 18, 2004. The Observer

In the far left hand corner of Juliette Lewis's hired silver and burgundy tour bus is a 20-year-old blonde girl grinding her crotch into a speaker the size of a 10-year-old child. With the treble pulled down to zero, the bass oomphed up and her belt-sized skirt hitched around her belly button it won't be long before she good-vibrates her way into 'music-loving' history. Basically, the girl is humping sound. 'Ahhh! Yes, yes, yeeee ...'

'Blip.' The screen featuring this image fuzzes with static, the TV's standby LED beams bright red and Howard Stern's film Private Parts fades to black. More groans fill the tour bus, although this time it's not ecstasy causing the mummers. 'Hey, I can turn that piece of shit video off! Please. I know we're in Vegas but we're not delinquents.' Standing in the doorway to the bus's 13in-square bathroom, dressed in white Adidas tracksuit bottoms and a pea-green stripy top, is the pint-sized punk-rock artist formerly known as the actress Juliette Lewis. Her assembled band the Licks, slouched on the plastic-leather beige sofas, nod in resigned agreement. She aims her hazelnut peepers directly at my head. 'I'm sorry, I'm not always this much of a psycho to be around,' she smiles, her eyes a little puffy from a near-sleepless night-time drive from San Francisco, 11 hours back down the road. She reaches for a plastic bag from a cupboard full to bursting with about 30 different types of vitamin pill, packs of herbal tea, energy drinks and a tub of tea tree oil. She fiddles with the child safety cap on one, releases it and pops two pills the size of giant mutant rabbit droppings between lips still smudged with red lippie. 'Can I get you a green tea perhaps?'

Happy Independence Day! It's 4 July, 2004, and in Las Vegas, Juliette Lewis is trying really very hard not to be 'a psycho'. In fact, she's trying to be a rock star. Like Keanu Reeves and a handful of silver screen starlets before her, Lewis has temporarily swapped the clapperboard for a mic stand, and for the past two weeks has been part of the travelling punk'n'puke circus that is the Vans Warped Tour. The annual month-long event sees 40 bands, 40 tour buses, six stages, an army of guitar techs - and the most tattoos you've seen in your life - caravan from state to state spreading a love of third-generation nu-punk to the apple pie-chomping rebels of America. They started in Houston, Texas; today they're at the Desert Breeze Skate Park in the upper-class 'Lakes' district of Las Vegas. Lewis and her band are on at 4.15pm on the Maurice Stage (named, inventively, after the stage's manager). It's noon and it's already so hot, the organisers have had to move the family parking space two blocks down the road. Why? Police have noticed that the tarmac in the venue has started to melt and one of the main stages is sinking.

Lewis and the Licks have only two more shows to go before they leave for home (Los Angeles for most) and head back into the studio to finish mixing their debut album ... Like a Bolt of Lightning. The trip has gone well for their first tour - last night's gig in San Fran 'couldn't have gone better' - although there's always room for improvement. 'We haven't had a bad review yet,' beams Lewis. Well, until now. Jay, their bespectacled tour manager, hands her the latest edition of Entertainment Weekly and announces the headline: 'IS JULIETTE LEWIS CRAZY?' Sitting on the knees of Licks drummer Patty Schemel, suddenly Juliette stops fiddling with the oily entrails of her unkempt hair that is dangling out of a well-used burgundy scrunchie. She seems genuinely upset. 'What is it with them!? Okay so I played one wacko role in my entire acting career, and that was in Natural Born Killers.' She looks down at her flip-flopped feet, her frowning 31-year-old face at odds with her body that seems hardly to have grown out of puberty. Her legs are compact coils of muscle and bone; her stomach is as flat as her chest. 'What is it with fucking Hollywood. Why can't they just judge us on the music?' Of course, she was expecting to get a little stick. Her Hollywood guitar-twanging pals have seen to that. After all when was the last time you went out and requested a record by Russell Crowe and his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts?

But Juliette is angry and fed up. In fact she's steaming. She's fed up with being that weird psycho girl that went out with Brad Pitt for two years, got wild on drugs at the age of 20 ('I took everything pretty much') and gave Robert De Niro's thumb a blow job in Oliver Stone's Cape Fear (winning an Oscar nomination for her performance). And she's angry about how much criticism she got when there were mutterings of her career going down the pan in the light of her last role as a drug dealer's mistress in the recent Starsky and Hutch movie. At this point in time, rock stardom might be the only thing that will save her mood. 'Ever since I was five years old I wanted it,' she tells me, curled up among the debris of a half exploded suitcase in the back of the tour bus. The bus can sleep nine and Juliette has the biggest bunk. (Well, she is paying for it all.) 'I remember my dad taking me to see Miles Davis in concert at the Hollywood Bowl when I was a teenager. He would always be tapping on the steering wheel while driving with a tooth pick in his mouth. Real cool, like ... '

Lewis's father is Geoffrey Lewis, a well known character actor in the Seventies. He played alongside Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. This summer he is directing The Drummer, which stars Michael Madsen and Alison Eastwood, Clint's daughter.

Juliette formally disowned her parents at the age of 14 in order to work longer hours. Even then she knew how to play it differently from the other starlets. By becoming an adult in law, she would be able to work double the studio time of a teenager still living with her parents. Film bosses loved this. She was talented but could also save them money. 'But it was always theatrical music I loved. Things like Hair and Grease. Me and my sister once went into a mall and watched Grease in a department store for half the day. Just sitting there together singing. And I remember one time when I was really small, we did a musical rendition of Annie in our friend's garage. It was sort of cute kids' stuff.'

It's about half an hour till show time. 'Hello Vegas! How we all doing out there! I hear you have some great crystal meth and if I book into a room I'll be getting my hookers for free!' Lewis is getting G-ed up for her big entrance and practising her lines. She then carries out vocal exercises, locking herself in the bus loo and making 'brrrrr, brrrr' sounds like an old Bakelite telephone. Singing along to the Buzzcocks she squirts Wellness Colloidal Silver Throat Spray into her mouth as lubrication. 'I love banter with the crowd,' she explains as the band crawl out of shorts and into butt-hugging denim. 'Maybe I should go with, "Welcome to the city of sin you motherfuckers!" What do you think? Hey guys, what do you think?'

The 'guys', the band, are basically hired guns to back Juliette's charisma machine. But they're not without their rock credentials. It goes like this. Lewis was sitting at home one day, and a friend called. That friend knew how much Lewis wanted to break into the music industry. He also knew the songwriter Linda Perry, the queen of the pop melody who reinvented Christina Aguilera and gave Pink depth. So, last year Linda and Juliette sat in a studio and came up with a handful of songs, two of which have made the album ('Father's Daughter' and 'Comin' Around'). One night, by way of a creative field trip, Linda took Juliette along to a Blondie concert where she met ex-Hole drummer Patty Schemel. Between the two of them, they recruited Paul Ill, stole Todd Morse from Warped veterans H2O and finally added the fey lead guitarist Kimbel Pie. Then they sat in a studio for a week and 'Bam!' Juliette had herself a new career. After touring this year she'll have the album out and collaborations, plus a possible tour with the Prodigy, on whose new record she takes a guest role. Not bad for a Hollywood wannabe, huh?

The stage is located about a 10-minute walk from the tour bus and Lewis leads the band from the front. The site is made up of several stages and about 100 stalls. There are the anti-smoking lobbyists in one corner, the Reverse Day Care Centre in the other (an inflatable igloo-style tent where worried kids can leave their moms and dads for the day and go and smoke cheroots in peace). The rest of the site is a melting pot of hotdog stalls and record label tents trying to push crappy thin black T-shirts and album samplers onto kids ever-ready to exchange their hard-won pocket money for hoodies emblazoned with 'Stay Warm, Burn the Rich' on their chests.

When the band go on stage there are approximately 15 sun-baked kids standing shuffling at the front, sucking on bathtub-sized cartons of Mountain Dew. By the time they finish their set, that number has tipped over 200, with Lewis licking the crowd into a dusty riot. Frat-boys down from the University of Nevada chuck beer, and Avril Lavigne lookalikes wave their skinny black ties in the air as the mosh-pit kids perform a ritual of approval know as 'windmilling'. Arms are flung in reverse circles (think swimming backstroke on dry land but standing up), spinning leg kicks are attempted, and the more innocent bystanders that get pelted in the chops, the better. Halfway through their set some poor kid's black spectacles go sailing through the air.

Lewis hardly notices any of the crowd in the chaos. Up on stage she is a whirlwind of flailing locks and punching fists, either writhing on the floor emptying her lungs into the sky or driving her stare into her chest, her red face buried under a mop of tangled hair. She's wearing a tight T-shirt dress in salmon pink, black fingerless gloves, black kneepads and black Nike socks. Her dress is so short the words 'God Save the Teen' can clearly be seen stamped across the back of her black and white-striped panties. I wonder whether the Ultimate Fighting videos she's told me she's so keen on were used as wardrobe inspiration. Her voice - sounding like a heavy chest infection ripping through a damp Kleenex tissue - cuts the skate park clean in half: those who are head-banging and those who stare in entertained bemusement. This is a rock'n'roll exorcism. 'Shall I take you over to mother's house?' a sweat-soaked Lewis asks the steaming crowd before launching into their sixth and final song, '20-Year-Old Lover', a horny guttural mess of noise that deals with a crush Lewis had on a guy that serves her tea in her local Starbucks back home. 'So I can give yous a little kiss ... / So yous can put your hand on my leg?' And with that she rips off her dress and tornadoes back into a ball of adrenalised fury, arms pumping like some kind of punk-rock super-heroine.

'When I'm on stage, I think of being the Hulk,' she pants to me afterwards. 'All that raw energy just comes flooding out. I work when I'm on stage. I give it my all, for the crowd. I fucking rock!'

Ryan from New York band The Rebels isn't so sure. 'Juliette Lewis just vomits on stage. I'd rather stick a finger up her ass than hear that again. Her sound is that bad. She's that commercial, man,' he says, his hungover eyes hidden behind a nice new pair of Gucci sunglasses. 'This whole tour just sucks; people get paid to be here and bands just hang around to sell stuff. It sucks.' Does he think she pulls a crowd just because of her celebrity status? 'She a curiosity, that's all. She's no artist. And as for her acting career ... Did you ever see National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ? What a demanding role that was.' She was pretty good in Strange Days, I say ... 'What? She's just one of those religious freaks. It's her and John Travolta leading from the front line.'

Scientology has been a part of Juliette Lewis's life since she was five, although she only embraced it when Narc-Anon (the US rehab specialists) came knocking at her door and shocked her out of a two-year fling with hard drugs. 'My parents were scientologists, although I never really paid attention to it when I was younger. If you look at the Juliette Lewis before and the one after I discovered scientology, there's a huge difference,' she says with all the well-tuned, considered positivity only hours of therapy can bring to the surface. 'It is not so much a religion as a set of courses about being energised. The last one I took, for example, was a life orientation course. That's the reason I was able to put together a band: I lost all my self-doubt and thought, hey, I can fucking do this!'

And Juliette Lewis has just fucking done it. As the blood-orange sun spills down over the desert and the Vegas strip lights power up, Lewis and her band hop back into their bus and head for the centre of town. Tonight is a rare treat. Tomorrow is an 'off day' and Lewis has managed to swing a couple of rooms where the band can shower and change at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. Later on tonight she's throwing a party in honour of some guy from an alt-rock band called Thursday who is getting married. It is being held in the VIP bar downstairs where booths of Cristal-sipping wannabe high-rollers sit next to cabinets that show off Kurt Cobain's dirty lumberjack shirt and old Fender.

I' m not invited to the party but show up anyway and Paul from the Licks gets me in without a laminate. There's no sign of Lewis. I still find it hard to decide whether Juliette Lewis the rocker is for real. I ask someone at the bar sipping a tumbler of Grey Goose vodka and cranberry whether they've seen her.

'Who? No, but she is paying for the bar, apparently. Is she crazy or something? How rock'n'roll is that!' And with that the smiling punter goes back to paying attention to a sequined brunette in black stockings propping up the bar. The City of Sin has spoken; ladies and gentlemen, Juliette Lewis the actress has just left the building.

Useful link ---> Juliette and the Licks