Sevigny and Stewart have been giving formal interviews all day to promote Lizzie—still an emotional challenge for the two introverts, even after so many years of fame. Sevigny refers to any job that isn’t acting or directing as “fake work”: photo shoots, press days like this one. But anything beats standing still. “I am kind of a workaholic,” she says. “With Lizzie, I was on screen almost every second of the movie. That was really draining and fulfilling and terrifying all at once.” The next half-hour will offer some reprieve: We’ve organized for Stewart to ask the questions instead of me this time (celebrity-on-celebrity interviews are currently enjoying a bit of a media renaissance, and this seems like an ideal pairing), which instantly steeps the room in a relaxed energy. Sevigny’s PR rep leaves, and we ensconce ourselves in a triangle, our postures slouched. Sevigny takes off her shoes.
So the two actresses are chatting about the benefits and hazards of being a free-thinking, weird-dressing woman in Hollywood—a nonconformist, a “cool girl”—particularly now compared to the 1990s, when Sevigny began her career. Today, both women are dressed in dark hues, like a steampunk bride and groom: Stewart is in a tuxedo blazer, shorts, and layered chains around her neck, Sevigny in a calf-length two-toned frock (half black, half navy) tied at the neck. Contrasting the floral sundresses everyone else at the Four Seasons seems to be wearing, perhaps Sevigny is indeed dressed “like a weirdo.” But for her, that’s nothing new.
One of modern Hollywood’s original outcasts, a 19-year-old Sevigny was christened in 1994 by The New Yorker as “the coolest girl in the world.” This was before the indie cinema queen had made her onscreen breakouts in Harmony Korine’s Kids and Gummo. (Sevigny has held onto the blue T-shirt and bunny ears she wore in those films. “My wardrobe is vast and exhaustive and a little embarrassing,” she says.) It was before she’d received an Oscar nomination for her turn in 2000’s Boys Don’t Cry, before she’d posed for iconic fashion houses like Miu Miu and Kenzo, and long before she’d added the diaeresis above the “e” in her first name (because an unembellished “e” simply wouldn’t do). But it was after Sevigny had shaken her suburban upbringing and moved to Brooklyn.
The product of a conservative Connecticut town, rebellious Sevigny grew up, as she once told The Times, “very bored.” But she spiced things up quickly. Less than a year after moving to New York, Sevigny had already hypnotized the city’s downtown fashion scene with her iconoclastic vintage style and refusal to take herself too seriously, even when everyone else seemed to. Before age 20, she’d already become the muse of ’90s cult label X-Girl (designed by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth), posed for Paper magazine, and appeared in music videos for The Lemonheads’ “Big Gay Heart” and Sonic Youth’s “Sugar Kane.” New York loved Sevigny. But she didn’t want to be a fashion icon; she wanted to be an actress. And Hollywood told her a different story.
“One of the worst things I ever heard was from a female casting director, who said, ‘You have to make the men want to fuck you and the women want to be you,’” Sevigny recalls. “I was a real weirdo kid. But I wasn’t allowed to be. Everyone was like, You have to be more approachable. Hollywood thinks you’re too weird. You’re never going to get any parts. Meanwhile I was like, Johnny Depp gets to be weird! But it didn’t work for me.”
“That’s why everyone else thinks you’re so cool, though,” says Stewart.
“Well now that’s acceptable,” Sevigny explains. “Now ‘weird’ is a brand. But before, it wasn’t. Before, you were telling Hollywood you didn’t want to be a part of it.”
Sevigny did want to be a part of it, though. She wanted big, challenging roles, and sometimes she caved under the pressures of Hollywood’s patriarchal power structure in an attempt to get them. She posed for pictures with men she didn’t like; she brushed off inappropriate commentary from industry higher-ups in auditions. “I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s true. My whole career, I was always so insecure,” she says.
"Cool” was never something Sevigny aimed to be; in fact, from what I can tell, both she and Stewart (who also boasts an irreverent, IDGAF reputation) are some of the nerdiest give-a-fucks in the business. The two bond over how easily intimidated they get on set: “I’ve worked with some actors who are really capable and objective, confident, but also probably pretty narcissistic and insane. You and I aren’t like that,” Stewart says. “I have so much crazy energy and nerves. I have to remember that it’s actually more fun not to want to kill yourself after one scene you didn’t do perfectly.” Sevigny relates, referencing a Jim Jarmusch zombie flick she just finished shooting alongside a star-studded cast: “When you’re working with people like Tilda Swinton or Bill Murray or Adam Driver, you’re like, everybody’s exceptional. And I’m just here going womp womp. What am I doing here? So then I torture myself. … I can’t trust that I’m going to be good.”
But Sevigny’s self-criticism doesn’t get in the way of her desire for creative power. She and Stewart are both shifting their focus to behind-the-camera work; they want to direct. With enthusiasm, Sevigny tells us about a short film she just wrapped as director, a female empowerment piece called White Echo that explores the “feather witch” movement of Los Angeles: “You know all those girls who like, bathe their crystals in the moonlight? All these ‘witchy girls’?” Stewart and I nod. “I am very eyeroll-y toward that. But I wanted to explore what we believe in ourselves and how we convince other people of that talent, or art, or whatever it may be. For example, can I really direct? Do I have to convince other people, or myself, that I can do it? And then how can I communicate that?”
Sevigny had a love-hate relationship with the authority that came with the director’s chair. Our culture, certainly the entertainment industry, doesn’t provide enough examples of women in power for it to feel natural once they get there.
“My level of control freak–ness was really overboard,” Sevigny says. “But I was very vocal and cheerlead-y with everyone, too. I was just walking around calling all the guys handsome. Then I was like, am I #metoo-ing them all? And I had to apologize. Because I guess you can’t do that anymore.” (She says all this with irony, of course—parodying the imperious men she’s been forced to impress her whole life—and Stewart laughs appreciatively.) “Oh well. I like objectifying men.
I think it’s fun.”
But maintaining authority in Hollywood as a woman is difficult, even for one as accomplished as Sevigny. (As of 2018, there is only one female film director per every 22 men in the role.) A man directed Lizzie, and according to a recent HuffPost interview, some of Sevigny’s “punchier moments,” plus much of the romantic relationship between Stewart’s and her characters, ended up on the cutting room floor. “I was a producer, and this was my baby. I developed it from the get-go, and I had to relinquish control and power over to the other producers and the director. … It was very hard,” Sevigny told the publisher. “I was like, ‘If you have another scene with Kristen Stewart and you don’t put it in your movie, you’re stupid.’” Evidently, Sevigny is still too weird for Hollywood.
It’s no coincidence, then, that Sevigny’s next focus is to direct a full-length feature. Stewart is trying her hand at directing for the first time too, currently adapting Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water, for the screen. Sevigny and Stewart figure if the kinds of directors and roles they want don’t exist, they’ll just cast each other. “I can’t fucking wait to put you in something. You have no idea,” Stewart says, to which Sevigny responds, “You’re going to be one of those directors that I’m intimidated by. I’m gonna cry.” Says Stewart, “No way. I will literally fucking hold you.”
If it’s rare for an interviewer to promise her interviewee that she’ll “literally fucking hold” her, it’s even rarer to witness such an unfiltered human exchange between two women as enigmatic as Stewart and Sevigny. A few weeks ago, a reporter penned a hot take in response to this format of celebrities interviewing other celebrities. She wasn’t so charmed by it, calling the concept “an extremely bad media trend” and criticizing a number of recent pieces for offering nothing but “inside jokes and compliments.” The frustration with substanceless, overly sanitized interviews that are more about fluffy optics than providing a personal window into a celebrity’s life is understandable. But it’s worth asking: Can you really blame these women for wanting to be gentle—for wanting to “literally fucking hold” each other? Hollywood can be an unwelcoming place for “cool girls” like Sevigny. Perhaps there exists a well-earned place in the media for them to be barefoot, among friends, and weird on their own terms
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