Wilde Child
by Andrew Myers |
Angeleno magazine | January 25, 2012
Shoot:
Markus Klinko & Indrani 2011
Scans:
Angeleno - Février 2012
Extraits traduits:
Sur
son
enfance
:
« J'ai
vécu
dans
ma
tête.
J'ai
eu
une
imagination
très
active.
Je
pouvais
jouer
seule
dans
ma
chambre
pendant
des
heures
et
voir
des
films
entiers
dans
ma
tête.
Ce
flou
de la
ligne
entre
la
réalité
et
l'imagination
est
je
pense quelque chose
que
tous les
enfants
ont,
et
j'étais
très
chanceuse
parce
que
mes
parents
l'ont
encouragée.
Ils
m'ont
vraiment laissé
embrasser
l'idiosyncratique,
pour découper
ma propre identité
basée sur
mes propres
intérêts. »
Sur
sa
carrière
jusqu'ici
:
« Certains
pensent
que
je
suis
stupide
de
jouer
tellement de petits rôles ou des rôles de
soutien,
mais
j'aime
ça.
Cela
me rappelle
d'être en compagnie d'acteurs,
où
vous
pourriez
jouer
Madame
Macbeth
dans
une pièce
et
une
fille
inconnue
dans
une
autre;
vous
apprenez
tellement
comme ça. »
The year
is 2048 and the newspaper headline proclaims a “Wilde Win!” This is not
a reference to an acting award for Olivia Wilde—although any number
might be shimmering in the now 63-year-old actress’ memories—nor to her
slew of film roles including 2011’s Cowboys & Aliens and The Change-Up,
and the release of Butter in March 2012, a left-leaning sociopolitical
satire with significant election-year overtones in which Wilde stars
alongside Jennifer Garner, Alicia Silverstone, Hugh Jackman and Ashley
Greene as the local bad-girl stripper intent on winning Iowa’s high-profile
butter-carving contest.
Rather, the headline references candidate Wilde’s win in the U.S.
presidential election, 36 years into the future. She’s assumed the
political role of her lifetime: the liberal equivalent of that other
erstwhile actor, Ronald Reagan. It could happen. Like the Gipper, Wilde
holds fast to her principles and believes in them profoundly, and she’s
not only immensely personable, she’s also surprisingly approachable. She
has the common touch. Then there’s the physical beauty factor, which
makes for Beltway magic when combined with an innate can-do optimism.
While the roads to the White House are as varied and unreliable as those
to Hollywood stardom, Wilde was raised ringside in Washington, D.C. In
addition to having a front-row seat for past presidential races, she
also has a strong sense of the difference between the way in which
things are supposed to work and the way they function in real time.
Born Olivia Jane Cockburn in 1984, Wilde is the daughter of Andrew and
Leslie Cockburn, two Washington journalists who have covered national
and international politics and policy since the 1980s. They have
investigated cover-ups and blowouts for the full gamut of media outlets,
penning articles for national newspapers and magazines; writing books (Andrew’s
latest in 2007 took Donald Rumsfeld to the woodshed); producing segments
for network news and news magazine shows such as 60 Minutes; and making
documentaries (their 2009 film, American Casino, explored the housing
crisis). “My parents are incredible,” Wilde states, full stop. “They’re
passionate about truth-seeking, striving for justice; they’re part of
the original crew of investigative journalists.” Peter Jennings was a
close family friend and the recently departed Christopher Hitchens was
Wilde’s onetime babysitter (she later returned the favor and watched
over his daughter).
Though let’s be clear, Wilde didn’t grow up around a bunch of nose-buried-inside-a-book
policy wonks. Her parents really know how to throw a party. “I still can
so easily recall the sounds of conversation, laughter and glasses from
the 20 people seated around their dinner table.” She also remembers the
roar from larger cocktail parties, and the informal debates during
smaller gatherings. More than simple parties, these were salons;
must-stops in the swim of old Washington where politicians from both
sides of the aisle, foreign diplomats, intellectuals and visiting
celebrities mixed in a cross-pollinating Georgetown-townhouse world. A
place that once included such power-brokering hostesses as Pamela
Harriman and Evangeline Bruce, and which—in the less congenial present
where polemics mean breaking heads rather than bread—are no more.
For Wilde, these parties—magnifying her parents’ world, its excitement
and its intellectual fecundity—were seminal. And although guests might
include a foreign leader or a Rolling Stone named Mick, “there was never
any fame-whoring,” Wilde says. “Nobody was ever introduced to me and my
sister as a ‘success,’ or as famous; we were told what they had done,
what they’re doing, what’s unique about them.” But older sister Chloe,
now a civil rights lawyer in New York, was, according to Wilde, “more
introverted” and content to listen attentively and remain unobtrusive.
Wilde was headstrong, at least as described by the famously headstrong
Hitchens. “I was a tyrant,” she says, laughing, “assertive in my
opinions and abilities. I made myself very present.”
It was this tendency to be a not-so-silent witness that won Wilde her
earliest reviews. “‘I think we have an actress on our hands’ was
something I heard very early, most often from my parents’ friends and
extended family,” she recalls. “It was probably not said as a
compliment.” Regardless, she found her creative self early. There were
the usual games of dress-up and role-playing, which she did precociously
by age 4; there was also an early interest in horror fiction. Wilde
created a library for her prized books and charged a penny per rental.
“I lived in my head, I had a very active imagination, I could play alone
in my room for hours and see whole movies in my head,” she says. “This
blurring of the line between reality and fantasy is something I think
all kids have, and I was very lucky because my parents encouraged it.
They really let me embrace the idiosyncratic, to carve out my own
identity based on my own interests.”
Parental encouragement was broad-based. “They never would have allowed
me to be a child actress, but they took my passion seriously and
expected me to be serious about it. To work hard, to study the greats,”
says Wilde, who enrolled in acting classes early, and, after the eighth
grade, transferred to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., for high
school. She was particularly attracted to the prep school’s theater
department. “There was a main stage, two black box spaces, studio
theaters, playwriting classes, student producing—incredible,” she says,
even now singing the praises of two teachers in particular, English
teacher Seth Bardo and acting instructor Kevin Healan. “[Healan] had
worked with Sean Penn, and I floored Sean by mentioning his name by the
pool of the Hotel Oloffson in Haiti a few years ago.” Wilde was in Haiti
as a board member of Artists for Peace and Justice, which provides
education and health services in a country she was introduced to when
her mother produced a report exposing the brutality of a U.S.-trained
Haitian military unit after the Duvalier regime.
It was at Andover, while appearing as Gwendolen in The Importance of
Being Earnest, that Olivia Cockburn became Olivia Wilde, a stage name
homage to the piece’s playwright. “It was the first time I felt I owned
the stage. It was wonderful,” she says. The name was also in deference
to the many writers in her family, many of whom used pennames, as well
as to her own Irish roots; her father grew up in County Waterford, and
she has been a frequent visitor there.
It’s not surprising, then, that Wilde’s parents signed off on her plans
to spend a summer at Dublin’s prestigious Gaiety School of Acting. But
they became less enthusiastic when one of Wilde’s instructors suggested
their daughter take a “gap year” before college, and spend it in L.A. in
order to make sure she wanted to be in this business. Wilde says, “My
parents knew I’d been working very hard, that I was very serious.
Luckily, since my dad is European, they were comfortable with the idea
of a gap year.”
Luckier still, although her parents were not of Hollywood, they had
conceived and co-produced The Peacemaker, starring George Clooney and
Nicole Kidman, the first movie from DreamWorks, released in 1997, and
based on their book One Point Safe. Wilde had gone with them to L.A. for
the press junket. “It was my first trip to Los Angeles and my first time
in a chauffeur-driven town car,” she says.
For advice, Wilde turned to her parents’ friend Sarah Pillsbury,
producer of movies such as How to Make an American Quilt. Pillsbury
suggested an internship with a casting director, specifically Mali Finn,
whom Wilde describes as “the best in the world… and the toughest.” She
says that Finn set the standard on how to behave during auditions and
how to prepare. “And Mali let me pore over VHS tapes of great auditions
from actors like Sam Rockwell, Angelina Jolie and Russell Crowe,” Wilde
says.
Though instrumental, Finn never sent Wilde on auditions. “After seeing
the thousands of headshots at Mali’s, I was under no illusions. I really
thought I’d be a character actress, a theater actress—I never thought my
looks were right to be an ingénue and I was fine with that,” explains
the woman who Maxim named No. 1 on its 2009 Hot 100 List. “Even so, I
wanted the experience of auditioning.”
Through a friend’s father who was a manager, she got it—and she landed
more and more auditions as favorable reports filtered back. And then
came roles, among them Jerry Bruckheimer’s high-profile, short-lived
Skin. “We spent more time doing press than working on the show,” says
Wilde. That was followed by an eye-catching part on The O.C. “I was
supposed to stay for four episodes but stayed for 13.” They were enough
for Wilde to defer matriculation at Bard College several times, then
indefinitely, and enough to convince her parents she was making the
right decision. This was no easy feat considering that Dad and most of
his family went to Oxford and Mom was a member of the second class of
women to graduate from Yale. But it was her role in Nick Cassavetes’
2006 film Alpha Dog that proved to be Wilde’s professional watershed.
“It was my first transcendent experience in film or television, where I
thought, ‘This is why I’m here,’” she says. “It gave me courage to
strive for more.”
“More” meant a main role on The Black Donnellys, an NBC drama that
didn’t take, off-Broadway satisfaction in a political thriller called
Beauty on the Vine, and later that same year, House M.D. “I wanted to do
another play, but my agent came to see me and asked if I’d do House. I
hadn’t seen it, so I watched a bunch, then flew back to L.A. and
auditioned,” she says. “I didn’t get the role I auditioned for, I got
[the part for character] 13.”
It must be her lucky number as she’s now spent four years on the hugely
successful Fox medical drama. The show proved to be Wilde’s professional
breakout, leading to her first major movie part in 2010’s TRON: Legacy,
and her current slate of films that started with last summer’s Cowboys &
Aliens and includes The Words with Dennis Quaid and Jeremy Irons (which
premiered at Sundance this year), as well as Blackbird with Eric Bana
and Welcome to People starring Chris Pine—both with no set release dates
as of yet. “Some people think I’m stupid for taking so many supporting
and smaller roles, but I love it,” she says. “It reminds me of being in
a company of actors, where you might be playing Lady Macbeth in one play
and a nameless girl in another; you learn so much.”
But acting is not necessarily what she considers to be her defining role.
Politics, political activism and humanitarian work tether her to her
family and play a huge role in her day-to-day life. Wilde was an early
Obama supporter, and campaigned on his behalf. “I really believed in him
as a candidate, and got to know my country,” she says, “I hadn’t been in
the Midwest before, nor really in the South. I went door-to-door and it
was great.” While political activism, humanitarianism and a liberal
stance are hardly new in Hollywood, Wilde has a sensibility that seems
to combine the idealism of youth and education with the healthy
skepticism of a seasoned reporter. Asked if she continues to support
Obama as fervently, she answers (with nary a pause): “It’s much harder
to run on the concepts of hope and change. Student loans, banking reform?
People want specifics now and they deserve them. I’m an advocate of
youth participation in politics, and I hope there will be a swell of
participation again, but I hope it’s based on actual knowledge of policy.”
Last year marked Wilde’s final season on House M.D., as well as the end
of her marriage to Tao Ruspoli, the documentary filmmaker, photographer
and Italian prince whom she married in 2003 (Wilde is currently dating
Saturday Night Live comedian Jason Sudeikis). It also signaled the start
of an impressive résumé of film credits that will continue throughout
the year. But while Wilde singles out Butter for the clever script,
incredible cast and the new role it allowed her to play (she admits she
loved putting on those stripper heels), can she really, after playing a
tattooed exotic dancer, sit tall in the Oval Office in 2048, embodying a
political renaissance based on mindful, mass participation? It doesn’t
seem like much of a stretch if you recall Reagan’s own claim to on-screen
fame happened with the help of a chimpanzee. Consider it Hollywood magic.
Traduction par Jujualias
Source: www.modernluxury.com/angeleno