From the Archives: Jennifer Jason Leigh
"You always take a bit home with you, even on the good days because you're trying so hard to be convincing and to believe it yourself that it starts to invade you after a while." - Jennifer Jason Leigh
Jennifer Jason Leigh is petite -- you don't have to wear too large a hole in your pocket to lose her -- and, as a result, everything around her appears oversized. It's a bit like meeting Alice inside of Wonderland. At 37, she looks 17 and, at times, can even strike you as 7. All pale skin and indistinct features, she would almost fade into the light were it not for her incisive and piercing eyes.
She has been commended and criticized for the thread of daring and uncompromise in her roles. Yet for all the winning abandon and emotional (and physical) nakedness she bares onscreen, Leigh is a woman of mystery once the cameras stop rolling. Robert Altman, who directed her in Short Cuts and Kansas City, and with whom she shares a sensibility that champions artistry over commercialism, mistook her for a script girl. In truth, she was the actress portraying Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. As the celebrated literary wit and high priestess of the Algonquin Round Table, Leigh recreated Parker's highs and lows with writing, booze, men, and especially the unrequited love she possessed for Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott). It was the role that Leigh found hardest to let go. Perhaps a bit surprising considering the gallery of characters that she's embodied and the lengths to which she's gone to inhabit their skin.
Before she learned Braille to portray a deaf, blind and mute rape victim in her movie debut Eyes of a Stranger, she had been The Best Little Girl in the World. She weighed in at 86 pounds to portray the anorexic teenager in that made-for-TV production. Triumph and tragedy marked 1982 -- she won plaudits as a high schooler who loses her virginity in Fast Times at Ridgemont High then found herself confronted with the news of her father's tragic death. Vic Morrow, who debuted in Blackboard Jungle and starred in the TV series Combat, and two Vietnamese child actors were killed by an out of control helicopter while shooting a scene from John Landis' segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
Her subsequent roles marked her onscreen descent into darkness. She's been raped (Flesh + Blood) and gang-raped (Last Exit to Brooklyn), the victim (Heart of Midnight) and the victimizer (Single White Female), and how many variations on junkies and hookers has she given? She's done the kooky (The Big Picture) and the normal (Backdraft), television (Showtime's Bastard Out of Carolina and CBS's The Love Letter) and recently wrapped up a six-month run as Sally Bowles in the Tony Award-winning Cabaret. For eight performances a week, Leigh ate a raw egg onstage because she couldn't bear to fake it.
Her latest project, eXistenZ, unites her with Canadian mindbender David Cronenberg. The film envisions a world where people are so consumed by technology that their days are spent playing virtual reality video games whose end goals are a mystery to all players. The games are downloaded from pods which resemble human embryos and are plugged into a bioport, a new orifice located at the base of a person's spine. Leigh portrays Allegra Gellar, a game designer whose latest game eXistenZ is being tested. Based on writer Salman Rushdie's plight to avoid assassination, Allegra is targeted for assassination and is aided by Ted Pikul (Jude Law).
Leigh, a great admirer of Cronenberg's work, jumped at the chance to work with him. "Cronenberg has such an amazing imagination and what's in him is really remarkable," she marvels. "The movies that he gives us are so unique and so his own and that's why I'm always excited to see them. As a person, he's just so grounded and easygoing and he's incredibly articulate and bright. I feel I could ask David Cronenberg any question about anything and he would actually know the answer," she giggles. Yes, Leigh giggles. And smiles, too. Quite often.
Once she cinched the role, Leigh began to immerse herself in her character's physical and emotional world. She read up on the existentialists -- Sartre and Hegel, in particular -- as well as works by Philip K. Dick and literature on terrorism and anything cyber-related. As usual, she kept a journal written in the character's voice. Childhood memories, adult relationships and "hating to test your games because that's what she had to do" were some of the thoughts Allegra inscribed in the journal.
Leigh admits that portraying Allegra was "really, really fun because there were three levels operating all the time, three characters in operation all the time. There are little secrets all throughout the movie and, knowing what you ultimately know, then it's fun to go back and see it again because there's lots all the way through that give away the ending. Jude and I and David had a really good time doing that. Sometimes it would be from take to take. Yeah, it was challenging and it's like you can never get bored in a scene because you always had another level to go with it."
Leigh found Allegra's shyness an easy task to convey. Shyness and Jennifer Jason Leigh are nearly synonymous, yet is it so ironic that she chose to be in a profession most categorize to be an extroverted one? "I'm shy so I understand that pretty well in a significant way because I own it," Leigh explains. "When you're shy, you don't want attention so you try not to have any tics or any kind of behavior that seems loud or anything."
Over the years, Leigh has managed to reconcile herself with the process of doing interview rounds to promote her films, but reveals she still finds it difficult to the center of attention in a roomful of reporters. "It's tremendously difficult. I'm not extroverted so it's very unnatural for me to talk about myself and talk about my approach to my work and anything. We can talk about the weather," she giggles.
So why acting? Why choose to be trapped in the lives of other people? Why that dichotomy? "It's in acting that I'm not shy," Leigh reasons, "because in acting, I feel like it's my game. Creating the game, it's a very free place because you don't have to take responsibility for it and yet you can expose parts of yourself, but only you know what they are. And you can invest in them and you can start to understand parts of yourself through other people you don't know at all. You come to grasp something or explore something in a very deep way, but maybe not in the way you'd want to in your own life."
