8/2/2023 0 Comments Julia stiles now![]() Stiles admits that she was kind of gratuitous in the first movie, playing the young CIA assistant role that usually gets doled out to the newbie from Iowa with big boobs and glasses: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I barely had anything to do.” The second installment was a tad better: At least she got a memorable scene where she wears a wiretap and is held at gunpoint by Bourne.īut from what little information we can glean about the third Bourne, all of Stiles’s gracious utility playing will have paid off. In many ways, the Bourne movies may be her catalyst out of a slump. Her first big role post-school was in a laughably miscast remake of The Omen. Looking back, though, she says she’s realized “that the industry kind of develops crushes on actors, especially young actresses.” And while it shouldn’t have been that big a deal for a bookish 19-year-old to go to college, it seems pretty clear that by the time Stiles graduated, Hollywood had forgotten what to do with her. She wanted to experience living in dorms, she wanted to avoid being overexposed, she wanted to grow up on her own terms, and, after a while, she just wanted to graduate because she’d talked about college in so many interviews she didn’t want the public humiliation of not being able to finish what she started. A lust object for Ivy League freshmen, she became one herself, settling into Columbia as an English major in 2000, and purposely “kind of slowed down the momentum of my career.” She won some MTV Movie Awards and starred with Stockard Channing in The Business of Strangers and with a venerable Mamet ensemble in State and Main. She had that spate of “smart” teen movies, several of which were jazzed-up Shakespeare. You’d think that growing up surrounded by grit, not to mention getting your start at downtown’s La MaMa Theatre at age 11, might have led to some edgier movie choices, but for the most part, Stiles has managed to stay this side of the mainstream. You’d point to it and say, ‘There’s a needle,’ and a teacher would come over.” “My mom was like, ‘Don’t touch them! They’re dirty!’ ”Īt the soccer fields Stiles frequented along the East River, “we’d pick up dime bags and needles-well, you wouldn’t pick up the needles. “They had broken eyeballs and missing limbs,” says Stiles. Most intriguing to a little girl, there was a doll factory that left piles of defective dolls on the curb. There was a chocolate-cherry factory around the corner pumping nauseatingly sweet-smelling goop from a truck every morning, and at lunch, ladies in blue bonnets would pour onto the streets for a break. She was around when Soho was an industrial wasteland with just a few enterprising artists-including her mother, who makes ceramics, and father, an elementary-school teacher-raising their families in converted loft spaces. “Not to people on the street! But I smiled at the guy in the deli.”Īt age 26, Stiles may have lived in this town too long to learn how to be extraneously nice. But could it be that this born-and-bred New Yorker has really started talking to strangers? “No!” she says, bursting into horror-tinged laughter. “But from Wednesday on, the crossword is like a lost cause for me, so I read some headlines instead.” Her (clearly air-dried) hair is lapping in untamed waves of blonde against her face. “I get it for the crossword puzzle,” she says. She’s spent her day swimming at the Y and reading the Times. Leisurely sipping Diet Coke in an East Village café whose maître d’ won’t stop staring at her-ads for The Bourne Ultimatum (she’s been in all three Bournes) are up and running on TV-Stiles does seem relaxed. Strangers say hi to you! So I’ve kind of come back with a new perspective.” “It’s true that people in the South are a lot more open. I’m guarded.” But this summer, while filming Gospel Hill with Danny Glover and Angela Bassett, about a town that can’t escape its racist past, Stiles says she finally “got over” her New York chill. ![]() ![]() A straight-A student to Lindsay Lohan’s mean girl, Stiles spent an inordinate chunk of her early career in girl movies ( 10 Things I Hate About You, Save the Last Dance, The Prince & Me) playing the uptight smarty usually in need of a dressing down from some fine, fun-loving guy. Julia Stiles went to South Carolina a month and a half ago and claims to have returned a changed woman. ![]()
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