teenage lust
Christina Ricci
Photographed in New York City, 1997
- Christina Ricci
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Christina Ricci
teenage lust
Christina Ricci Photographed in New York City, 1997 |
"I'm really just an annoying teenager and can't help being obstinate and contrary. I consider myself such a mess, and my life is not something people should want for themselves... I am a teen-ager. I'm still allowed a couple years of being bad to myself."
- Christina Ricci |
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-- Lower East Side -- Christina Ricci showed up unexpectedly at our publicity shoot for the independent film Hurricane Streets. She was hanging out with Isidra Vega and Brendan Sexton, and apparently had nothing better to do than sit around in a desolate, wintry Lower East Side alley while the photographer Tom LeGoff snapped portraits of the Hurricane cast. When everyone else was occupied with the photographs, Christina walked over and sat on my lap, put her arms around my neck, kissed me sweetly on the cheek and asked (irresistibly) if we could walk over to the corner deli for some smokes. Since the photo shoot took several hours, Christina and I were forced to entertain ourselves as best we could -- playing cards, sharing a pack of Newports, downing several forties of Old English 800, and eventually climbing three stories of scaffolding to sneak on top of an old decrepit brownstone building to watch the shoot from above. By the end of the afternoon, Christina finally crawled down into a filthy sinkhole at the back of the alley and we caught a few portraits of her in front of the camera. 
At the time, I didn t even realize that this cool, personable teenage girl was a grown version of the haunting gothic child actress Wednesday from The Addams Family; or that she was the controversial and uncontrollable "wild child" of Hollywood; or that she would soon become a formidable leading actor in independent film and a regular celebrity at the Sundance Film Festival, scoring a string of back-to-back hits with performances in The Ice Storm (1997), Buffalo 66 (1998), The Opposite of Sex (1998), Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas (1998), Desert Blue (1998) and Pecker (1999). Instead, she was just a normal teenage kid hanging out, passing time, bored, while her friends were busy with the shoot. She is not very tall, something like five foot one, with very big beautiful eyes; and she is incredibly, incredibly sweet and sincere -- not at all the personification of her reputed image as a sarcastic snob or in any way comparable to her cold and disturbed characters in the films I would watch over the next few years. 
Ricci began making feature films when she was only nine years old. Her first role was in the film Mermaids (1990), and a year later her face was plastered on posters everywhere in the U.S. for her leading role in The Addams Family(1991), playing the bewitchingly psychotic Wednesday. After the box-office success of The Addams Family and its sequel just three years later, Christina has said that by age 13 she felt completely removed from any ordinary semblance of reality. She responded by inventing a world of adolescent isolation and rebellion. "Children are pretty resilient, we can figure things out& and I think I knew from a very early age that there was nothing anyone could do to me. They couldn't put me in jail, so I could do what I wanted." Rebellious antics quickly led to tabloid headlines of a scandalous New Year s Eve in Times Square, published accounts of a 14 year old movie star gone adrift that she says were completely overblown. She was just a bored teenager in New York City. And what s her least favorite misconception about her by the press? "The worst is that I'm this really wild, crazy person when I'm actually really pragmatic and normal. I have a very stable life. It's the characters I play who don't." 
It was in 1997 that Ricci found her place in independent film with the Sundance release of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) as the darkly deviant yet innocently confused 14-year-old Wendy who seduces a neighborhood boy played by a prepubescent Elijah Wood. In what has often been called her most authentic role to date as Layla in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66, Christina somehow masters the character of a naive teenage girl abducted from her dance class by Gallo who takes her home to meet his parents. The part seemed almost written for her (despite reported accounts of Gallo saying that he couldn t stand her and apparently calling her an ungrateful cunt in the press), and she moves through the film like some phantom, ghostly and haunted. The Opposite of Sex is an original, daring film directed by Don Roos film that cuts deep to the nerve of American mores. Ricci plays a compellingly chilling, monstrous female lead -- a precocious and manipulative 16-year-old named Dedee , who flees her trailer-trash Louisiana home after the death of her abusive stepfather and arrives unannounced on the doorstep of her gay brother, then shamelessly seduces his hunky boyfriend and gets pregnant with him. She's a strange mix of naïve and wild; heartless and cruel yet strangely likeable. It's hard to imagine that anyone could possibly play the role, but Christina seems to pull it off effortlessly with a stone-faced, cold irreverence. text written by Ned Schenck |