The Stanford Daily

Interview: Perabo pipes in about her film career August 29, 2002 By Ramin Setoodeh Piper Perabo is cheerful and enthusiastic about her work. At the age of 24, she’s also become one of the most promising actresses of her generation. I interviewed her at the Four Seasons in San Francisco earlier this month, when she was promoting her next film “Slap Her. . . She’s French.” I started our conversation: “I saw your movie, and. . .” I was interrupted. “You did!” She was genuinely pleased. “Thank you.” Not the typical response from a Hollywood actress. But then again, Piper Perabo is not typical Hollywood. She studied acting at Ohio University with aspirations of becoming a theater actress. She must have been good, because she graduated at the top of her class, summa cum laude, in 1998. From there, she went to New York — and auditioned for all sorts of parts, including TV commercials. She hit the jackpot when she was cast as the lead in “The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle.” Then came “Coyote Ugly,” where she played Violet Sanford — a young woman who wants to be a singer/songwriter and goes to the Big Apple with those dreams. The movie was one of the surprise hits in the summer of 2000; and ever since, the film roles have been coming steadily. Her latest performance in “Slap Her. . . She’s French” is not her strongest work. Perabo stars as Genevieve LaPlouff, a French foreign exchange student who comes to the United States and begins to terrorize the most popular girl in school (Jane McGregor). It’s basically a remake of the 1950 classic “All About Eve,” with Perabo in the Anne Baxter role. She discussed what attracted her to the film. “I’ve been wanting to play a villain for quite some time and just wasn’t being considered for the parts because I had been playing the goody two-shoes up until then,” she said. “So when this project came along and they asked me to play the villain, I snatched it right up.” That’s understandable. In the film, Perabo has some fun with her playful French accent. “I studied French in college and just before this movie I had been making a movie in Quebec with a Swiss French woman and we had been speaking a lot of French on the set. The accent was different, but it wasn’t that far to go as starting from scratch.” Did you study “All About Eve” to prepare for the role? I asked. “I did watch it a number of times. But I don’t want to make too strict a comparison because it is one of the great classical films. I watched a lot of [Baxter’s] mannerisms and sort of what makes her seem unsettling. There are some small things she does were she’ll be standing and watching a room work. “I actually hadn’t seen it before. I’m not really that much of a film buff, although I should be. In the last few years, I’ve been watching the great films. I always intended to do theater.” But things didn’t work out that way? “The week I graduated from Ohio University I moved to New York and got a waitressing job and was just going on every and any audition I could get — regardless of the medium. And the first job I booked was in film.” That movie was “Whiteboys” (1999), a limited release from Fox Searchlight. Perabo played Sara, the girlfriend of the hero (Danny Hoch) — who wanted to be a rapper, but couldn’t because of the color of his skin. Then came the call that most struggling actresses dream of getting. She was cast for the lead role in “The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle” (2000) — a live action remake of the popular cartoon series with a large budget and a cast that included Robert DeNiro, Jason Alexander and Rene Russo. “I was on my way to an audition when I found out that I got the part,” she said. “I was on my way actually to a pesticide audition, which was horrible because I’m a vegetarian and was having all these moral qualms about whether I could actually do a pesticide commercial. “My pager went off and I was in Penn station and I got on the pay phone and my manager was like screaming, ‘You got the job.’ And it was so strange that I was by myself. I started crying and the guy at the newspaper stand next to the phone came up to me and said, ‘Are you okay?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m crying because I’m happy,’ and he said, ‘Are you getting married?’ It’s so New York — these strange people who kind of care and who are kind of crazy.” Perabo played Karen Sympathy, a FBI agent who is called upon to save Rocky and Bullwinkle from the forces of evil. The role earned Perabo some great reviews, especially from film critic Roger Ebert who wrote: “She has fine comedic timing and is so fetching, she sort of stops the clock. . . and becomes a star right there before my eyes.” Was it not hard, I asked, reacting to the Rocky and Bullwinkle characters — who were added in later as computer-generated images. “It was a lot about movement, about remembering the weight of people — how heavy someone’s hand is when you shake it, for example. At the beginning, it was really hard for me to see where their eye lines were — to be always able to look at the same spot. So they would hang like small nuts and bolts in the air, and they would take them out later.” One week after production ended, she was cast in the lead role of “Coyote Ugly” (2000). The film had several inspired dance sequences on the countertops of a bar in which Perabo’s character works — and was a hit at the box office. “I was really pleased with how many young women, young teenage girls, liked it. Because for me, what was so important about the story was that it was about a young woman who didn’t put her dreams on the backburner. Kids know what they’re going to be successful at and they should be encouraged in those instinctual callings.” Her strongest performance to date, however, has been in the movie “Lost and Delirious” — one of the best movies of last year. The film, which played at Sundance, features Perabo as a rebellious teenager at a girl’s boarding school who shares a love affair with one of her classmates (Jessica Pare). “I do a lot of prep on my own before I begin a movie,” she said. “For me, ‘Lost and Delirious’ is the closest I’ve ever come to the ideal that I set before starting the movie. It’s the closest I’ve come to creating the original thing I wanted to create.” What she does create is an incredibly complex character, who quotes Shakespeare in one scene with an intensity that few actresses can match. We talked about her college education, and how that helped with the role. “I think it can’t be stressed how important college has been to me and how important it is always. You can’t rely on inspiration all the time. You have to have a well-formed craft and process. And also, as a young person, because you haven’t had a lot of time, you don’t have loads of life experience. So I think the more that you’ve read and studied history and literature and art, the fuller your scope of life is and your characters are going to be more interesting.” Do you read your own reviews? “No, actually I don’t.” Never? She shook her head. I told her that Roger Ebert had written extraordinary things about her —comparing her to accomplished actresses like Julia Roberts and Renee Zellweger. She smiled. “I met him at Sundance and he’s so nice. I didn’t recognize him at first because he’s shorter than I imagined and so I looked at him and thought that he looked familiar and I realized who he was and sort of went crazy. I’ve seen his show so many times as a kid — I don’t know why I freaked out when I met him but I did.” In addition to “French,” Perabo has three more films she’s completed that are awaiting release. The most promising is called “The I Inside,” from German director Roland Suso Richter. “It’s a thriller with Ryan Phillippe and I play his wife so it’s a really good cast. I think it’s going to be a really good movie.” Can you tell? “Sometimes you can tell. You usually shoot really out of sequence. But because of the location [in Wales], we shot more in sequence. It was more of a play in the sense that you prepare it more in order. You get a better sense of how it’s going to be.” Then we discuss the punctuation in the title of “Slap Her . . . She’s French.” The posters and press material use ellipses. But some Internet databases have separated the two clauses with a comma (“Slap Her, She’s French”). “That’s so terrible that they haven’t made their decision on their punctuation,” she said. “I’m guessing really it’s a comma.” Doesn’t it work either way? “I guess so. But it should be a comma, because there’s not a period at the end. I’ve been out of school a little while. Are you still at school?” Yes. “See. That’s why you noticed the punctuation in your questioning.” She laughed. “It should be a comma. I find that really amusing. No one has asked me about that. I think it’s really astute.” source: The Stanford Daily Online