Christina Ricci
The star of Competition entry The Ice Storm talks about wigs and the machinery of publicity with Nick Roddick
She has had the biggest role in three of the biggest summer box-office movies of the 90s, but I still don't recognise her. The publicist said I'd know her because she had long, dark hair. Christina Ricci has very short blonde hair and looks nothing like Wednesday Addams.
The hair was cut and dyed for Buffalo 66, an indie movie in which she co-stars with Vincent Gallo and Anjelica Huston and which wrapped a couple of weeks ago. And it will stay that way for the upcoming Opposite of Sex, whose title apparently refers to love and which rolls on 15 June.
"I play Southern white trash. I'll be pregnant for half the movie and I get to shoot someone in the head," she says.
That, though, is beginning to seem easy compared with Cannes. "I went to dinner last night and then we went on to a party!" she exclaims. "It's crazy: things start here at like two o'clock in the morning. I can't do that stuff: I need my sleep.
"When I first knew I was coming to Cannes, I was still doing Buffalo 66 and we were working really long hours - like 12 or 14 hours a day. But that was work. This is different: this is meant to be socialising!"
As we talk, 'this' seems to belong to another world. The lobby of the Hotel du Cap is big and airy enough to be the anteroom of heaven. There is so much marble that no-one can move around quietly. But the atmosphere of hushed wealth is such that everyone tries.
"You remember Wonderwoman?" says Ricci, gazing down the too-perfect gardens that lead to the sea. "This is like Paradise Island in Wonderwoman."
Sadly, however, this isn't Paradise Island and we have to start somewhere. Wednesday Addams' hair seems as good a place as any. It wasn't hers, then?
"No, and it was very, very uncomfortable," says Ricci. "I don't know why it is, but whenever I have to wear a wig, it never seems to fit. I think my head kind of moulds itself and changes shape during the day."
Ricci's career began, however, long before Wednesday Addams. She was seven and, as happens so often in movie lore but so rarely to one's own children, someone came to see the school Christmas play and discovered her. Her first movie was Mermaids in 1990, in which she played Cher's daughter and Winona Ryder's little sister - a heavy-hitting twosome with whom to make your debut.
But starting out in that kind of company has given Ricci a fairly detached view of the machinery of stardom. "I met all those people when I was really young, like 10 years old," she says, "and you just don't care when you're 10 years old. They're just people. Cher was wonderful: I loved her so much."
Then there was the 90-plus minutes of screen time spent working with an empty space which, thanks to the magic of CGI, would eventually become the digitalised spooks of Casper.
Most actors quite enjoy joking about the business of working with special effects that will be added after they've gone home. But not Ricci, who has obviously been asked the question one time too many.
"Was it hard to get used to?" I ask.
"Nah," she says, in the conversation's only real soundbite. "I like looking at eyelines."
Ricci is in Cannes with the Ang Lee-directed Competition entry The Ice Storm, in which she gets to play close to her real age. "I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie, but the whole idea otherwise is rather scary," she admits. As for the press junkets that will follow, however, that is more familiar ground.
"Listen," she says, "this kind of life is so self-indulgent, all we're asked to do is sit there and talk about ourselves."
But what about being asked the same question 16 times in a row?
"You just have to find different ways of answering it," she says.
So press junkets are just another kind of performance?
"I didn't say that, but yes."
Ricci didn't do the agent thing to get her role in The Ice Storm. "I'd rather audition," she says. "This is the first script I'd read and liked so much that I really wanted to make it. I've done huge amounts of cheesy movies in my time, but that's what happens if you're a kid. If you want to get into the business, the best thing is to do big box-office summer kids' movies."
The Ice Storm is something else.
Set in Connecticut in 1973, the year of Watergate, it features an ensemble cast in which Ricci plays the teenage daughter of Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen). Dad is making out with his next-door neighbour (Sigourney Weaver), while Wendy, Ricci's character, is discovering sex games with Weaver's son, Mikey (played by Elijah Wood, an actor who has also served time in kidflicks like North and Flipper).
"Wendy is very much in the tradition of angst-filled teens," says the actress, "but she's not a stereotype: she's much too smart for that. They're a very dysfunctional family and they're unhappy in so many different ways. I felt like there was a dark cloud over my head throughout the whole movie and I just couldn't get away from it."
And did Wendy's discovery that the grown-up world is full of deceit and unpleasantness bring back memories of passing through that same era, as she must have done herself not so long ago?
"Nah," she says. "I always knew everything was really strange. When I was a kid, I'd go into people's houses and look around and go, 'Uh-huh: pretty weird stuff here!'"
She should have no trouble with Cannes, then.
