Never mind his porn-star name. Before working on more adult projects (Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever; the soon-to-be-released graphic novel, Blood Merchant, co-created by his brother, Shiloh, with whom he’s also written and directed a number of award-winning short films), Rider Strong rose to teen-idol status as the harmlessly rebellious Shawn Hunter on ABC’s Boy Meets World. Since the show ended in 2000, we asked the 32-year-old actor where Shawn has been hiding—turns out, he’s been locked in the basement this whole time.
After seven years on your television screen, Shawn Hunter moved to New York City, where he became an alcoholic. No, I’m kidding. He married the love of his life, Angela Moore. That’s not true, either, but he did become a world-famous poet. Actually, last I heard he was the East Coast representative of The Center, a fundamentalist cult.

You may have picked up on the fact that I’m making all of this up. The dark truth is… Shawn has been locked in my basement for 12 years. It’s really best for both of us. I’m able to move on (well, except when people confuse me for him), and, as a fictional character, he’s much safer down there.
Let’s be honest, more Boy Meets World would only further ruin his life. Being The Dramatic Storyline in a 22-minute comedy series takes its toll. It was never easy for him to live a sitcom existence, where poverty can be a punch line, where alcoholic parents can be funny, where no matter how much you learn—no matter how much Mr. Feeny sets you straight— you come back the next week, making the same old mistakes. And the laugh track roars.

Shawn was never meant for that world. He was too dark, too self-indulgent, too whiny. He was a downer! How many times can one character experience loss? Give a heart-wrenching monologue? Go on a soul-searching road trip? Conversely, he’d never survive another genre. Despite his bad-boy posturing, perhaps summed up best by his faux-retro, pseudo-biker look, Shawn wouldn’t have lasted minutes in a drama. He may have acted out with some hijinks, but deep down, Shawn’s pretty vanilla. He never swears. He’s never done drugs. The furthest he’s been from home is Disney World. I think he’s still a virgin. None of this would fly on Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under, or House. For all of his flaws, Shawn’s, well, safe.
He could potentially leave my basement for a cop show. I could see him heading back to Philadelphia to join the cold case squad. Or to become a hard-bitten-but-ultimately-good detective, solving grisly crimes armed with only his street sense and a leather jacket. Or maybe he could find a hot female with whom to partner—just like on Castle or Bones—and their witty banter could lighten the dark underbelly of the city they protect. The problem there? Shawn ain’t that smart. Or perceptive. He’s a C-minus student at best, which seems prohibitive to good detective work. So I think I’ll keep him downstairs for now.

I treat him well. He gets plenty of food and water. He even has a window, a small square that lets him see passing feet—and dogs, if they’re short enough. He tells me he loves that window. For him, it’s like a television, looking out at real people, with real-people problems.

He’s fascinated by how unstructured our lives are, how we drift from one moment to the next, free from the constraints of narrative, the pain of lurching endlessly from crisis to resolution. He covets your formless mood. Your un-episodic joys. The way you catch yourself off-guard. The way you wander, slowly, in and out of love. How you can go back, and revise the story of who you are, because there’s no DVD box set. The way no one wants to know your ending.
Sometimes, I stay down there with him, and we share memories of the good old days. The time he blew up the mailbox with a cherry bomb. The time he peed on the cop car.

But even our best times together are bittersweet: We both know it can’t last. Only one of us can return to the surface and live a semblance of a normal life. I make sure it’s me.

For more character studies from your favorite child stars, go here, here, here, and here.

Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles, which opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival and earned the U.S. Directing Award for documentary film, tells the story of David Siegel, a real estate mogul dubbed ‘The Time-Share King” by the media, and his wife, Jackie, a former engineering student who was crowned Miss Florida in 1993. It also tells the story of wealth, classism, and excess in America in the wake of the subprime-mortgage crisis. David’s involvement in the time-share business, a specific brand of mortgage gambling that only succeeds if banks have money to lend, granted them a life of unparalleled opulence, which peaked with the creation of the family’s 90,000-square-foot mansion—10 kitchens, two tennis courts, a bowling alley, and a health spa—modeled after the Palace of Versailles. With the housing market crash of 2008, the banks quit lending to the Siegels’ premier time-share property, PH Towers Westgate in Las Vegas, forcing it into a state of crisis and foreclosure. As we watch the Siegels’ seemingly bottomless wealth dissipate, the emotional repercussions unfold with the swiftness and pitilessness of a Greek tragedy. We’re left with a complex moral about, in the words of Lauren Greenfield, “what is given and what is taken away”—and what, if anything, is deserved in American life.

Watching the film made me think about the passage in the Bible that says it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Wealth used to be thought of as immoral.
And now it’s the opposite. I’ve been working on a book about wealth for the past 10 years. I come from Los Angeles, where class is uniquely defined by money. My first project after college was a photo essay on the French aristocracy, photographing families who didn’t have any money and yet were able to stay in this contained class. Jackie and David’s story is the polar opposite. They were up-by-your-bootstraps people who made their own way in the world. I think it prepared them for the loss that befell them. They were never defined by money.

Money, however, is the very thing that defines most audiences, especially in New York. During the film, we laugh at a real estate agent’s mispronunciation of “Versailles” and the tacky, Walmart opulence of the Siegel mansion. Our response raises the question: Are we classist?

The Siegels are, at times, inadvertently hilarious. Did you worry that we might be laughing at them and not with them?
When I started making the movie, it was more comedic. When everything started falling apart, the thing I got to work with was this narrative arc in their characters and in their story where you kind of start out thinking, “Who are these people? Why would people have these ambitions?” You end up not just empathizing with them but also seeing yourself in them. The film is about our cultural values and what overreaching means in America, and the recalibration that comes after, the looking back and seeing where we might have done things differently. The country started on an amazing ride—the boom! Then we ended up with foreclosed homes and green pools and brown lawns, wondering, “How could we have thought that somebody without a job could have a loan?” That’s the journey I want people to go on. I want them to start out fascinated by, and somewhat envious of, David and Jackie, in the same way that the characters on reality television repulse us.

The Siegel household includes countless animals, live-in help (who steadily dwindle as the Siegels come into hardship), Jackie and David’s seven children, and Jackie’s niece, Jonquil, who was taken in by them to escape a tumultuous and financially unstable home life.

Jonquil is very much the Nick Carraway of the film. She’s experiencing firsthand privilege, but she also knows the other side of things.
You can also see Jackie’s story through her. Jackie made this transition from lower middle class to rich over a span of many years, and Jonquil made that transition overnight. In a way, she’s a case study for how that transition worked out. By the end—even though she says at the beginning that she doesn’t want money to change her—Jonquil admits that once you have everything you kind of get used to it, and it’s not that exciting anymore. It does change you.

For a good quarter of the film, the Siegels get along just fine, despite the increasingly obvious corruption that plagues David’s time-share properties. At one point, David, having boasted that he “got Bush into the White House,” admits, “I can’t tell you how, because I’m not sure it’s legal.” A scene at his Vegas time-share building, a gigantic property whose expensive upkeep is the initial cause of David’s downfall, shows David’s employees getting a pep talk by his oldest son, who encourages them to get people to buy “at least something,” with the understanding that “vacations are healthy.”

When we got to see the pep talk at the Vegas property, it does feel a bit corrupt.
It represents most sales in America. That’s what capitalism is based on. That’s what happened in the housing market—people were sold things they couldn’t afford, and the first people who went down were those who had these terrible loans that they shouldn’t have had. And who’s to blame? Was it the mortgage brokers? Was it the banks? Was it the investors in the public companies? David really sums it up at the end when he says, “It’s a vicious cycle, and we were all a part of it.” He acknowledges that greed and the need to go bigger and better was really at the root of it. The thing about David’s relationship with the bank is that he’s both banker and borrower. He’s selling people this dream of luxury and this time-share that maybe they can’t afford, and then he’s also borrowing huge sums of money from the lenders, and it all works as long as there’s cheap financing. As soon as there’s not cheap financing, none of it works—it all comes to a halt. That’s the story of the subprime crisis. He is both a victim and a perpetrator. In a way, none of us can say we weren’t complicit in that because everybody benefited from the values of their homes going up so much, and borrowing on them, using their homes as piggy banks for whatever they wanted, and now it’s a kind of recalibration.

But the crisis also had so much to do with the political administration. David’s endorsement of Bush becomes ironic, because the economy probably wouldn’t have crashed like it did without the Bush administration and the war that came out of it.
David would blame the current administration. More important to me, however, was the connection between money and politics, and David would agree. By the end of the film, he was no longer involved in politics because it’s not really much fun—there’s not a lot you can do—without money.

Greenfield didn’t edit out the Siegels’ direct addresses to her in the film. Near the end, we hear David tell her that it’s time to “wrap it up.” 

Why did you decide to leave in David’s directions to you at the end?
People have asked me, “Why would they do this film?” I spent huge amounts of time with them over a three-year period, and they were very much a part of the process. David really opened up in the interviews and Jackie, even though she’s somebody who cares about her beauty and how she looks, allowed us to film her getting Botox and looking swollen. In the beginning, she would always put together her hair and makeup before we started filming, but in that last scene she has no makeup on and she has bare feet. When things started to get really tough with the Vegas property, he finally said, “Okay, we don’t need to dwell on this anymore. Let’s wrap it up.”

I . THE FACTS

Style Icon: Joan of Arc. I like the different interpretations people have had of her over the centuries.

Bands that should be on MTV (if MTV still played music): AIDS Wolf, Kleenex, Necros, Heavens to Betsy, Xiu Xiu, the Sick Lipstick, Discharge, and Carcass should all be on TV. “There should also be a hall of fame for riot grrrl bands like Bratmobile. There should be a museum full of [the band’s founder] Allison Wolfe’s lyric books and guitars. Not the Eagles’.

Vehicle of choice: We have a 1960s police van with a steel cage in the back. It’s unbreakable. We’ve seen people trying to break down the door but they can’t. The thing is designed for riots.

I I . THE MUSINGS

On confrontation… I live for sincere moments. Witnessing the passionate eyes of hate and locking with them makes up for all the phony weather talk. Life without passion is meaningless. I’d rather have confrontation over comfort. I’ll be comfortable when I’m dead.

On technology… I’ve never even had a phone. I prefer booths—any excuse to go outside.

On infanticide… [Crystal Castles’ song] “Black Panther” is about a mother who’s sick of her children and throws them away, drowns them. It’s about being ashamed that something so awful came out of your body. Drown ’em like cats.

On the album art—a young boy pictured in a cemetery—for their second album… It’s about the serene calm that comes from thinking about lots of bodies slumbering in the ground for eternity. There’s nothing more serene than that.

On saying no to huge tours opening for mainstream bands… Fuck it.

On saying no to contributing a song to the Twilight soundtrack… Fuck it.

On saying no to a proposed major network TV show based on her band… Fuck it.

I I I : THE QUESTIONS

“Is it somehow more goth to wear makeup when you know that aluminum, lead, arsenic, and a rainbow of carcinogenic chemicals are potentially now dancing around in your bloodstream?”

“Does coolness matter? Nothing matters. We’re all dust.”

“Do I think that every girl, if they want to, should start a band no matter what the people in their lives think about it? Fuck yeah. If your boyfriend or father disagrees, do it anyway.”

Photography by James Orlando

SpaceGhostPurrp credits his trademark sound to a childhood spent listening to hip-hop’s original gangsters. His family, he says, played records by UGK and Eazy-E around the house, music that instilled in him a rigid notion of what hip-hop should sound like. “The kids nowadays, they’re used to hearing high-quality, crispy-ass music, and they think that’s hip-hop,” he says of the highly produced music being made by many of today’s mainstream rap stars. “They don’t know about that distortion sound. They hear my music and go, ‘Oh that’s low-budget.’ But they don’t know that’s how all the pioneers made music.”

Newly signed by indie-minded label 4AD, SpaceGhostPurrp, who built a rabid online following of art-school kids and skaters, can’t fathom how he’d have peddled his mixtapes without the help of 140 characters or less. “Back in the day, you either had to know somebody or you had to hustle to sell CDs,” he says. “I couldn’t really see myself doing that crap, like selling CDs at the mall and shit. Nah, man, I ain’t about to make a fool of myself like that.” His debut album, Mysterious Phonk: Chronicles of SpaceGhostPurrp, is out today.

Tell me about Miami and the neighborhood you grew up in. What was it like?
It was an African American neighborhood, a lot of crime and drug dealing. Hip-hop had a big impact on youth in the area. At that time, hip-hop was real popular, and everybody be rappin’ and stuff, so, it was a hip-hop infected area.

What are the people you grew up with doing right now, the ones who aren’t making music?
They’re into their regular lives, some of ‘em are locked up. They are dealing with their mistakes.

What are you passionate about besides music?
I like art and fashion. I’m not really deep into fashion, but I like creative stuff, I like to draw, I like graffiti and stuff like that.

How did 4AD find and sign you?
The word got out to one of the people at 4AD, and they met one of the people here, and they was like “Oh, we like this guy we want to meet him.” We met up and it went on from there, and everything was good.

Has getting signed to a label always been your goal, or is it just a byproduct of doing what you do?
I always wanted to be signed, but I just love making music. I didn’t expect it, I was just doing it how I wanted to because I liked doing it.

Talk about your sound.  It’s deliberately murky.
The kids nowadays, they don’t really know about that distortion sound. They’re used to hearing like high quality crispy-ass music, and they think that’s hip-hop. They don’t know about that distortion sound, they hear that and go “Oh that’s low budget.” But they don’t know that’s how all the pioneers used to sound back in the day on the old machines.

You don’t really listen to radio hip-hop?
No, I hate it.

You hate it?
I don’t hate the artists—it’s not that I hate it. I wouldn’t say I hate it, I’m not gonna say that.  It’s that I don’t feel it, it doesn’t trigger me.

Does your music come from a dark place?
Yeah, all of that, everything, at once. I was in a real bad place mentally when I wrote some of the songs on the album.

Are you in a better place now?
Yeah, I’m doing fine, I’m doing better. I’m still going through stuff, but I’m trying to hang in there.

I know you gave up smoking weed. How much weed were you smoking when you were smoking it a lot?
Oh, a lot. Like every 5 minutes.

Why did you give it up?
Just to keep my mind clear, because when I was doing a lot I was just zoned out. I was spaced out, just like, What the fuck? I would write a rap and I’d be just staring at the paper, and I’d fall asleep.

Has it affected your music?
My music hasn’t changed. I’m lyrically better, I can wake up and just go to writing, because I’m not tired from the high from the other night. I can just get up and just go ahead and write, because my mind is clear.

Now that you’re on a label and putting out a proper album, does your music have a better, clearer sound than it used to?
Yeah it does, it’s more crisp. Everything is like HD. The kids these days just want to hear high quality.

How important has the internet been in getting your sound out there?
Back in the day, you either had to know somebody or you had to hustle to sell CDs. I couldn’t really see myself selling CDs at the mall and shit. I was like, instead of going to the mall and making a fool of myself, why don’t I just promote myself online? I would connect all my sites together like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter. And say if I had like a thousand followers at the time, and I posted something on Twitter, I would keep posting that shit until all of those thousand followers saw it and clicked on it.

Photography by Alexander Guerra

Ever since Claire Boucher released Visions, one of the most exciting albums of the year, her life has been unfolding on the road. But when she’s not touring, the artist better known as Grimes is either at a photo shoot, DJing a party, or remixing her friends’ songs. That, or she’s breaching firewalls. “I’m not very good at it yet, but it’s a short-term hobby of mine,” she says of her proclivity for hacking computers. When pressed, Boucher is reluctant to discuss her greatest cyber conquest. “No, seriously,” she says. “If they find out, I’m fucked. I’ve already said too much.”

Today, the 24-year-old Vancouver native is Skyping from a schoolyard in her adoptive hometown of Montreal, and with her green hair spilling into her even greener anime eyes, she looks like a cyberpunk kid playing hooky from art history class. After Visions netted universal praise from critics and the video for its lead single, “Oblivion,” went viral, Grimes capitalized on her overnight success with three nights of sold-out shows in New York. Suddenly, everything she says matters to somebody. “It’s nerve-racking because I’m very bad at censoring myself,” she says, tugging uneasily at the sleeves of her black hoodie. “But it’s cool, too. In becoming a pop star, there’s a lot of power to change what people see as beautiful, to make a feminist statement.” Perhaps realizing how self-serious she sounds, she grins and adds, “I still don’t shave my armpits.”

Production-wise, Boucher, who makes all of her own beats, is obsessed with experimental hip-hop. “I love Timbaland, Jedi Mind Tricks, Dungeon Family, Outkast, and Gatekeeper—they’re all amazing,” she says. “But as a producer, I hate that people assume that whoever produced your favorite pop song is a male. It’s like assuming your professor is a male. I was a producer first, not a singer. I’m not even that good at singing. I deal with that by producing like the best.” That means synthesizing filmy electro loops with loopier vocals to create a weirdly familiar yet proto-alien sound, for which she’s become known as “post-Internet”—a category she once bestowed upon herself but now regrets. Whatever it’s called, we hope Grimes keeps hacking it.

I loved that interview you did with Nardwuar, where you held up the Mariah record you’d just bought. She’s the best—a lot of musicians our age reference her, and not in that stupid, sort of ironic, “guilty pleasures” way.
Musically, I think if you enjoy something you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. It’s an inherently flawed idea because you’re judging art based on someone else’s judgment.

Right. The only actual “guilty pleasures” for me are, like, drugs. What about yours?
Drinking alcohol. Or beating up my brothers. Kind of feel bad about that, you know, when I was a kid. One time I smashed my brother in the face with a hockey stick and I knocked out all his teeth.

Are you the oldest? Do you believe in birth-order destiny?
Yeah, I’m the oldest, and I was like the bad one. I did all the bad things and got in trouble. We played a lot of video games—talk about guilty pleasures, fucking video games.

What’s your favourite all-time video game?
Well, The Legend of Zelda was the first video game me and my brothers ever got, and so we all got matching Triforce tattoos.

Seems you’ve been doing a lot of remixes in your spare time, if you can call it that. Who do you most want to remix?
Zebra Katz. I love what he does. I also love female rap vocals. The rhythmic qualities of rapping—you can’t play with that so much in singing vocals. I sing out of necessity because I was like, fuck, I wanna make pop music and I don’t know who else can sing it. I wish I could rap. I’m a good rapper, but I don’t want to be, like, Blondie. When she rapped it was just the worst.

Which female rappers are the opposite of worst?
I love Azealia Banks. Her Twitter is horrible and annoying, but she’s amazing. She’s so ghetto, it’s sweet. Dominique Young Unique is so hot and fucking amazing live. She has the face of a baby. It’s a good package.

You recently had an art show in New York. Are you already planning another one?
I’d like to do something in L.A. maybe when I move there. I’ve been painting a lot since I’ve been home. I also want to have free stuff at shows, or really cheap posters. I just made a series of them.

Which visual artists, or what kinds of visual art, are you into right now?
The art that I’m like, into, I’m just really into music videos. All the art direction for the Marilyn Manson videos. I’m revisiting Marilyn Manson right now. That, and Nine Inch Nails. Like, 2000s mainstream goth stuff is really epic for me right now, better than Lady Gaga. I’m really into buto, the Japanese form of dance. The next music video is buto plus mainstream goth.

Styling by Cary Tauben. Hair and makeup: Leslie-Ann Thomson at Folio Montréal.

Photography by Max Abadian

Juliette Lewis channels an obsessed teen, fawning over a dreamy crooner, embodied by Daniel Radcliffe.
Go Here or Here to read more and see the photos.

We can’t think of a better place to ride our bikes than under the Eiffel Tower and in the streets of Paris. This playful clip features styles from the avant-garde Belgian designer, KrisVanAssche.

You can check out his latest collections on his website, and see the photos from the Obsessed Issue here.

From the Obsessed Issue Youth Portfolio:

Twenty-one year old Chase Finlay fresh face of the New York City Ballet, returned to the coveted stage last year after an injury, and once again proved to notoriously critical ballet enthusiasts that, despite his age, he “can do it, and do it better than they thought I could.”

“I feel like the audience always wants to see a fresh face. They always want to see who can step up and do that role because it’s the same steps over and over. But if you get a different person to come in and change it up a little bit, then that’s exciting. I get the initial butterflies before the curtain comes up–I think, ‘Oh, shit! I have thousands of people sitting right in front of me.’ But once the curtain goes up and I’m in it, I forget about everything around me. Adrenaline kicks in, which helps. After a while, it’s like I’m up there with my friends and we’re just trying to have a good time.”

Check out our behind-the scenes video of Chase photographed by Jeffrey Graetsch and styled by Evren Catlin.

Pop quiz: What’s the easiest way to quiet the three million thoughts simultaneously running through your brain? It’s easy. Just watch a video of beautiful people wearing beautiful people clothes and doing beautiful people things. Case in point, our new clip, Clubs, which is essentially a behind-the-scenes look at A League of Their Own, a brainy and bawdy fashion story from our spring Obsessed Issue. Using high school cafeteria cliques as their inspiration, photographer Takahiro Ogawa and stylist Aki Maesato re-imagine the glory days of debate clubs, prom royalty, and not-so-secret crushes. So tune in, and tune out.

I think it’s going to blow people’s minds,” says Eve Hewson, the 20-year-old daughter of U2’s Bono and Ali Hewson about her latest project, This Must Be the Place, director Paolo Sorrentino’s tale of Cheyenne (Sean Penn), a washed-up rocker on a mission to find his father’s Nazi persecutor. The film screened in competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and though it has yet to find U.S. distribution, Hewson is currently in the midst of shooting a sure thing. Blood Ties tells the story of two brothers on opposite sides of the law who clash in 1970s Brooklyn, and features an all-star cast including Clive Owen, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana, and Marion Cotillard (her husband, Guillaume Canet, is the director).

Let’s talk about This Must Be the Place.

I think it’s going blow people’s minds. In terms of Sean Penn’s acting and his character, I’ve never seen that kind of acting before.

What drew you to the project?

Everything! When your agent calls you and is like, ‘Paolo Sorrentino is directing a movie with Sean Penn in it, they want you to play this young girl they want you go in and audition. The character that I play, Mary, is amazing. She’s something that I don’t think a lot of young actresses get to play anymore. She’s not the sexy, cute girlfriend or the hot girl who’s dating the older man, she’s got her own story and it’s completely different than [that of] any character I’ve ever auditioned for.

How did you land the part?

I didn’t think this movie was going to happen for me. I’d heard the name come up every now and then and I was like ‘okay’—then my agent called and was like ‘your audition’s on Tuesday!’ I auditioned a couple of times with Paolo, on my first audition I was so nervous and I prepared so much, and I went in there and he didn’t even ask me to read. He just sat there and talked to me, and went around with a little video camera like, to different parts of the room and videotaped me at different angles. I was like ‘what is going on?’ And that was it. I was like what the hell just happened? I didn’t even read for him! But I think it was part of his method—he wanted to meet me first, get a vibe, and then I went back in and read for him afterward. It was a really funky process.

When’s the last time you felt growing pains, and why?

The last time I had a conscious growing-up feeling was probably when I started growing boobs. I was like ‘oh, okay this is real. I can’t go back to being ten years old. It’s a devastating moment. I always wanted to be a boy when I was younger—I dressed as a boy, I cut my hair off—I was obsessed with E.T. so I made everyone call me ‘Elliott’.  But I always used to get upset when my mom’s friend’s referenced me as a boy, even though I wanted to look like one. But then I grew up and people couldn’t mistake me for a boy anymore. I think that was pretty upsetting.
What are you excited about for the future?

I’m really excited to graduate from college. I love college but I am excited to not have to write an essay anymore. I’m excited to be independent from any sort of institution. I always loved school, but I also felt it was holding me back from doing things I wanted to do—which is a very adolescent viewpoint, but I’m excited to have my say in what I want to do with my life—not that Hollywood will really let me do that.

For the past five years, Maki Ryoke has been of of New York’s leading makeup artists. Her work has been featured in such publications as Vogue, Dazed & Confused, and Harper’s Bazaar and her commercial clients include brands such as Prada and Louis Vuitton.

Design Consultant Sally Lyndley has been one of fashion’s most daring visionaries since starting her career in 1996. Most Recently, She’s an Editor-At-Large for Love Magazine, and the Editor-In-Chief of her own website, forthosewhonotice.

Anton Yelchin’s parents have a lot to be proud of. At 23 years old, their son–who still lives with mom and dad in the Valley–has appeared in two mega franchises (Terminator, Star Trek), and has led a bunch of smaller projects to the indie-film promised land (Like Crazy, Charlie Bartlett). But last night, at the Dilettante gallery on the Los Angeles city limits, Yelchin’s heavily-accented, Russian immigrant folks, couldn’t stop talking about their son’s photography. “He’s been taking pictures since he was ten,”  Mrs. Yelchin told us. She mentions one he took of her husband as a dark silhouette on a balcony, smoke wafting from his mouth. “It’s the most beautiful picture he’s ever taken,” she said.

We don’t want to question Mrs. Yelchin—she gave birth to the boy—but it’s hard to argue against the photos Yelchin shot for our Spring Obsessed issue, the same ones that were on display and on sale last night, with all proceeds going towards the Trevor Project. Before the crowds poured in to Dilettante’s downtown LA gallery space, and they did, Yelchin scanned through the photos one last time, and smoothed the edge brought on by his first solo exhibition with the help of a bottle of Becks. He reminisced about his life as a photographer, away from the flashbulbs of Hollywood, and in dark rooms, teaching himself how to develop prints. “I remember I spent so long working on this one picture I took of my ex-girlfriend to give to her on her birthday,” he told us. “ I don’t even know if she liked it.  It’s probably in two pieces somewhere.”

Guests who trickled in out and of the space all night included Yelchin’s Alpha Dog costar Emile Hirsch, (who spent a healthy amount of time chatting up two enamored blondes), Hangover star Justin Bartha, Lana Del Rey boy toy Bradley Soileau (who just made the permanent move to LA a few days ago), Porcelain Black, Jamie van Dyke, and Matthew Gray Gubler. A DJ set by The Embassy kept the party dancing downstairs, while movie-heads donned Eskuche headphones and checked out BULLETT.tv programming upstairs. The whole thing was lovey-dovey, and not because the endless supply of Bushmills and Beck’s had everyone feeling lightheaded — it did — but because we set up a hot pink altar that let everyone relive their prom night or shotgun wedding; it was their choice. As the crowd surged to capacity, we lost sight of the elder Yelchins. Maybe they went back to the Valley, maybe they were still there, chatting someone else up about their talented son.

Photography by Rony's Photobooth

Over the next few months, Greta Gerwig will be taking over movie theaters, and she’s a little apprehensive about it. “I would be sick of me,” says the 28-year-old actress, who, beginning with Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress tomorrow, will be appearing in three movies througout the summer. First up will be the upscale romantic comedy Lola Versus, in which Gerwig appears in nearly every scene as a New Yorker on the verge of her thirties trying desperately to get over a breakup. After that, the Sacramento native will realize a lifelong dream when she appears in Woody Allen’s romantic fantasy, To Rome with Love. We recently caught up with Gerwig while promoting her role in Damsels as a student at a fictional New England college, to talk about breaking up with boyfriends, mutually freaking out with Rome costar Jesse Eisenberg, and maybe—just maybe—starting a family.

Congratulations on making the cover of Town & Country magazine.

The only thing that’s missing is I wish there was a horse in it. It’s a very horse magazine like, What to do with your stables in the winter. Whose problem is this, exactly? I guess people who live on Long Island. I don’t know.

I saw Lola Versus last week.

Oh, no!

Why do you say that?

I just have not looked at it. It’s exciting, but it feels unfortunate that there’s all this stuff coming out with me right now. It just feels like there’s been a backlog of movies recently. It’s the Whit movie, and then the Woody movie, and then Lola. I would be sick of me.

I think you’re in every single scene.

There’s only one scene that I’m not in. I remember because it was a very fast shoot. We had 25 days and I was also writing a movie during that time, so I didn’t sleep a lot. I was in a very particularly crazed moment in my life and a lot of it is very hazy for me, so that’s why I’m scared of it, because sometimes it feels like you make movies—and I felt that way about Damsels, too—it just goes by so fast and you really feel like, oh God, what did I just do? That’s always what I feel like right afterwards.

It’s like once the train starts moving you’re on that fucking train, and you have to make the best of it. All shoots have good days and bad days, but I don’t think I’ve ever ended a movie and felt like, yep, nailed it. I always end it and think, Shit, am I really going to regret that? Was I horrible in it? Is it going to be horrible?  I try to not care about that but it’s really hard not to care, because you’re making them—what else are you going to care about?

You live in New York, and you shot Lola and Damsels here. But you went away to shoot To Rome with Love. Do you prefer that?

That was great. I actually prefer living away from home to make a movie. Even when I’m shooting a movie in New York, I don’t really live in New York while I’m shooting them because they’re all-encompassing. You don’t really get your own life and in many ways it’s easier if you really don’t get your own life when you’re in Rome. But also, Rome. It’s a better life than my life. Living in Rome and shooting a Woody Allen movie is a very good alternate universe to slip into.

I know you were excited about working with Whit, but you’ve gone on record saying that working with Woody Allen was a lifelong dream of yours. How’d you handle that?

Not great. It was almost too much. I got so excited, but I was so scared. The best part of it was that I was mainly working with Jesse Eisenberg, and he was equally reverential towards Woody Allen, but also nervous.

When is he not nervous?

Yeah. I don’t want to oversell our friendship, but I think that we did have a very equally apprehensive period before the shoot started, and we were both kind of in awe of the whole thing. It was really hard to experience it. I felt like I didn’t do it because sometimes when you do the thing that you’ve always wanted to do, it feels like it’s not even happened to you. It feels like you blinked and you missed it because you were just so anxious the whole time. So I want to go back and do it again and relive it, but really savor it.

You’re now a Woody Allen character.

I know, forever my name will be in that font. You know that Woody Allen font? I used to watch Woody Allen movies all the time, especially in high school, and look at that font and just want my name in that font.

Let’s talk about Lola Versus again. The entire movie is basically you getting over a breakup.

It’s a lot of me. This is literally the first time that I’ve talked about Lola and I’m feeling like, Oh, god, what do I say about this one? I always freeze a little bit when I first talk about it because it doesn’t seem disconnected enough from me to talk about it. There’s a process of intellectualizing it and talking about your experience and about the movie that makes it not part of you, and I don’t have that yet, so this is the first go-around of it. It makes me nervous.

Have you ever experienced heartbreak on that level before?

I’ve never been dumped at the altar. I’ve had a number of gay boyfriends, which has been very hard.

What are you talking about?

I’ve had boyfriends who have ended up gay.

They came out of the closet after you guys broke up?

No, during. Those are not fun.

So they literally break up with you by telling you they’re gay?

Or you find them with a boy. It’s a different kind of heartbreak because there’s a lot of, What’s wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? What’s my psychological makeup? But no, I’ve never quite had that level of heartbreak, thinking that my life was going in one direction and it ends up going another. I mean, I think part of that is that the character of Lola and the way that movie was constructed was very much someone who, in spite of living in 2012, is really depending on marriage, and I have not been that person. I’ve never been like, What I’m going to do is get married by 30 and have some kids by 35. All of my goals are like, win Pulitzer. My brother went through something really hard; he’s much more traditional than I am in terms of marriage and what he thought he wanted. It was devastating. And my sister too! Both of them had devastating, devastating breakups in their ‘20s that laid them out. I remember my sister was catatonic for months. This will make me sound crazy, but I think right now my great love is movies and I think I would be devastated if movies broke up with me.

Do you feel like the time is fast approaching to start a family?

No, aren’t women having babies into their eighties now? I don’t know! I think that there’s definitely this idea in our culture that at some point women have baby clocks that go off and you’re going to want a baby. Mine hasn’t gone off yet at all. But it’s almost like I’m anticipating it going off, but I don’t know, maybe it’ll never go off. Maybe I don’t want that. It kind of worries me a little bit, but I also don’t want to have a kid because you feel like that’s what you should do. I’m 28 and people are making life decisions.

I was surprised to learn that you’re doing The Corrections.

Yeah, but we don’t know if it’s going to get picked up.

If it does will you be a series regular?

Well, my character’s in the first season but not really beyond that at all. I would do 10 episodes.

How does that relate to the book in terms of structure? Does it ever veer off the course of the book?

No, it never veers off the course of the book in terms of what happens, but there are things that are expanded upon. Something in the book that would say, “the science fair,” they expand what the science fair was but they don’t invent new things, if that makes sense. And it was done with Jonathan Franzen and it’s not autobiographical but it is influenced by his life, so he had very clear ideas about it.

Bella Heathcote, who appears this spring in Tim Burton’s film adaptation of ABC’s gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows, says, “I’m playing Victoria and Michelle Pfeiffer plays my employer. I acted opposite Johnny Depp, which was surreal—it was like stepping into another world.” It’s true, she did, and for the 24-year-old Australian, playing make-believe in the vampire odyssey alongside one of the world’s biggest movie stars marks a career turning point. Her post-Shadows resume says as much. She’ll next appear in Sopranos creator David Chase’s directorial debut, the coming-of-age tale Not Fade Away, followed by a role in Killing Them Softly, opposite another Hollywood alpha male, some guy named Brad Pitt. Here she is on her breakout role, growing up, and falling in love.

How did you start acting?

After school, I went to drama school. I got an agent after that, and it kind of worked itself out.

How did you start working the US?

I basically got my manager, came over, and auditioned for it. Luckily, it went well and I got a small role for the film called In Time. And once I got that, everything else started to come,it was great. Once people see that someone is willing to take a risk, things really start flowing. Dark Shadows came straight after that, so I was really lucky.

How did you first hear about Dark Shadows?

I heard about Dark Shadows through my agent sometime late last year, but I didn’t know that Tim Burton was casting for it. I met with the producer in L.A. and at the end of January I flew over to London. I had an audition with Tim and within a couple of days I had the part. It all happened really quickly.

What was working with Tim Burton like?

It’s like stepping into another world. It’s their well-oiled machine. He’s got a system and a great group of people around him, and it’s just like a family. It’s a really good environment to work in and he is great.

Did anything very extraordinary happen when you filmed?

I’d be giving away a major part of the plot so I cannot tell the whole thing, but there was a particular set that we worked on that was very intense. It was great fun, but there were some pretty challenging moments in there.

When you think about getting older, what’s one thing that you really dread?

I do not actually dread anything. I feel like I’ll be far more comfortable with my own self when I’m older. For most people I know, aging only makes them better. So I have quite a bit to look forward to. I think you become more aware as a person and of who you are. When you’re young, you don’t have as much control, but when you’re older… I don’t know, maybe it’s my idealistic view of the age.

Do you remember the first time you rebelled against your parents as an adolescent?

Sixteen was a very turbulent age. It was me and my father, I feel sorry for him now. It was about going to parties and kissing boys for the first time. But that whole year was quite a rebellion. I was really just experiencing everything for the first time. It was my first kiss, the first time I really failed at something, all those things parents don’t like at all.

What was the first thing/person you fell in love with?

I remember the first film I fell in love with. It was a French film called The Girl on The Bridge with Vanessa Paradis. I just thought she was the most extraordinary creature I’ve ever seen. I was 12.

How do you know that you’re in love with something or someone?         

Strangely, it’s something that becomes a part of you, a part of your consciousness. It applies as much to film as it applies to other human beings.

If there were a movie about your life, whom would you want to play you?

I think I’d be absolutely horrified if they were to make a film of my life.  Watching something that encapsulates my life is out of my realm of imagination. It’d be so strange.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?

That’d be a cup of red wine and some dark chocolate, or lying in bed and watching movies all day. Just to spend the day not leaving the house.

Have you been very enthusiastic about a band/film/actor/movement lately?

I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg recently, and I don’t understand how I could live the 24 years of my life without seeing it. It’s the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen.  I don’t even like musicals but I loved that film.

What scared you the most as a kid?

I think I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I was really little, and I was very scared of vampires for a while. I also watched IT when I was 4. My parents left me in my brother’s care and he let me watch it. That scarred me for life, so I’m also scared of clowns.

What are you most competitive about?

Probably Scrabble. I get really competitive about board games.

Styling by Cat Wennekamp.

“I want to wear Eileen Fisher and clunky jewelry and orthopedic shoes, and I want to nap whenever I feel like it,” says 26-year-old actor Alison Pill, whose embrace of liver spots might come as a surprise to those of us who remember her electric embodiment of the vain, magnetic Zelda Fitzgerald in last year’s Midnight in Paris. But Pill has always projected an old-soul wisdom; in the HBO series In Treatment, she portrayed a terminal cancer patient, and in Milk she was a levelheaded lesbian activist in a maelstrom of high-maintenance men. “I felt like I had to grow into my age,” she says, “and I feel like it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve finally melded into the age that I am.”

In the coming months, she’ll star in Nero Fiddled, Woody Allen’s love letter to Rome, and in HBO’s Aaron Sorkin–helmed Newsroom, a much-hyped miniseries about a fictional news show. “I’m so in love with her,” Pill says of her character, an associate producer named Maggie Jordan. “Sorkin writes these amazingly funny, super-smart but still clumsy and scattered women.” Then, in September, Pill will take the rather grown-up step of getting married to fellow young lion Jay Baruchel, whom she met on the set of the Canadian hockey flick Goon, also out this year. “My fiancé plays a very foulmouthed public access show host,” Pill says of Baruchel’s part in Goon. “My parents were like, ‘Oh, it’s so nice that your future husband has a mouth like that.’”

When tasked by BULLETT to invent a contraption for today’s youth-obsessed culture, Pill went high concept: a helmet-like creation called the Hebe Youth Regenerator, a nod to Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth. “It’s a device that literally removes memories in order to give the appearance of youth,” she says. “It’s the ultimate face-lift. The price—or the payoff, depending on how you look at it—is a sort of midlife adolescence, where you concern yourself with adolescent issues instead of more grown-up things.”

Since senescence can’t come soon enough for Pill, she hastens to add that the Hebe was conceived with “a heavily ladled dose of irony.” In fact, it was inspired by The Real Housewives… reality series. “My sister loves The Real Housewives… and she got me into watching some of it. I just got to thinking that their conversations are those of people in seventh or eighth grade,” she says. “Nobody knows how to deal with conflict. Nobody knows how to have an adult conversation or how to disagree like an adult. The really shocking thing is that most of them are mothers! What mother steals clothes from her 13-year-old daughter?”

Although she’ll soon tie the knot, Pill doesn’t seem destined to wind up on Bravo looking down the end of an empty bottle of Pinot Grigio—in large part because she’s ready for wrinkles and walkers. “I want to get old,” she says. “I want Jay to be bald and to have a little potbelly. I think it’s going to be adorable.”

HEBE Youth Regenerator™:
What is it? Finally, a revolutionary device called the HEBE Youth Regenerator™ has arrived to save people from feeling and looking old. Even their behavior will match the look of their skin, as lessons learned in the past are erased in place of a second adolescence, even in clients who are 50 and older! At last, moms and daughters can talk as equals, CEOs can relate to and confide in interns, and grandparents can enjoy the music on non-oldies radio. Who needs age, experience, and mentorship when you can have constant adolescence?

How does it work? A metal or plastic helmet with acupuncture-size needles sticking out through it, HEBE Youth Regenerator™ is placed on the head of the patient, and (depending on the severity of the treatment) one to seventy needles may be used in the procedure. These needles, which are equipped with microscopic lasers, are inserted into memory centers in the brain, searching for “youth regenerator memory abrogators.” After “firing” the lasers into the brain, the skin of the individual is noticeably tighter and more youthful.

Potential side effects*: Patients may experience a loss of memories from their youth. The technology literally pinpoints “wrinkle spots” in the brain and erases them, thus allowing a tightening of the skin without surgery. Hebephrenia, a schizophrenic mental disorder: As the client approaches an increasingly youthful look, symptoms may include impairment to daily living (the ability to think and speak clearly, or even shower) and the possibility of hallucinations. The main problem when these delusions or hallucinations arise is that the patient isn’t clear whether or not they’re actual memories.

Photography by Randall Slavin

After appearing in Lisa Azuelos’ English-language remake of LOL (Laughing Out Loud), British actor Douglas Booth dove headfirst into a couple of classics. First, the 19-year-old starred as Pip in Brian Kirk’s television adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations which airs this Sunday, and then, in a role that will make him an instant teen idol, he’s currently shooting the male lead in Carlo Carlei’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, opposite Hailee Steinfeld. We spoke to Booth about the pressures of playing the iconic star-crossed lover, why playing a gay character doesn’t scare him (he’s already done it), and our kind of depressing future.

Did you have a proper childhood or were you auditioning from a super young age?

I fell in love with acting from a very young age, but I didn’t do my first film until I was sixteen. But I had a very normal upbringing and I was very lucky. I was born into a middle-class family, and I never really wanted for anything and was lucky in that sense. I had parents that brought me up very well and always supported me in what I wanted to do. I can imagine it being quite hard if your parents don’t support you at all, and have no interest in your wanting to be an actor, or if they really wanted me to be an actor and they were pushing me.

That’s definitely rare. Usually when somebody says they want to be an actor at a young age their parents are like, shit, instant poverty.

Exactly. And my sister is studying to be an artist—so they have two complete paupers on their hands.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Greenwich in London. I lived in Greenwich in Blackheath until I was about 10, and then I moved about forty-five minutes out of London to a town called Sevenoaks in the country.

With it feels like literary projects just find. Or do you look for them?

I look for interesting characters, interesting material, interesting filmmaking. The first lead I played was Boy George, and it was an exceedingly risky thing to do—but it pulled off and was really critically acclaimed, and did me a huge amount of good in my career. I want to have a career that’s completely full of variety. They wanted to screen test me for LOL while I was in Ireland filming Christopher and His Kind. Later I came to London and I met the filmmaker Lisa Azuelos. She was really brilliant and she directed the original movie in France which was a huge hit there. I knew that if they loved this film in France, with their discerning taste, there must be something there.

For Great Expectations, were you forced to read the book when you were younger or did you just recently read it for the role?

We did have to read it in school and I loved it. Dickens writes such brilliant characters—I think in all his works he’s written over 900 characters and they’re all so individual and brilliant, he was so talented in that way. And his book is still so relevant today, with its social themes and commentary. I think that’s why everyone still loves the book today.

And you’re slated to play Romeo, which is not intimidating at all.

Just a tiny bit intimidating, especially looking at the person who’s played it in the last film. But you commonly think about that with adaptations. You just have to think about the character for yourself. The way I’m trying to prepare is by removing this big banner of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ I want to think about it as just these two young people who fall in love. I’ve been looking for stories in the media—there’s one specific story I cut out, a young girl, she’s about fifteen, and she was cleaning her boyfriend’s shotgun, and it went off and it shot her and it killed her. And the boyfriend was so sad that he instantly killed himself as well. I’m trying to place this story in complete reality, so nothing is far-fetched, nothing is fictional, it’s two real people, and this stuff happens to people. Arranged marriages have been going on for centuries and they’re still going on today in certain cultures. People are torn away from people they actually love to be forced to marry other people that they don’t. All these themes that run through it are very relevant today, and very real.

What’s one of the things you look forward to about getting older.

Loads. I can’t wait to grow old—not that I’m going to wish away any of my time, but I think—especially for a man—you get better with age. I just want to make sure I keep making choices that I’m happy with, and doing jobs that I connect with. I’m nineteen, I’m young, and I’ve got a good load of work behind me. I’m completely comfortable where I am now, I know what I’m doing in front of a camera. But now I feel like there are no limits, I can do anything, I can approach anything, so I think that just improves. I like to challenge myself. So hopefully I will continually challenge myself and keep myself interested in my art as I grow up.

And it’s interesting that your career has already surpassed a lot of stigma. Actors older than you are still told ‘you can’t play gay, it will ruin your career,’ but obviously you’ve already done that at such a young age and proved that it’s not the case.

I think it’s very naïve for people to say that playing a gay character will ruin your career. I don’t think any role will ruin your career just because of who that person is, whatever their gender or sexuality. If they’re saying that’s going to ruin my career, that’s a completely naïve person and I don’t want to be taking any advice from them. If the script is shit, okay, that will ruin my career. But if it’s just something about the character, no. Bullocks.

Is there anything that you’ve been disillusioned with lately?

I’m sure there is—nothing instantly comes to mind, I don’t think. There’s a million things on this planet that, if you start worrying about them, will completely turn you mad. The fact that we’re probably going to be drowned in however many years because of global warming, I mean there’s a million. We’re all driving big SUVS around and killing our planet, chopping down trees for god knows what. Many things are depressing. The fact that when I grew up we always used to get photos and they were put in photo albums and now everything’s digital. No one prints their photos out anymore properly, and our records are all up in the air somewhere, and if it all crashed we’d lose everything. These are things that depress me sometimes.

Styling by Ruben Moreira.

Photography by Grant Thomas

Movie Review Winners and Losers: ‘Hunger Games’ Scores, ‘Trouble With Bliss’ Bores

Winner: The Hunger Games

Although the film’s monumental box office take has been a foregone conclusion for months, the surprise is that The Hunger Games may be the exceptional cash-cow that is also artistically rigorous. Boxoffice said, “As action, as allegory, as cinema, The Hunger Games is the best American science-fiction film since The Matrix, and if [director Gary] Ross and his crew stay with the series for the next two books, we may get that rarest of things: a blockbuster franchise that earns our money through craft, emotion and execution, not merely marketing and effects.” Entertainment Weekly called the film based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, “muscular, honorable, unflinching,” and “brutal where it needs to be,” while Empire found it “as thrilling and smart as it is terrifying.”

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote that star Jennifer Lawrence, already an Oscar-nominee at the age of twenty for her role in Winter’s Bone, “reveals a physical and emotional grace that’s astonishing” and called her character Katniss “revolutionary” for being “a heroine propelled by principle instead of hooking up with the cutest boy.”  Even the Wall Street Journal, which found the film overall “both a feast of cheesy spectacle and a famine of genuine feeling,” called Lawrence “powerful” and “touchingly vulnerable.” The film, of course, had other detractors as well, including Time, which found it “pedestrian”, and New York Magazine, which was “struck by how slickly Ross hit his marks and how many opportunities he was missing to take the film to the next level—to make it more shocking, lyrical, crazy, daring.” However, given the circumstances—a major studio adaptation of a young adult trilogy that is already a cultural phenomenon—it is, perhaps, more than enough that the film is, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it, “better than any of the Twilights.”

Loser: The Trouble With Bliss

Michael C. Hall, the celebrated star of Six Feet Under and Dexter, continues his unpromising big-screen streak this week with The Trouble With Bliss. Hall’s character proves to be the strongest element of an independent film the A.V. Club found “scattershot” and “a shaggy-dog story being spun out by an easily distracted barfly over the course of an idle afternoon.” Time Out New York called the film a “collage of Sundance-cliché castoffs,” and wrote, “Hall’s puppy-dog charisma holds up under the strain, but it isn’t nearly enough to keep this messy midlife-crisis dramedy afloat.” The Village Voice offered a halfhearted defense, arguing that “the film manages to ingratiate thanks to a script that pleasantly ping-pongs from one digressive dialogue to another,” and Slant called it “watchable and likeable.” But in the end, even Hall’s talent can’t save a movie that, as the New York Daily News put it, “wastes a cast that deserves so much more.”

As an actress, Isabelle Fuhrman is in a dicey spot. No matter what she does, it’ll be almost impossible to forget her sledgehammer debut 2009’s intense psychological thriller, Orphan. Thanks in large part to Fuhrman’s terrifying portrayal as Esther, an Eastern European demon child from hell, Orphan is a classic of the genre. Furhman was 11 then. Now, at 14, the Atlanta is terrorizing the big screen again in the blockbuster-to-be, The Hunger Games, as the ruthless, knife-throwing expert Clove (Check out our interview with Clove’s onscreen partner Cato, here). As we continue our The Hunger Games countdown (only 4,700 seconds to go!), we caught up with Fuhrman, who filled us in on how she became a blade-wielding badass.

You’ve started acting at the age of 7. Did you always want to be an actress?

My sister Madeleine very much likes being on stage, and she loves doing theater performances at school. When I was little, she would always come home after school, dress me up in whatever outfit, and we would put on shows for our parents. I always say that she was my first director because she would turn to me and say “Bark like a dog” and I’d start barking. When she was auditioning for Cartoon Network, I had to go with my mom to take my sister, and they ended up seeing me as well. We both ended up getting it. I was in awe with everything. The casting director convinced my mom, and I ended up going to Los Angeles. It was only supposed to be for a month, and I ended up staying for three. My mom and I fell in love with the city, so we moved out there after my sister finished middle school.

What was acting in Orphan like? Did it feel uncomfortable, stepping too much into that adult territory?

I love playing edgy and crazy characters because they’re so different from what I am. I don’t know why I get all these scary characters; maybe I give up that creeper vibe. There are so many different things that have to lead up to why a person is bad, and it just interests and fascinates me. With Esther I don’t think I really was thinking as myself, I was thinking as that character. As far as discomfort goes, the only one I had was cursing on camera. I was really scared about saying the F word, and all the producers were like, Seriously you’ve walked around the set and you’ve heard us all curse all the time! So, I ended up saying ‘fudge’ in every single take except for three close-ups.

We are so excited to see you play Clove in The Hunger Games. How did you first hear about the project?

My agent first gave me the book when Lionsgate decided to make the movie. I stayed up all night and I finished it overnight, and I e-mailed them in the morning saying, “I have to be a part of this.” I’d just fallen in love with the series. I think I’ve read the entire series about nine times now. I originally went for the role of Katniss, but I’m 14, so I was way too young for it. I thought I wasn’t going to be a part of it and I was really sad. A few weeks later my manager called me and asked me if I would be interested to read for Clove. In the book, Clove is this muscular career tribute and I’m definitely not. But I kind of knew how I wanted her to be like; I had a good idea of who she was.

I thought it would be fun to go see the casting director again, and show her what I came up with. I didn’t even expect to get the role. When I got the call from my agent I cried. I was at a restaurant and everyone in the restaurant is looking at this 14 year-old girl crying at a table. I never thought that people could cry of happiness. The second time it happened was at the Elle Women Hollywood event last year. I got in the car after the event with my dad, and started crying like, I met so many awesome people. It’s just that overpowering feeling.Speaking of emotions, what kind of a relationship did you establish between yourself and Clove?

My character is so fierce and kind of sarcastic—this game, it’s fun for her. I had to learn how to be a badass. It was a lot of martial arts training and conditioning. For one scene we trained for a week for 8 hours a day because there was so much going on in it. I really wanted to learn how to throw the knives properly, and how to fight with them. That way I could bring her to life as I would want to see her – as if I was just watching the movie. I had to lean out, and get muscle definition. At the same time I had to figure out what in big in my mind, become her, and embody her in every single way. So I wrote a one-page background story for her past. Being able to come up with my own story for her, and make her this sarcastic, sick, masochistic person was awesome. After the last day of filming I let her go because I’ve done my job, and that’s all that I can do. I have to wait and see how it turns out.You are a very young actress. What does the future hold for you?

I just fell in love with the business and everything about it. I really want to get into producing, I actually am producing something with Disney right now, writing and directing. Acting is still my favorite part of the business, I love being different, being able to create different characters and personas, and make people feel something. In a way, I find it the weirdest way of self-expression because you basically lay your feelings on a platter and just say, Look at them. I want to be on all sides of this business because it’s something that I’m really passionate about.

Photography by Hilary Walsh

Styling by John William

Photography by Marley Kate