Not afraid of the dark side
Suvari wants to prove she isn’t just an American beauty
Mena Suvari just got out of a wig fitting for the Lifetime Original Movie “Sex & Lies in Sin City.” The actress’ hair has become somewhat of a testament to how committed the 29-year-old is to taking on meaty, interesting roles.
Just last year, she shaved her blond locks for a role in “The Garden of Eden,” and she’s sporting cornrows in her latest thriller, “Stuck.” The movie is based on the highly publicized real-life hit and run crime of Chante Mallard, an African-American woman from Texas.
“[Director] Stuart Gordon and I were really trying to create a particular kind of character and the community that she comes from and the kind of people she associates with,” says Suvari about the decision to wear braids.
To her credit, Suvari has stepped away from the pretty-girl roles that made her the ideal girlfriend mold for teen boys and the nymphet lust object for grown men. Remember those vampy “American Beauty” posters?
Instead, the Rhode Island native has fearlessly taken on flawed, dark characters, such as a drugged-out meth head in “Spun” (she’s grimy, constipated and fully straining on the can). In “Stuck,” she plays Brandi, a white-girl-from-the-hood nursing home attendee who drops too much Ecstasy, shoots bourbon (supplied by her drug dealer boyfriend) and hits a homeless person while driving home high.
“What do you want to know about it?” snaps Suvari, perhaps a little weary of explaining her recent choices of grittier roles. “There are many sides to my personality, and I’ve always wanted to challenge myself and never play the same kind of character. This story really just responded to me,” she explains. “I worked on films, like ‘Domino’ and ‘Spun,’ where people afterwards didn’t realize I was in it. I take that as a compliment in a way. I’ve done my job then as an actress.”
Though the movie feels horror-campy at times — come on, Mena Suvari is wearing cornrows, and there is a bloody, conscious man stuck in a windshield for days — and there are plenty of gory, stomach-churning scenes, Suvari does a good job of conveying the anxiety and fear her character is going though.
“I believe that Brandi is inherently a good person. She had a 30-second window to make a decision, and she clearly made the wrong one. And after that, it keeps escalating,” she says.
The movie also attempts to comment on society’s amorality.
“It really made me question what that says about humanity — do we all have that kind of animal instinct in us?” Suvari asks. “It almost becomes survival of the fittest, because [Brandi is] faced, in her mind, with losing everything she’s worked so hard for. And she decides to fight for it.”
Meanwhile, Suvari will be fighting for interesting female roles in Hollywood.