Julia fell for her horror film part (From Basingstoke Gazette)

Julia fell for her horror film part

NEW Yorker Julia Stiles' face is well-known to moviegoers.

Julia Stiles in The Omen

Having started her career aged 11, when she made her debut with the experimental off-Broadway La MaMa Theatre, she was considered for the role of Claudia in Interview With the Vampire, but lost out to Kirsten Dunst.

She continued training at New York's Professional Children's School and, at 15, starred in I Love You, I Love You Not with Claire Danes before playing Harrison Ford's daughter in The Devil's Own.

After several high-profile and acclaimed performances, she came to wider attention with her performance in 10 Things I Hate About You, opposite Heath Ledger.

Her position as something of a teen queen was then consolidated by her role in Save the Last Dance, in which she played a ballet dancer trying to recover from the death of her mother by experiencing a more urban culture than she's used to.

A huge favourite among all young girls, it has meant that Julia's every move is now of interest.

Julia graduated from Columbia University in the last few years and has begun a more "adult" phase of her career with performances in the David Mamet adaptation Edmund, opposite William H Macy, and in this month's release, The Omen, where she plays the mother of a young boy who may or may not be the devil.

Q: Given the spooky nature of this film, how superstitious are you?
A: I was pretty superstitious for a while. I've kind of gotten over it. It's not so much superstition about ladders and the number 666, but the subject matter in this movie.

John Moore, the director and I met and had coffee to discuss the movie. And I read the original script and I thought it was awesome. I thought the original movie was great. I wanted to play the part because it's very complicated, but at the same time I was hesitant because I was worried that I would tempt the fates or something. I don't know, I guess you can call that superstitious. You never know.

Q: What was the stunt work like on the scene where you famously fall?
A: Normally I'm very much a daredevil. I've done stunts in movies before and I have this stupid, nave attitude that on a movie set everything's protected so there's no way you could ever injure yourself.

But, for whatever reason, when we were about to shoot that scene and we did the rehearsal, of course you hear those horror stories about bad things happening on the set of Rosemary's Baby or Poltergeist or whatever it is. I thought, "I really am tempting the fates here" but then I knew it was a safe machine.

When you're suspended over 30 feet just by two ropes for three days, and the whole time you're trying to convince yourself that you're about to die or what would happen if you actually fell, because you have to have that look on your face like I'm about to die, your mind plays tricks on you and I lost it at the end. I burst into tears and it was very embarrassing actually.

There were three parts to it. The first one was I was harnessed lying flat, parallel to the ground, and they just dropped me. That was the scariest part of it, because it's a free fall and you have to have utter faith that the machine is going to catch you just before you hit the ground, and then I got into it and it was fun.

Then the rest of it was being pushed off the balcony and hanging there. It made for a good shot so I was happy to do it.

Q: What informs your choices as an actor?
A: I think when you're starting out as an actor, you just want to get hired and then, as you have more of a body of work, or if people are paying more attention to the decisions you're making, you have to be more careful about the roles you choose.

A big thing for me was transitioning out of teen movies. I think I'd done a lot of work that I thought was varied but I became known for certain roles because I was that age. I was 18, 19, whatever, and so now I'm making a conscious decision to play more sophisticated characters or be in more sophisticated films.

That's only natural because I'm also 25 and I couldn't play somebody in high school, but it changes.

That's one of the exciting things about this business, the uncertainty of it. You don't know what you're going to be doing three months from now.

Q: Are there roles you tend to stay away from?
A: I thought it was horror movies. I love watching horror films but I thought it would be boring to be an actor in one of them because all you're doing is reacting but that's why I really liked this because it's very psychologically driven.

I love classic horror films. Psycho is a great one. The original Omen is really good. The Exorcist is good. But I never thought that I wanted to act in one because I always thought actors don't really get to do much in them except react and pretend to be afraid.

What I really liked about this one, what made me change my mind, is that it's psychologically driven, so even aside from anyone's belief in the book of Revelations or the devil, each character has this intense fear of something that's an unknown force or something that you can't identify and you can't control.

Q: Did anything spooky happen during filming?
A: Yes. And I preface that by saying when you're making a movie like this, you're obviously primed to be looking for that! You hear a door creaking and you think it's a ghost or you see the number 666 more than you would normally.

But the first day of shooting, we were doing a scene where Liev hands me the baby in the hospital and we couldn't shoot the scene because these church bells kept going off for 20 minutes. And I thought it was just on the hour, but they kept going. And it was six minutes after six that they had started. So I don't know. Explain that to me.

Q: Did you spend time getting to know Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, who plays her son, Damien?
A: I did, but then I had to cut it off a little bit. He's an adorable kid and I naturally wanted to play with him. And I had to stop that a little bit because there's supposed to be a distance between my character and his character and I wanted him to naturally, when I picked him up, to get kind of stiff. So you would see that unnatural relationship.

But then I would go and apologise to him and tell him that I'm really a nice person and that I was just acting.

Q: Do you feel a shift in your life into the adult world, post-college?
A: Yeah. I love being 25, I think it's a great age. And I love not having to write papers anymore. I think it's something connected to graduating or something, I take things more seriously now.

You can get away with a lot more in college sleeping until midday is not as acceptable.

I think it made me a more well-rounded person. I had more life experience that I can impart into the roles that I play.