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Leelee Sobieski is the first to admit
she can be a pain in the you-know-what. Like the girl
warrior she played in the popular CBS miniseries Joan
of Arc, this 17-year-old actress isn't afraid to
speak her mind. "I have a lot of self-confidence,"
reveals Leelee. "Maybe too much." And while
her "I rock" attitude probably explains her
quick rise from minor TV appearances to memorable stints
in big-time features like Jungle2Jungle, Never Been
Kissed, Eyes Wide Shut and her next flick Here
on Earth, this self-assurance hasn't always proven
successful in her personal life.
"Like any teenager, I can be obnoxious," she
exclaims before diving into a plate of macaroni and
chess at a swank L.A. cafe. "Sometimes my parents
are like, 'Is this Leelee being a pain-in-the-ass actress
or a pain-in-the-ass teenager?' Usually it's the latter."
Overlook her self-professed brattiness and it's easy
to see that Leelee has a knowing when to take chances.
When she was 11 years old, she was discovered by a casting
agent in her unglamorous school cafeteria. Her first
acting attempts, she now says, were "really, really
bad." But the craft hooked her, like a new game
she had to conquer.
"It was like someone said, 'You can play poker
with us,'" she recalls. "But I didn't know
the rules, so I lost." Not for long. She took acting
lessons and, within months, landed a role in the made-for-TV
movie Reunion with Marlo Thomas. These days,
she says: "Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose,
but I don't care because I like the adrenaline rush."
The daughter of an American writer and a French artist,
Liliane Rudabet Gloria Elsveta Sobieski attributes her
quick wit and poise to growing up on New York's Upper
West Side and to her father's "sick French"
humor. Yet despite her successes, Leelee says she's
never been one of the popular kids. "I don't go
to the right parties or smoke pot," she explains.
Like many of the characters she plays, Leelee always
seems to winds up somewhere way left of center. She
loves fast cars but is afraid to get a driver's license
because people, herself included, drive "way too
fast." She took trigonometry again over the summer
because: "I'd rather learn something really well
than just get by and wing it." And though she loves
Mariliyn Manson ("His music is scary stuff, but
don't blame him!"), she also listens to plenty
of Marilyn Monroe's music.
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"Not
fitting in is fine with me," says Leelee. "To
be popular these days you have to act mean and aggressive.
There's a lot of pressure (in high school). We're all
just trying to find ourselves, and when people tell you
that you're pathetic and stupid, it hurts. Kids don't
realize how mean it is to dis someone. Now that kids have
guns it's gone to another level."
It's probably no wonder then that Leelee's colliding worlds
botfriends aren't easy to find. Belive it or not, sometimes
it comes down to her 5-foot-9-inch height. "Boys
say, 'I'd go out with you were'nt so tall.' They feel
intimidated. And i'm like, 'What makes you think i'd go
out with you if I were shorter?'" What is she looking
for? "Intelligence is important, and he has to be
funny. And he must be creative--I need a bit of culture."
On her finger, she twists a big silver heart-shaped ring
with an X on it. "That's what this ring signifies:
that it's high time I have a boyfriend."
As she says this, a wide-eyed 7-year-old named Sophie
approaches with a diary. "Were you in Never Been
Kissed?" she asks shyly. As the girl walks off
with her autographed book, the never-popular Leelee, who
happily played a no-boyfriend supergeek in the Drew Barrymore
film, looks up and smiles. Perhaps being different isn't
such a bad thing after all. |
