An Interview With Chloë Sevigny
Chloë Sevigny used to say she wanted to start a family before she turned 30. At the time the actress was busy playing characters that would worry most parents: Jennie, an HIV-positive teenager in her debut Kids; a schoolgirl going home with Steve Buscemi (five years before Ghost World) in 1996’s Trees Lounge; the true-life ex-girlfriend of a slain stealth trans man in her Academy Award nominated turn in Boys Don’t Cry. At 25, she played her first mother on film—a troubled young woman whose son accuses the school nurse of child abuse—in 1999’s A Map of the World opposite Sigourney Weaver. It wasn’t until Sevigny was 45 that she had her first child, son Vanja, with art director husband Siniša Mačković. “It’s funny that she has a baby now,” her longtime best friend, Natasha Lyonne, told The New York Times’ T Magazine last year, “because she’s so maternal. People probably don’t realize it, but that’s what she does for a lot of our friends.” The two actresses became close back when Sevigny was filming A Map of the World. On the second season of Russian Doll, the series Lyonne cocreated and stars in, Sevigny appears by way of flashbacks as Lyonne’s mother.
In her real life, 47-year-old Sevigny can only be herself, the role she was born to play. Since rising to prominence in early ‘90s New York with her era-defining style, she has seemed chary of being a bigger movie star. She still doesn’t play the Hollywood game; makes headlines for calling Mother! star Jennifer Lawrence “annoying.” After nearly three decades of acting, Sevigny retains the aura of an indie darling. Part of it has to do with her choice of projects and part of it has to do with the dim view she takes of Los Angeles, where she has stayed intermittently over the years while filming television shows like American Horror Story and Big Love. The girl from Darien, Connecticut has chosen instead to stay on in New York where she is known for flourishing on the downtown scene and forgoing scenery chewing on the big screen.
There is a generosity to the way Sevigny works; she possesses a special ability to showcase other actors. She’s worked with some of the most beloved art house auteurs under the sun—Olivier Assayas, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Lars von Trier, and Whit Stillman—but above all prefers being a loyal collaborator, willing to make sacrifices, including vanity, for the projects she cares about. Soon she will swan alongside Naomi Watts for director Gus Van Sant in the recently announced show Feud: Capote’s Women. But first up, is a “small but pivotal” role in Luca Guadagnino’s road movie Bones and All, based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis, reuniting Sevigny with the director whose HBO series We Are Who We Are featured her as its complicated matriarch. Of her part in the forthcoming film, Sevigny says over the phone from Provincetown, “I can't say she was the best mother, but her decision-making is the only way she thinks she can protect her child.”
