Dominique Swain Interview
November 2004
“I’m twitterpated,” sighs Dominique Swain. “Twitterpated,”
for the Disney-challenged, is an intense state of infatuation, a lá Thumper
when he lays eyes on Miss Bunny.
Dominique (pronounced Doe-mi-nique) is talking about her new French
boyfriend, a Yale graduate, whom she says is “amazing.” She giggles as she points out one of the
intricacies of their relationship: “My boyfriend said my name is, like, a
really cheap name in France.
In French slang, ‘nique’ means ‘to fuck.’
So here he is, dating the American girl whose name means ‘uuuuhhhh!’”
The 23 year-old actress made headlines in 1997, when she
starred in Adrian Lyne’s remake of Lolita. Lyne has said he knew early on that she was
the one to play the infamous nymphet, and the beautiful, blonde, straight-A
student from Malibu High was chosen from 2,500 hopefuls. The film, which raised
conservative eyebrows to the sky, features her in the controversial role of a
teen who has an affair with her stepfather.
At 15, Dominique’s ability to slip from a childlike innocent to a
seductress, and her on-screen chemistry with co-star Jeremy Irons is
unsettlingly erotic— and it is effective in the same way that made Nabakov’s
original text a literary classic. Her
intense performance garnered gushing praise from critics, who hailed the
talented newcomer as the next big thing in Hollywood.
Prior to the film, Dominique broke into the business as
Quinn Culkin’s stunt double in 1993’s The
Good Son, and she narrowly lost out on the role of Claudia in Interview with the Vampire. After the success of Lolita, her Cinderella-from-Malibu story was so appealing that the
press immediately latched onto her. “They played it up that it was all about me
being so dynamic, putting myself on
tape and sending it across the country.”
Looking back, she has some regret about allowing the press to spin her
story in this way, and credits her former manager Rich Leo for helping her make
it into the industry. She had worked with him two years prior, and he was the
one to pass on her headshots and helped her throughout the entire casting
process. “He was willing to stand by
me. It’s so rude to be untrue to the
first person who ever believed in you.”
She looks upon her lapse in judgment as a learning experience, and is
now quick to give kudos to those who have helped her on her way.
Lyne was another individual who made a huge impression on
the young actress, and Dominique is grateful to have had him during her introduction to the industry. “He has helped in life, and in acting. I mean, he showed me that crying is not just
making your eyes water. He would say,
‘that’s great Dom, but what else can you do?’” she recalls. “I wish every girl had someone like that in
her life, someone who isn’t her dad who can mold her and make her feel like
she’s amazing.” Lyne’s influence on her
career was also substantial, getting her to sign with his agency, and offering
his guidance as she faced impending fame. “When it’s your first film, everyone
has got a thousand bits of advice. He just said, ‘trust your own instincts,
they are never wrong.’”
Despite receiving unanimous praise for her talent, Dominique
didn’t immediately achieve the household name status that many expected from
her after Lolita. She nabbed a role in Face/Off, as John Travolta’s rebellious daughter, but didn’t appear
in many other mainstream films thereafter.
Though Lolita made her a star
of the moment, she freely admits, “I don’t think I was ready for the kind of
fame that I might have gotten at that point, because I was too busy fucking
up.” Her head-spinning induction into
the L.A. party scene took its toll
on her reputation, which the press was more than eager to jump on. Though Dominique’s “party girl” image was no
different than any other teenager, her scandalous moments occurred in front of
rolling cameras rather than on a college campus. “I went to some Hollywood
parties and really embarrassed myself on ‘Celebrities Uncensored.’ I think
everyone has gone to a party and had a little bit too much, and basically mine
was on TV,” she says. “What a waste of time.” Her hard-core lifestyle lasted
about a year and a half, after which point she cleaned up her act and simply
moved forward with her social life and career.
Though she has worked pretty steadily since starting in the
business, she doesn’t forget the droughts that she experienced during her
rougher days. “I was in a snotty ‘I’m an artist’ phase for a while. And then
you don’t work for a couple of months, and you’re like ‘Well, I’m an artist who
doesn’t do any art. Really cool,
huh?’” Though several oversexed, post-Lolita roles were offered to her, she
tried to avoid those types of films because “showing your boobs really isn’t
that important.” While she happily
reaches for those dream projects that require sending out tapes and
auditioning, she also keeps in mind the innate desire to continue working. “If
someone wants you to do a film…and they want you as a person, especially if you’re feeling a bit down, it’s
really nice.”
Mainstream roles notwithstanding, Dominique has become a
familiar face in indie films, which have allowed her to lick her acting chops
and develop breadth and depth within her career. Among the dozens of films
under her belt, she starred in Girl,
as a bookish student-turned-groupie, and played Christina Ricci’s traitorous
sorority sister in Pumpkin. She also appears in the upcoming films The Freediver, with Judd Nelson, and Vinyl, alongside a slew of other famous
young actors including Anna Faris, Thora Birch, Lukas Haas and Jena Malone (who
is also one of her best friends.) This summer, she will be shooting film called
Liquid Dance, about lesbians opening
up a yoga studio, in which she’s neither a lesbian nor does yoga, but does
provide the comic relief.
At the moment, she is in Vancouver filming Devour, which stars Justin Akle (“Dark
Angel”) and Shannyn Sossaman (A Knight’s
Tale) as his girlfriend. Devour is a horror/thriller, centered on
a group of friends who play a deadly computer game that spirals out of control. “Since Scream, there have been a slew of really good, really scary horror
movies. I think the genre has really been reawakened.” Fortunately for Dominique, making horrors
isn’t nearly as terrifying as watching them. “Those movies scare the absolute
shit out of me.” She admits that during a particularly disturbing scene in The Ring, “I started strangling the person next to me! It’s extremely embarrassing… Sometimes when I
know something scary is coming, I just sort of close one eye, trying to prepare
myself for the onslaught of terror.”
Dominique’s family is large and close-knit, with three
sisters (including Chelse who is also an actress), a brother, and her
parents. Even when filming the racy Lolita, her parents, who are fans of the
novel, supported her throughout the project—because she was a minor, she even
had her mom on set every day. As she
grew older, her parents allowed her the independence to explore all of her
options, even into her partying days. “My parents have always thought that I knew
what I was doing,” she says, with a hint of irony. “They really let me do
anything that I wanted, and make my own mistakes.” It wasn’t until years later that her
boyfriend offered his own theories, and, in some self-analysis, she realized
that part of her wild behavior was a response to her liberal background. “While
I’m very thankful for that now, it kind of made me rebel a little bit, just to
see whether they would notice.”
Fortunately, she has always had an extremely close relationship with her
family, openly revealing to them “the diary version” of her daily life. “I think they raised me—for all the mistakes
that I’ve made—to be a responsible person.”
In recalling other difficult periods in her career,
Dominique reveals how the ugly side of the business left a bitter taste in her
mouth. “I didn’t want to take the good
with the bad,” she explains. When it came to potential TV roles, she was
heavily criticized in ways that she hadn’t ever experienced from film
producers. “They said I looked old, they
said I look fat, and they said I looked ugly…and then they said I had no
talent.” In that same week, she went out
for another show: “I went in there, and I was shaking. I could not even speak English, and I started crying in the meeting.” Walking away from
the situation, she grappled with mixed emotions about where she wanted to be,
and how she would deal with the downsides of the industry. “I was like, ‘I
don’t want to do this anymore, I don’t need this shit….Then I reconsidered. I
started seeing a coach and going back to my roots in a way. And I sort of
remembered why I’m here. Acting is not about being pretty at all. The more
interesting characters are the one who are screwed-up and more
vulnerable.”
Dominique has aspirations of furthering her career, but not
necessarily in terms of the coveted “It Girl” status that she might once have
been headed for. Now a vet in the
business, she understands the realities of what life would be like as an A-list
celebrity. “It would enable me to do
what I wanted, if I took a shine to some project…but some stars are tortured,
and every move they do is monitored. The fact is that if you’re rude to one
person, they go telling stories about you for the rest of your life.” She recalls a recent event in a 7-11, where
she got into an argument with the store clerk about some suspiciously moldy
cheese. “I just wanted to make a tuna
melt!” she laughs. When her mom pointed out that she could have been
recognized, the episode freaked her out even more. Never knowing what might show up in the
tabloids the next day, she realizes, “I think that fame is when you just have
to let things like that go.”
One of the goals that she is still interested in pursuing is
to become a pediatrician, which has been a lifelong dream. As a straight-A student and star athlete
until her junior year of high school, she was forced to take time off in order
to accommodate her film career. A new
legislation dictated that missing classes meant an automatic failure, which
prevented her from graduating with the classmates she had known since
kindergarten. “In my 17-year-old tweaked-out mind, I thought, ‘well that’s a
bunch of shit….so I basically tried to buck the system.” Because her professional career was taking
off, she decided that she no longer needed to finish high school. It wasn’t until she entered the working world
full time that her thoughts on education shifted. “I love to read a lot, but
when you enter into scholastic conversation, you feel like such a moron. It’s always there, that you didn’t even
graduate from high school. It’s like
‘who do you think you are?’ I want that to go away.” Self-educated and with a natural flair for
learning, Dominique is now finishing her last credits so that she can get back
on the academic track and potentially enter medical school in the future.
At the same time, being involved in the film industry seems
to be a bug that she can’t quite shake.
“The whole process of going back to school was supposed to be to quit
acting completely,” she says, having just completed government and economics
classes while about to shoot a new film.
Among her many goals, she also plans to write and direct. She has always been an avid writer, keeping
diaries and penning stories. “Writing
begets more writing. Whenever you read a cool article or something, it gets
your juices flowing.” A recent creative
writing class allowed her the structure that she needed to create a project,
and now she is on the third revision of her screenplay. “Actually, I wrote it
in two days because I wasn’t sleeping at all. There was all of this story just puking out of me, and then it was
done.” With the mark of a true writer,
she notes that “my characters wouldn’t do what I told them to do. They have
minds of their own.”
The level of fame that Dominique has reached as an actress
has opened up other opportunities, including standing up for issues that she
believes in strongly. At 21, she
participated in PETA’s anti-fur campaign, becoming the youngest celebrity to
pose nude for the series that also included images of Pamela Anderson, Kim
Basinger and Christy Turlington. The ad is a provocative one, featuring
Dominique standing in front of a blackboard where she has chalked the
now-infamous words, “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur.” As a self-professed animal-lover, she
proclaims that she’s happy to bare her own skin in order to save that of an
innocent animal.
She even has own menagerie of animals that have come into
her life over the years, many of which are now housed in her father’s backyard. Right now, the only pet in her home is a
“crazy, crazy Romanian mutt” that she found while filming Out of Season. “It was my
dad’s fault,” she exclaims. “I found
this dog that was about 2 weeks old, that had been sprayed by a skunk. She
could fit on my palm, and she was black and white spotted like a miniature
cow…This little dog was getting kicked around, and I turned to my dad and said
“Can I take him?!” I haven’t lived with my dad in eight years, and he was like,
“Uh, sure.” So I got this dog and we’ve
never separated until 3 day ago.” While she is shooting in Vancouver, her
sister Chelse is dog-sitting, and recently called up Dominique to announce that
the dog just had its way with her favorite pair of silver shoes.
At 23, Dominique has already experienced the good and the
bad—or perhaps the amazing and the appalling—sides of a Hollywood career, and
emerged with only a few battle scars. It
Girls come and go, but this young star has maintained longevity in a fickle
business. She maintains a positive
attitude toward life (“I’m a blonde from Malibu!”) and has learned to how keep
herself firmly grounded through her family, friends and her pursuit of
education. Her secret to success? “You just stick to your roots and the people
you love to be with, and they keep you honest…the people who support you on
your way are the people who make you a better person, and I think that’s what
real love is.”
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