Fire Walk
With Lead Roles In Two Of Fall’s Most Shocking Films, Unconventional Actress Amber Tamblyn Is Blazing A Trail All Her Own.

By Sarah Haight

Photos By Stacey Mark

Amber Tamblyn is rocking out. As a Fiona Apple song growls over the din of trucks rumbling three floors down on a Williamsburg side street, the 23-year-old-actress, her Bambi-brown eyes peeking out from under a platinum wig, channels Bardot in a far corner of the photo studio: she purrs, she winks, she thrums her body up against the grimy wood floor. The photographer moves in, and Tamblyn, knowing the NYLON shoot is about to end, sites back on her legs and says, “I’m gonna shake it,” throwing her head from side to side gustily.  She’s teasing, laughing at herself, but from the sidelines, you can’t help but be a bit transfixed: this is no Joan of Arcadia. Twenty minutes later – wig tossed off, polka-dot sundress thrown on, heavy makeup still smudged in place – Tamblyn sits front of me in the back of a nearby coffee shop.

Her pale, rounded cheeks and short dark hair give Tamblyn a softness, yet her commentary – on everything from plastic surgery to politics to venomous critics on Amazon – cuts to the quick. She reminds me of any number of girls with whom I attended an all-women’s college: a bit pissed off and unabashed in her opinions, yet somehow eager to please. She’s both tomboyish and giggly. Her eyes fall on a member of the hipper-than-thou waitstaff, whose boots are covered in graffiti. “Wicked,” she whispers.

Then she’s tearing up an empty sugar package between her small fingers and giving me her take on Tokyo fashion; she spent three months there last year filming the lead role in this month’s horror film The Grudge 2, Takashi Shimizu’s follow-up to the 2005 hit. “The Japanese love the idea of those indie-rock T-shirts, but they get it all wrong!” she laughs, flecks of Splenda flying in the air. “Instead of looking tough and saying the name of some motel, the shirts will be pink and say, The Mom Road, Route 69, Happy Ending Is Our National Belief. What does that even mean?  So much subtext, though, right?” She shakes her head. “I totally bought one.”

Subtext, it turns out, is one of Tamblyn’s primary interests. The former soap actress (she was the tormented Emily Quartermaine on General Hospital from age 10 to 16) and prime-time star (of the aforementioned short-lived but much-loved Joan of Arcadia, on which Tamblyn’s Joan conversed with God) is well-aware that interviews like this are an opportunity for publicity soundbites on her films. In this instance, it’s The Grudge 2 – in which a rage-inducing curse befalls multiple victims – and the superb Sundance graduate Stephanie Daley. Yet the self-describes feminist and published poet is deft at finding ways to talk shop while digging at the issues that really get her going (at one point in our conversation, she says with all the earnestness of a women’s studies major, “In 20 years, I don’t want to be going under the knife. I want to be striking people with my brain blade!”) As for her role in a multiplex sequel like The Grudge 2 - she plays the younger sister of the original’s star, Sarah Michelle Gellar – Tamblyn doesn’t make apologies for taking the horror route. “I like the supernatural, and I like to define fear through complete and utter mystery. That to me is something much more fascinating and fun than two hours of sheer violence,” she shrugs. “You can basically see people killing each other on the news these days, so who really wants to see that at the movies? I like something that can be terrifying but truly suspends reality.” I point out that in terms of career moves, following up in the shoes of Gellar, who now commands $6 million per film, can’t hurt. “I don’t plan things exactly that way,” she says, crunching up the tiny flakes of paper in her fist and taking a long gulp of iced coffee. “One of the reasons I do things like The Grudge is because it’s set in unfamiliar territory, and the horror isn’t all about the gore. But if people catch your eye in a major film, then you can get some of the smaller stuff you love going. There’s character-driven stories that I want to tell, and that makes a cool, big movie like The Grudge all the more satisfying. If they pay attention to that, maybe they’ll pay attention to Stephanie Daley.”  

At Sundace last January, the proverbial buzz surrounded a handful of films, and Daley was near the top of the list. The achingly real portrayal of a sullen 16-year-old who, while on a high school ski trip, gives birth in a bathroom stall and leaves the dead infant in the toilet – tiny mouth stuffed with tissues – stunned industry veterans and made Tamblyn, in the title role, one of the most-talked about actresses of the festival. Tamblyn’s Stephanie is remarkable precisely because of her utter ordinariness, and when she denies killing her baby – insisting she did not know she was pregnant, and that the infant was stillborn – a court-appointed, heavily pregnant psychologist, played by the powerhouse Scottish actress Tilda Swinton, is assigned to unravel Stephanie’s secrets, while herself coping with the grief of a previous stillborn child. The anguished rapport between Tamblyn and Swinton is palpable, and the success of the film lies in the subtle ways in which they navigate their mutual mistrust and affection. “Tilda Swinton is a goddess,” Tamblyn says, sitting up in her chair and swiping the table clean. She looks at me carefully. “You know, some movies are intense because they are manipulative and go overboard, and some are intense because they’re so true they’re scary. We agreed that this is a film that people can relate to, and not just chicks. Having children, not wanting to have kids, not knowing what it means to have a child until you do, whether purposefully or not. Everyone struggles with this.”

In fact, it was Swinton who guided Tamblyn through what is perhaps one of the most shuddering raw labor scenes in recent film memory: “Tilda told me to just imagine that something really powerful was trying to get out of me. From deep inside.” She shot the scene in two hours, racing out of the stall and hurling her beet-red face into a bucket of ice every time writer/director Hilary Brougher called ‘cut.’ 

“Yeah, it was tough,” she admits. “Neil Young’s wife wife had to walk out of one screening.” Neil Young, eh? This isn’t exactly petulant Young Hollywood name-dropping; Tamblyn was raised in Santa Monica, California – she now lives in nearby Venice – the only child of Bonnie and Russ Tamblyn, a burly character actor who appeared in Twin Peaks and counts Young, Dennis Hopper, and Ed Ruscha among his closest friends. The actress grew up “soaking in,” as she says, the creative mojo of her father’s pals. And so perhaps Free Stallion – her book of poetry- was almost inevitable. “It was the scariest shit I’ve ever done!” Tamblyn says of publishing the slim volume, through Simon & Schuster, last fall. “I could stand up in front of 5,000 people and do a play, I could get naked in front of a camera, but words are just metaphors for what you’ve been through, and that can translate into any voice that someone has in their head, and come out sounding…” She pauses and levels eyes with mine, “…really fucking boring.”

Tamblyn, not surprisingly, writes with the same ferocity with which she does everything else: “Hollywood’s got a face/trophy wives with stitched-up sideburns/look like 3^rd degree burn victims.” The book has its moments of earnestness, but boring, it’s not. Unlike many actresses, Tamblyn also admits to reading “everything” that is written about her, leading to some beef with a few anonymous Amazon reviewers. “One guy said, ‘As a writer, Amber Tamblyn is a fine sitcom actress.’ That pissed me off,” she says, draining the last of her coffee. “I want him to write me and we can sit down and talk about it face to face!” Perhaps reading everything written about her provokes some insecurity, then? “Not really. How can you not read people’s reactions to what you put out there? Why the fuck would put out a movie or a poem, if you don’t want to know what people say about it?” A smile creeps over her face. “People can shrug you off as being just an actor, and assume you can’t do anything more then that. The word artist doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s cliché.” The light is waning outside and we realize, suddenly, that it’s been a half hour since Tamblyn’s publicist said a car would be waiting to whisk her back to a Manhattan hotel. We make our way to the sidewalk. “Listen, e-mail me, and I’ll send you the book,” Tamblyn says as she steps toward the idling town car. “We can talk about it.”

Nylon Guys Magazine Fall 2006