LOS ANGELES — Christina Ricci knew there were great roles out there for her. She just needed to wait until she was older. Not old — just older. Old enough to no longer be judged for how sexy she was (or wasn’t). Old enough that the men in the room didn’t think about her in that way.
This was in the early aughts. Ms. Ricci, who was in her 20s, was already a star in Hollywood. Just a few years earlier, she had played the rosy-cheeked, towheaded Katrina Van Tassel opposite Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s adaptation of “Sleepy Hollow.” She had hosted “Saturday Night Live” and appeared on television talk shows and the covers of major magazines. She was ambitious. She wanted to make a career out of it.
This was also an era of romantic comedies when actresses like Kate Hudson and Rachel McAdams dominated the screen. Ms. Ricci could be a little more like this? You know, feminine. Relatable. Easy to laugh. Friendly. The girl next door. The girl next door is still sexy. There’s nothing dark or gothic about her. It was cute when she was younger, but come on now, it’s time to grow up.
Some of her films around this same time — “I Love Your Work” and “The Gathering,” specifically — had flopped. It was okay to have one or two failed films, but she needed to be cautious in this industry. The danger of irrelevance was always around the corner.
This type of talk made her insecure and made her impressionable. Other people’s opinions of what scripts to like and who she should be mattered more than they should have.
So she auditioned for this new version. She was normal, fun, and likable. But her look was too precise, she was told. She wondered if she was really a leading lady. Whenever she said “I love you” for the camera, it never felt that convincing anyway.
“When I watch myself and I’m trying to be afraid,” she said, “I always find I’m just a little too blasé about the whole thing.”
Now, at 42, Ms. Ricci plays Misty Quigley. She is a terrifying nurse who has a pet parrot named Caligula, and knows how to dismember a body. She is part of a standout cast in Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” which premiered last fall and has quickly become one of the network’s most successful series. The show alternates between 1996 and the present, telling the story of a high school girls’ soccer team whose plane, en route to a national tournament, crashes in the Canadian wilderness. The team survives for 19 more months before being rescued. They may also practice cannibalism during that time.
One reason she has loved this role is because she doesn’t have to pretend. “With Misty,” Ms. Ricci said with a little smile, “I never had to play any of those annoying emotions.”
Her character is the team’s bespectacled, curly-haired equipment manager, who lacks the charisma of the more popular athletes around her. Ms. Ricci portrays herself as a passive-aggressive weirdo whose sweet, syrupy voice is filled with unnerving amounts of hostility. America’s sweetheart she is not.
Celebrities at 10
Ms. Ricci explained all this to me as we hiked up to Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. She strode swiftly up the dirt path. She was wearing athleisure and her face was covered by large sunglasses. The owner of the dog she was petting pulled out her phone to snap a photo.
I asked Ms. Ricci whether people recognize her as a lot. She shrugged, like someone who has been famous all her life.
It can be hard to keep up with Ms. Ricci’s body of work. Since her childhood, she has been performing in films and television series almost every year. She’s played a cursed heiress with a pig’s snout for a nose (“Penelope”), a privileged sorority girl who falls in love with a person with disabilities (“Pumpkin”), Zelda Fitzgerald (“Z: The Beginning of Everything”), the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel (“Prozac Nation”), a con artist (“Miranda”), an ax murderer (“The Lizzie Borden Chronicles”), a yellow crayon (“The Hero of Color City”) and a lawyer on “Ally McBeal,” among many others.
Ms. Ricci was a household name by the time she was 10 years old. She made her film debut alongside Cher and Winona Ryder in “Mermaids” (1990). A year later, she played Wednesday Addams in “The Addams Family” (the character is being reprised in an upcoming Netflix series, directed by Tim Burton and starring Jenna Ortega; Ms. Ricci is also part of the cast), in which she made an indelible impression as a cherubic-looking, precocious little girl who had a flair for sadism and spoke with the deadliest of deadpan. Despite her sociopathic tendencies, there was an innocence to Ms. Ricci’s Wednesday that still endeared her to you.
In real life, she was equally intelligent and charming. Her confidence and lack of interest in performing for grown-ups was a big draw for the media. By the time she was 15, she had already made eight films, including the mega-hits “Casper” and “Now and Then.”
A few years later, she started appearing in indie and dramatic films: “The Ice Storm,” “Buffalo ’66” and “The Opposite of Sex.” In all these films, she played characters who were less innocent, teenage girls who tested the boundaries of the adults around them and had grown up a little too loose and too fast.
Her body — visible for the world to judge — had changed, too. She now had breasts as well as hips. At 19, she had breast reduction surgery because she couldn’t stand the way people talked about her body. A few years earlier, she had an eating disorder. Anxiety became her constant companion. Uncomfortable with the attention, she began to act out with the news media, saying hyperbolic and provocative statements in interviews, including a crack about incest to a reporter who wanted to discuss the brother-sister love affair in Jean Cocteau’s “Les Enfants Terribles” after Ms. Ricci expressed her appreciation for the French novel. She believes this confrontational attitude cost her her jobs.
It was difficult to navigate her career over the next 20 years. It wasn’t that she was unlucky. There were many opportunities. She worked with marquee directors like John Waters, Wes Craven, Lana Wachowski, Woody Allen, and John Waters.
But the pressure became too intense. So she stopped caring what part she did or didn’t get, she said. She stopped being emotionally attached to her work. It was difficult to feel any passion. She’s not complaining; after all, it’s the life of an actor to hear “no.” Still, the rejection never hurt any less. To cope, Ms. Ricci used to tell herself none of it — this world, this set, this part — was real. “I used repeat to myself over and over again, ‘You don’t exist,’” she said.
A turning point
If there is a through-line, a way of making sense of how Ms. Ricci traversed a male-dominated and occasionally unimaginative industry from little girl to adult, Ms. Ricci pointed to her decision to do “Monster” in 2003. The year before, she had read Patty Jenkins’s script and loved it. She met with Charlize Thon and Ms. Jenkins after she had signed on to play Aileen Wuornos.
The film told Ms. Wuornos’s true story. She was a serial killer and sex worker from Florida who robbed and murdered several of the johns she owned. Ms. Jenkins and Ms. Theron wanted Ms. Ricci to play Selby Wall, Ms. Wuornos’s girlfriend. They explained they weren’t trying to make some salacious film. Theirs would be unflinching and grotesque. (Ms. Theron weighed 30 pounds and wore fake pearls to become Ms. Wuornos. Ms. Ricci wanted her answer to be yes. Some people in her camp thought it was a mistake. She’d look too ugly. She’d be too unlikable. There would be no turning back.
She did it anyway. She was worried, however. At the time, there was a clear path to becoming a movie star. She wanted the guidance of people who knew how to do it. “Monster” deviated from this.
The film was a commercial and critical success. The relationship between Ms. Wall, Ms. Wuornos, is so complicated and the consequences are so terrible, it is hard to look away. When Ms. Theron won the Academy Award for best actress in 2004, she stood in front of millions of viewers and thanked her co-star as her “leading lady,” saying: “You are truly the unsung hero of this film.”
Ms. Jenkins recalled that Ms. Ricci “knew she was playing the role to set up another actress to succeed.” “That’s a very brave thing to do as a young woman,” she said.
Even though Ms. Ricci’s performance received less attention than Ms. Theron’s, she took the experience as a lesson to trust her own instincts. It is possible that an industry obsessed by precedent might not always have her best interests in mind. There was nothing wrong with her.
“When people are constantly asking you to change, they can feel it,” Ms. Ricci said. “They can sense the insecurity, and so they never really buy what you’re selling. The more I tried to change and be a different person publicly — I’m sure it just seemed so false and confusing.”
‘Once she made it to the other side, it set her apart’
“When I was 20, I was afraid to go to the post office because I didn’t know how it worked,” Ms. Ricci recalled. We were dining on the deck of Nobu Malibu and had a great view of the ocean. “A roommate took me and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want there to be things in life that I don’t know how to do because I’m a celebrity.’ I’ve always really tried to live as normally as possible.”
Ms. Ricci was wearing a blue plaid dress with black ankle boots, but she was cold, and had wrapped herself in one of the restaurant’s throws. The place was crowded. As she walked towards our table, a woman called out her name. She was a fellow mother from the school Ms. Ricci’s eldest child attends. They made the kind of small talk that only parents are capable of — their intimacy born from a moment in life when you form new friendships with people because of your children.
Ms. Ricci was married to James Heerdegen, a dolly grip and cinematographer, in 2014. She gave birth to Frederick Heerdegen. At the time, she was married to James Heerdegen, a dolly grip and cinematographer she met while filming the television series “Pan Am.” In 2021, People magazine published an article that stated Ms. Ricci had sought and obtained a domestic violence restraining order against Mr. Heerdegen. Ms. Ricci is denied by Mr. Heerdegen that he ever physically abused her. She and Mr. Heerdegen have now separated.
She married Mark Hampton, a celebrity and fashion hair stylist, last year and gave birth to their daughter Cleopatra Ricci Hampton. The actress has experienced profound changes in her life through motherhood.
“I was pretty nihilistic before I had my son,” she said. “I didn’t know I had the capacity to love somebody so much. It opened up the floodgates when that happens. All of a sudden, I had feelings about everything.”
When I suggested that some of these shifts in her career and her life could also be attributed to leaving a conflict-filled marriage and being happily in love, she didn’t disagree.
“That experience, while I could have lived without it,” she said, “has made me a better actress in many ways.”
Ms. Ricci began speaking at Comic Con 2017 and has since continued to do the convention circuit. These gatherings are often attended by actors who are appearing in Marvel films, for instance. Or if they starred in a cult film from the ’90s, like she had. They’re less glamorous than splashy red carpet events or award ceremonies, but they’re lucrative and an important way to connect with influential fans.
Surprised, Ms. Ricci found these encounters meaningful. She kept meeting people who had grown up with her, who had loved her before she tried to contort herself into someone she knew she couldn’t ever be. She was able to see herself — her more authentic self — through their eyes. She began to see herself as an artist again.
She said that the experience made her want more projects that would give her this feeling. This felt right for her. She eventually decided to change her manager, publicist and more while keeping her television agent.
When I asked what roles reflected this transition, she paused and then said: “I’d say Misty, actually.”
Ms. Ricci enjoys Misty’s anger. She likes how Misty has been dismissed — that she has been pushed to the margins but refuses to go away. She uses her lack of sex appeal to her advantage.
“Misty began as a character who wants nothing more than to connect to people and is unable to,” said Bart Nickerson, who wrote “Yellowjackets” with Ashley Lyle, his partner. “What is the most extreme version of that person? How traumatic and warped can this be? To what length will that person go to be seen or understood?”
Melanie Lynskey, one of Ms. Ricci’s “Yellowjackets” co-stars, said: “Christina does a lot of things with Misty that are so weird and so good. She strikes that balance of being someone who — if she were your co-worker or a classmate — would drive you absolutely crazy, but with Christina, you cannot take your eyes off of her. There’s a lot of physical stuff to her performance, like that funny little walk she does. Or her strange little laugh, or unnerving eye contact. She isn’t like that in real life.”
Mr. Nickerson said that what is so compelling about Ms. Ricci’s performance is that she can “reach into the darkness of Misty.”
“It’s not that she’s Wednesday Addams,” he said. “That facility was on display then and it’s on display now — they’re two very distinct things that are united by her performance.”
Ms. Ricci heard a theory I had. That “Yellowjackets” owes its success, in part, to the range of women’s stories it tells. Her portrayals of emotions and the challenges they face, as well as those of her fellow actresses, Ms. Lynskey (Julie Lewis, Tawny Cypress), are true to the female experience. This truth is what makes the series so dramatic. These women can be violent, insecure, and fiercely competitive. They can be deceitful and selfish. Some of them are — at their worst — capable of murder.
They are kind and loving, too. They are characters with a lot of heart. They have an inner sense, which makes our wants and needs real. They have agency. And it’s both threatening and thrilling to watch. Male characters exist, but they serve mostly to advance the plot (and a few of them — spoiler alert — end up dead). This is rare — rarer than you think — for television.
Ms. Ricci agreed. “We did talk about the fact that the cast was almost all women, which was fun. And — not to generalize — but there was less ego on set.” Ms. Ricci had been pregnant while filming, and had been exhausted by the long hours, but she had confided in her castmates early on in her pregnancy, which helped build camaraderie.
“The truth is, Christina has always been an artist more than she was a young ingénue,” Ms. Jenkins said. “She had to fight a lot harder to be her authentic self, but the irony is that once she made it to the other side, it sets her apart. The people who are trading only on their looks and appealing qualities when they’re younger don’t have much to go for when they’re older. Christina — because she’s such a complex and interesting person — has a massive reservoir to draw from for the rest of her career.”
Whatever it is that Ms. Ricci possesses as an actress — a deep sense for the transgressive, an ability to make you root for her characters even when they are damaged or awful — is also rare.
Ms. Ricci would like to work behind the camera as a director. She is contemplative. “I was willing to change or do anything to make my career succeed,” she said. “I thought if I could just trick everyone, then once I was powerful enough to make my own work, I’d be OK, but it didn’t work like that. I couldn’t change who I was.”
Source: NY Times
