If you have ten minutes, I’d really suggest that you read Chloe Sevigny’s Town & Country interview – go here to read the full piece. It’s not that she’s a great interview or that she’s the most fascinating person in the world, but if you like/have affection for Chloe, you will enjoy it immensely. For people who have followed her career, we know all of the big topics: she’s an It Girl, a Fashion Girl, an Indie Actress, and she was once dubbed “the coolest girl in the world.” Nowadays, Chloe is 38 years old and what’s extraordinary is that she’s still carving out a weird little niche for herself in the industry. She does a lot of TV work these days (she was great on Big Love and The Mindy Project) and she manages to still get parts in her beloved indie films and she also manages to still be a muse to important designers. But Chloe has “grown up”. Sort of. Anyway, this piece is charming and funny. Some highlights:

On being labeled an “It Girl:”
“It must come up when you Google me or something. I’d rather cut off my pinkie than Google myself. The whole ‘It Girl’ thing—I never felt that was the correct label, because I saw that as meaning ‘flash in the pan,’ or ‘socialite,’ or ‘rich girl,’ or ‘druggie girl,’ or ‘model girl,’ even though its origin is Clara Bow, who was the coolest thing ever.”

On getting the acting bug early:
“I saw Annie in kindergarten. And then I was like, ‘I want to do that.’ ”

On finding inspiration in fashion magazines:
“Marianne Faithfull and Debbie Harry—those were the first images I ever saw of women that I thought were beautiful.”

On the friends she gravitated towards in high school:
“They were the ‘cool kids,’ the ones who were also the rejects and the delinquents, and probably the children of alcoholics or divorced parents. People I fit in with.”

On being pigeonholed in Hollywood:
“I may have hurt myself as far as being pigeonholed. It’s always this ’90s indie-girl thing. I can’t crawl out of that, at least in Hollywood’s perception of me.”

She’s still cooler than most people:
Once upon a time Sevigny was “the coolest girl in the world.” Now that girl—the It Girl—has grown up. But she will never be boring or what someone else wants her to be. “To be honest,” she says, with a conspiratorial honk, “I’m still cooler than a lot of actresses.”

She’s still a New England girl (I love all of this):
Sevigny, of course, ended up running from Connecticut at the first opportunity. But, as she tells it, she never really left. She returns to Darien to visit her mother, who still collects every Chloë-related magazine clipping, at least a couple of times a month. (Her father died of cancer in 1996.) She has gone back to Darien High for her fifth, 10th, and 15th reunions and is planning to be at her 20th in November. She will gamely fly down to Charleston for a huge preppy wedding with her old hometown pals, as she did recently, showing up in Prada while all the guys in their khakis and blue blazers who never left Fairfield County swarmed around her, a personal army of admirers who have probably stuck by her since Hollow Tree Elementary. She even has pictures on her BlackBerry to prove it. 


“New England,” Sevigny says with unadorned Yankee pride, “is my favorite place in the world.” She can talk Cape Cod saltbox houses, Fall River B&B’s, and Mystic Seaport with the best of them. She was besotted with the past when growing up, loving nothing more than a visit to, for instance, Betsy Ross’s house in her mother’s hometown of Philadelphia. Her girlhood admiration for Little House on the Prairie continues unabated. (If forced to choose: “Mary was the pretty one, but she was a little boring. I’m going to have to go for Laura.”) She talks about Edith Wharton with the same unaffected excitement she brings to her favorite Guided by Voices record (which happens to be Bee Thousand). And after all the out-there parts, what Sevigny really wants to do in her career, she says, is period drama. “I’ve always wanted to be in one, the romance of it, being swept up.”

[From Town & Country]

I love all the stuff about how she still goes to her high school reunions and goes to all of her Connecticut friends’ preppy weddings. She IS very New England. T&C also notes that after 20 years of living in the East Village, Chloe is finally moving to a “classic six overlooking Prospect Park” in Brooklyn. Apparently, there’s some talk that she might want to have a baby soon too. Chloe as a cool hipster Brooklyn mom? Of course.

Photos courtesy of Town & Country.