There are few Hollywood actresses left who can really make an interviewer nervous. It's just not in style anymore. They are chatty, friendly and maybe a tad rehearsed. Lara Flynn Boyle, though, is a throwback to another era. You get the feeling that, like Greta Garbo, she just wants to be alone.
Arriving for my scheduled interview with her as filming was beginning on Shades of Black last spring, I felt a my stomach knot up and my pulse quicken. I was about to talk to a diva, in the best sense of the word. She takes herself and her work seriously, and while she's deeply private about her personal life, she always manages to come across as more mysterious than cold.
Is it any surprise then that she's playing Barbara Amiel Black, Canada's own cool diva? They have a lot in common, but Boyle says that's not what drew her to the role.
"I wasn't aware of her or of their story until I read the script, but I found her fascinating. From my perspective it's an interesting love story," she said, lounging comfortably in a suite at one of Toronto's newest boutique hotels.
By the time she joined me to talk, I'd been waiting for a fashionable half-hour. Some stars might view a day of press interviews as a chance to relax, but Boyle was dressed impeccably in her trademark black, her makeup professionally applied. I admit I immediately looked at her figure, remembering the frightening photographs of her from a few years back, when even Nicole Richie could have knocked her over.
But I grudgingly admit she looked slim but healthy. Clearly, her plump lip line was not the result of nature, but in person, they were completely overshadowed by her violet-blue eyes, which seemed to look out and ask, defiantly "So?"
As soon as her publicist had left the room, she asked me if I would mind if she smoked. I opened a window and joined her in a cigarette. With an air of co-conspirators, sneaking a pleasure into business, and she began to talk.
As depicted in Shades of Black, Amiel is both ferociously intelligent and utterly frivolous, a hard line to walk, even in Manolo Blahniks. But Boyle has played both before, as Helen Gamble on The Practice or Serleena in Men in Black II.
Thankfully, Shades of Black isn't a biography of Barbara but of her husband Conrad, and Boyle’s co-star Albert Schultz bears the brunt of the movie-of-the-week apologia that Canadians insist on putting in any story about "one of our own."
As a supporting player, Boyle gets all the witty rejoiners and smoldering looks without any of the pop-psychology defenses for her actions. She's simply ambitious, manipulative, and "magnificent" as Black calls her in the movie.
Even though Boyle carries herself like a bona fide movie star, it's on television that she's made her career. Beginning with Donna on Twin Peaks, she's played a number of iconic characters on the small screen, and she's loyal to the medium.
"I love television. A series can be a big commitment, but there are many different opportunities." Boyle has taken advantage of them, with recurring roles on Las Vegas and Huff. I asked her if she would consider returning to a full time series, and she smiled and looked away. "Never say never," she said.
Indeed. Boyle has since signed on to topline a quirky comedy about addiction in the suburbs called Insatiable for Showtime's fall 2007 line-up. She'll play a kleptomaniac, and sister to Andie MacDowell.
Boyle most recent performance did not escape Amiel's notice. In a July column in the London Daily Telegraph, she compared the situation to Anna Wintour's send-up in The Devil Wears Prada.
"Anna, being very famous, gets Meryl Streep, an A-list actress, to play her. I, being barely notorious, get Lara Flynn Boyle. [...] But then again, as Anna pointed out when we were discussing what to wear to the premiere of the films about ourselves, Boyle is nearly 30 years younger than I am and Streep is nearly five months older than Wintour."
This isn't the first time Amiel has been fictionalized. In some circles it is accepted as gospel that Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride was based on Amiel - the two went to the University of Toronto together.
“Oh isn't that interesting?” Boyle mused. “Women do love to tear other women down.”
“Is that something you’ve felt, in your career?” I asked her.
“Certainly. Not all women, and not all the time. But there is a certain kind of successful woman who brings out the worst in other women. Men are easier to predict.”
Published: Monday, December 4, 2006