Life in the film industry isn’t easy, even for a gorgeous blonde with serious acting chops and the timeless face of a star from Hollywood’s golden age. Just ask Gretchen Mol.
She’ll freely admit she’s struggled plenty on the road to near-stardom. She made her first movie appearance a decade ago and endured some lean years since.
But thanks largely to her radiant performance as a 50s pinup queen in “The Notorious Bettie Page,” released in April, she’s probably as famous now for her work as she is for an ill-advised magazine shoot.
Mol, who then had a handful of movies to her credit, graced the September 1998 cover of Vanity Fair, which asked if she was Hollywood’s next “It Girl.” Although she maintains she doesn’t regret the cover treatment, it created expectations she wasn’t remotely ready to live up to.
Now 34 and married to director Tod Williams (“The Door in the Floor”), Mol still isn’t an It Girl, but she’s certainly in demand.
She spoke to The Associated Press while on location for “Boy of Pigs” — an independent coming-of-age drama set in 1963, in which she stars as a JFK paramour who befriends her 13-year-old neighbor (Cameron Bright). Like “Bettie,” it’s a role that caters to her sexy but sweet persona.
Audiences will see a lot of variety out of Mol in the next year or so. She has three features and a TV movie in the can. When “Boy of Pigs” started shooting, she had to bounce back and forth between Baltimore and New Mexico, where she was completing her work on “3:10 to Yuma,” a big-budget western starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.
After welling up in tears during a half-dozen takes of an emotional scene with Bright, Mol was quick to laugh, with a disarming honesty that she knows can get her in trouble. Unlike actors who insist they’re passionate about everything they do, she admits she takes some parts for the challenge, and others just to pay the bills.
AP: What did you like about “Boy of Pigs”?
Mol: I read it and it was probably one of the best female characters I’ve read in a while, and the whole script just moved me. ... You know those roles that you feel like you’re going to be able to sink your teeth into and do something with, and you really have to fight for them because they’re few and far between. I’ve been working much more in the past year, I think because of “Bettie,” but I still hadn’t found that next thing that was going to challenge me. This is it.
AP: Every story I’ve read about you has followed the same narrative: You were on the cover of a magazine and there was a backlash, and your career suffered for it, and now you’ve undergone this renaissance. I can’t imagine that you see it that way.
Mol: I don’t, but that’s what will only be written because it’s sort of like saying I was discovered in a coat check or something. Of course there’s more to that story. But in print, if you have two columns to tell someone’s story, you pick out the juicy details, and if that’s as juicy as it gets for me, then I guess I should be happy with that.
AP: You were working in a coat check when an agent spotted you, but you were already trying to break into acting, right?
Mol: Exactly. It’s not like I was sipping a milkshake, waiting, not knowing what I wanted to do.
AP: You’ve said there were times when you weren’t confident in your abilities. How did that change?
Mol: It’s an ongoing struggle. Confidence is something that sometimes you have and sometimes you don’t. And the older you get, hopefully, the more you have some tools to at least fake it.
AP: How did the tears come so easily in the scene today?
Mol: It doesn’t always happen. You can’t think about it as a result, because it can still be valid even if there’s no tears. Sometimes tears are boring, frankly. Someone’s too busy feeling what the audience should be feeling.
AP: Photographer Bunny Yeager said about the real Bettie Page: “When she’s nude, she doesn’t seem naked.” How were you able to pull that off?
Mol: I don’t know how you do those things, but it’s part of the job and you just do it. ... So much of who Bettie was, was her comfort. The only time she was really ever fully alive, in my opinion, was when she was posing, and I had to go there, as much as I could, and hope that I could capture a morsel of that energy that she had.
AP: So the nudity was worth it?
Mol: Yeah. I believe in what Bettie believed in, like, “What’s the big deal?”
AP: Have you heard anyone say your name, “The Notorious Bettie Page” and “Oscar nomination” in the same sentence?
Mol: Well, I would be lying if I said I hadn’t heard that, just in a review or two. But, you know, the movie was released in April, and I just don’t see that happening at all. ... Once you even hear that, you start to look at how things actually unfold, and it all seems to be so much about inner workings, you know what I mean?