Neve Campbell Is Something Wild

Detour Magazine: March 1998

Story By: Erik Hedegaard

The other morning Neve Campbell rolled out of bed and ended up in a pair of shitkicker-type boots, a floppy Paddington Bear-type hat, a Columbo-type raincoat, and green Army-type pants. It was kind of gloomy outside. Maybe rain was on the way. She was dressed for it. She got in her Porsche Carerra and left her house behind-as it happens, it was a haunted house, the scene of a grisly murder during the tenure of its former owner-and threaded her way over to the Buzz Coffee place on Sunset. Her colors were muted, nearly faded. She looked good in them. In her freckles, she looked almost dewy.

``Am I available?’’ Neve said, while standing in line for coffee. She thought about this for a long moment. "Yeah," she said, smiling. "I'm available."

What she meant was that she was available as a person, that she was open and friendly and receptive. She wasn't a snob or some Hollywood asshole. She knew this about herself, even weirdly, just because she'd starred in a couple of hugely successful horror movies, Scream and Scream 2, and also starred in a pretty popular TV show, Party of Five, and also just because the press had recently put all sorts of icky labels on her-"Hollywood's Quintessential Teen of the Moment" being one of the most recent and ickiest. So people had begun to treat her differently. And yet she wasn't different, she didn't think. "I'm just Neve, you know?" she liked to say. "I go poo as well."

"No!" people would shout.

"Oh, yes, I do," Neve would say, steadfastly, chin up. "And sometimes it actually smells!"

"Naw!"

"Yeahhhhh!"

At the same time, though, she was also available in other ways. For instance, she was more or less available for a date. She didn't have much time on her hands for dating-two new movies were about to ope, 54, about the hairy-chested, disco-freaky days of Studio 54, and the psychosexual thriller Wild Things, with Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon-but if she wanted to, she could. After two years of marriagfe, she's recently seperated from her husband. She was alone now. She was out there, 24 years old, and available?

"What do I find dreamy?" she said, pouring sugar. "Oh, just a great, wonderful conversation. I like talking about life and lvoe and people's minds and what makes them tick and why they are who they are, and all that good stuff. That's what I like talking about."

She slurped on her coffee and stepped outside. The sky was lowering. She sat at a plastic table, on a plastic chair, half under a kind of awning and lit up a cigarette. She exhaled and a great cloud of smoke spread itself out, briefly occluding her, Neve. Then she came back, talking about all that stuff.

WHAT YOU WOULD GET IF YOU GOT NEVE WAS someone who had no problem swiping cigarette lighters at parties but was otherwise honest and forthright; who wouldn't show up nude in one of her movies (though girl-kissing was just fine);who read spiritually oriented books; who could get random bald spots on the top of her head; who had bunions; who kept a journal filled with secrets and had lots of them; who said corny but well-meaning things like "For me, everything in life is a learning experience, whether it be negative or positive." Also, she owned that fancy Porsche and that haunted house. Plus, she was fond of hugging and always felt warm to the touch. Maybe she'd have given up cigarettes, which she'd been loving for a good 10 years. Her plan was to drop in on the hypnotist next week, but sometimes the very thought of going under-of letting someone into that murky, infernal neighborhood down below-freaked her out.

She rocked forward in her seat. "Like, if they can tell you to quite smoking, can they tell you to skittish. "I mean, suddenly you're having these horrible nightmares throughout the day, or suddenly you hate somebody horribly, or suddenly you can't act-and it could be because of the hypnotist, but you would never know it."

These were the kinds of thoughts that confronted Neve. They were perplexing and largely unanswerable. You could ponder them for days and still not get too far. She knew this. "Maybe I should learn how to let go of control," she said, laughing. But still they came to her. Another Neve thought: "I think I am a very good person, so I dont' need to ask to be a better person. But if I wasn't a good person, I wouldn't know to ask for it, you know?"

This stuff was head-spinning. But that was Neve for you, lively and fun and all, but also kind of burdened.

She took a puff on her cigarette and held the thing up for inspection.

"I really do enjoy smoking," she said positively.

SHE CRIED OFTEN. RECENTLY SHE CRIED WHEN she went back home to Guelph, Ontario, where she grew up. She grew up wanting to become a ballerina and at age 9 joined the National Ballet School of Canada. The other kids there where nasty shits, and the competition was fierce, and knees and problems already with arthritis and sciatica. As a 14-year-old, she suffered what may be termed a nervous breakdown-"I basically cracked, but no, I wasn't in an insane asylum or anything"-spent a fair amount of time in the company of a shrink, had her private thoughts betrayed by this shrink to the school and left school. That was a blessing. Shortly thereafter, she got a dancing job in a Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera, hooked it through 800 shows, moved to L.A. and two weeks later was cast in Party of Five, which was followed by her first big movie role, in the supernatural thriller The Craft, then the Scream flicks, with the divorce in between; and then deranged fans started sending her black roses, and tabloid photographers started showing up outside her kitchen window, and so on.

Anyway, she was driving her rental car on the Guelph Line and saw the Church of Our Lady steeple on the outskirts of town, and the stores where her mother used to buy her treats. All of a sudden, she just started sobbing.

Neve flipped up the brim of her Paddington Bear hat to explain the tears. "Life seems very unrealistic and overwhelming in a lot of ways," she said. "And going back to remembering when I was a child, and I was someone's niece, and I was someone's sister, and I was someone's daughter, and when that's all I was, was just Neve-I felt a loss there. I can't go back. Not that I would choose to. But it makes me sad."

She smiled. She had the gentlest of smiles. "It's very odd," she said, "how certain things just spring that off, and your're just crying, you know?"

She was silent for a moment. Then she talked about crying while watching Cher on TV during Sonny's funeral and about crying after spending several hours with a woman in jail, in preparation for her role in Wild Things. I'll cry more at other people's experiences of love or sorrow than with my own than I am with someone else's. I mean, in a lot of ways, I should definitely get more in touch with myself."

She swirled coffee around in her coffee cup. "I can just shut down sometimes," she said. "That's not a good thing. Because you can get pretty lost, and it takes itself out in other ways," although in what other ways she did not say.

AFTER A WHILE, SHE STUBBED OUT HER cigarette and though about how far she might go on a first date. She wouldn't go far. "I think now, probably, I wouldn't go that far at all," she said. "It's really about getting to know the person. I mean, women do tend to get these love emotions after having sex, and I wouldn't want them to be false, because that creates something that's not there. But, I would kiss on a first date. Oh yeah, I would kiss. I'd do that that," she said, laughing.

She probably wouldn't kiss you, though, if you took her out to dinner and when you ate you accidentally scraped the fork against your teeth, thereby making a noise. "Oh, man, that drives me nuts!" Neve said. "I can't stand it. Makes me cringe! Drives me crazy!"

She had other dislikes, too. For instance, she disliked negative or angry people who knew they were being negative or angry and yet did nothing to change themselves. "It's terribly, terribly disturbing that anyone would make that choice," she liked to say.

She also did not look fondly upon people who tried to kiss her after eating peanut butter. This happened to her once. Actually, it happened to her at the moment of her first kiss, when she was 6, during a childhood schoolyard kissing competition to see who could kiss the longest. Neve was paired up with one Larry Hammond.

"It was the most vile experience of my life," Neve recalled. "He'd eaten a peanut butter sandwich before I kissed him. His breath was so bad that I wanted to vomit. It was awful, just awful."

She shuddered, visibly, and recoiled a little, right where she sat.

ALONGSIDE KEVIN BACON AND MATT DILLON in Wild Things, Neve plays a rather fucked up, rather murderous teenager. Among other things, the movie is notable for the full frontal shot of Bacon's wang-" If he wants to be dangling, then that's fine with me," said Neve- and for Neve's sizzling, soul-kissing scene with actress Denise Richards. It was the first time Neve had ever really kissed a woman onscreen or off. In preparation, she and Richards drank margaritas first, then a bottle of wine. Afterwards, Neve asked herself how she felt about it. Neve decided:"I feel OK abiout it!"

In fact, there are lots of things Neve felt OK about. For example, she felt OK about her haunted house. The previous owners had a maid who was slaughtered in the place, and not the place has a spirit. This didn't bother Neve. She liked the ghost. She hadn't seen it herself but friends had. Odd things went on. The furnace would all of a sudden turn itself off. Or, the lights would go out. Other than that, it wasn't a big deal. "She's cool. I'm cool. We don't bug each other, so it's all right."

She's also OK with not really wanting to do a Scream 3 movie. Or maybe that was just her position. "Oh, I'm holding out," she said, giggling. "I mean, I don't know if I really want to do it or not. But Wes (Craven, the director) told me he won't do it without me, so I'm sitting in a pretty strong position."

Finally, she was OK with not talking much. At parties or bars or even while entertaining at her own haunted house, she would just as soon not be the center of attention. Instead, she's prefer to sit in a corner not talking to anyone.

"It's funny," she said, "because people always complain that I'm not talking enough or am awfully quiet at points within a night. But I kind of just get a kick out of watching."

SOMETIMES HER HAIR FELL out. When she was making two movies at once, or one movie and one TV show at once, or was otherwise under the gun, out it came, leaving a bald spot on the top of her head.

Today though, she had a full head of hair. "It's fine right now, thank you," Neve said, brightly. Then she laughed. Neve had a great laugh. It threw together a kind of bleat and a kind of foghorn noise, so it actually came off as kind of a loud, penetrating bleat in the fog. It was charming and infectious and after a while people often found themselves laughing along with Neve, as she laughed at the things that sometimes bedeviled her and also made her the person she was. It was a whole laughing scene, although, of course, what you were laughing also caused Neve considerable anguish and was, in some ways, quite sad.

IF, AFTER A PERIOD OF TIME, YOU GOT TO THE point where you were rummaging through Neve's medicine cabinet, you would most likely find some Tylenol and some vitamins and quite a few things for her bunions, mostly ungeuents and pads. She had a terrible case of bunions. They hurt like hell and some days she though she'd like to get them shaved off. But then if she did that, she'd never be able to dance again, and she still liked to dance. So, she put up with the pain of the bunions, which was why she was so often seen limping around at movie premieres. She looked down at her shitkicker-type boots. These particular boots were truly OK. They were well broken in and didn't hurt her at all. On the other hand they were getting old. She fretted about them wearing out soon. Then what would she do?

Well, she could get them resoled.

That struck Neve as a novel idea. "I could right?" she said, suddenly optimistic. "I've never done that before. But heym yeah, that's right."

She stuck her feet back under the table and talked about love.

She had only been in love twice but twice was enough to know a thing or two.

"Love is a very hard thing," she said. "It can also be absolutely incredible. It's kind of like whne you put your hand under hot water and for an instant you can't tell whether it's actually hot or cold. Love is the same thing.

"It's overwhelming," she went on. "Your life is turned upside down. All of a sudden everything that was important in your life is no longer important, and it's all about that one person."

She lit a cigarette, thinking about love and how it approached her. It is true she is available. She was no longer Neve of Guelph but Neve of L.A. She discussed a few of the difficulties of being in love and being Neve of L.A. She said, "I mean, in the end, with anyone you meet, you have to be aware of the fact that it is possible that they could be with you for the wrong reasons."

That was something to think about. of course, as usual, she had lots of things to think about-her fear of hypnotists, her falling-out hair, her ghost, her feet, the way she would sometimes shut down, and the way that would take itself out in other ways-and, thus, lots to talk about with any dates that might come her way. She arranged her lighter and cigarettes on the table, then waited for what might happen next.