http://www.menasuvarifan.com ============================================== SONY STYLE magazine - Summer 2000 Typed by MenaSuvariFan.com ============================================== MENA SUVARI MEANS BUSINESS Written by Maria Speidel Sony Style - Summer 2000 Actress, Mena Suvari, who was last seen as the teenage temptress in American Beauty, would like the movie-going, magazine reading public to get something straight. “I’m not just this sex-pot who lusts after older men, you know?” she implores. “It’s always the same picture in magazines: Me in the bathtub with the roses, and Kevin [Spacey] drooling over me. That was one character I played. I hope to do other roles, maybe where there isn’t an older guy written in there,” she says with a laugh. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, and Suvari is sitting in the Chado Tea Room, a sedate establishment on boutique-filled Third Street. She is dressed in retro hippie chic: black platform boots, a flowered Betsey Johnson coat over a gray sweater and capri-length jeans. At 21, she is a petite but pleasantly curvy five foot four. But Suvari looks more like the high school students she portrays on-screen than a movie star. Over a cup of jasmine tea and a smoked-salmon sandwich, she widens her already big blue eyes, highlighted by perfectly subtle eyeliner, and explains the difference between her life and her art and what it’s like to become famous overnight. Yes, she was the flirtatious cheerleading inspiration behind Kevin Spacey’s mid-life crisis in American Beauty. Yes, in Loser (due out this summer), by director Amy Heckerling (Clueless, Fast Times at Ridgemont High), she plays a coed who is sleeping with her professor (Greg Kinnear). And yes, her real-life husband is also an older man, 38 year-old cinematographer Robert Brinkmann. It’s all true, but it’s a coincidence: “People try to discover the correlation between the characters I’ve played and there involvement with older men and [conclude] somehow that it’s a reflection of my life. That’s not why I chose those roles, and it’s not why I live my life they way that I do. It just happens like that,” she says with resignation. “If people want dish, they’re going to find it. I don’t know why people have to get hung up over an age difference. It doesn’t matter.” After speaking her mind, she relaxes. “Everything in my business has happened so wonderfully for me,” she says. “I’ve worked at it, and yet a lot of it has just happened. And I feel so grateful.” A model since the age of 13, Suvari was a serious but part time actress until she graduated from Providence High School in Burbank, Calif., in 1997. A good student who likes to paint and has “a thing” for science and the cosmos, she ditched some vague plans for art school and devoted herself to acting. Up to that point, her credits included some commercials and guest spots on television shows like ABC’s Boy Meets World. “1998 was one of my best years,” she says. She scored by winning a role as the sweet choir girl in last summer’s American Pie. Then came American Beauty. This summer, she again appears in two movies: Loser, in which she plays Dora Diamond, a struggling New York City college student who waitresses in a strip club (Jason Biggs, also of American Pie, is opposite her as the loser); and Sugar and Spice, in which she plays one of a band of cheerleaders gone wrong. Named for her British godmother Mena, who was born at Cairo’s Mena House hotel at the base of the Great Pyramid, Suvari came into the world in the slightly more prosaic city of Newport, R.I. She got her start in show business in Charleston, S.C., where her family has relocated. (Her dad, who is of Estonian heritage, is a retired psychiatrist. Mom, who is Greek, is a retired nurse.) When a representative from a modeling school went fishing for candidates at Suvari’s all-girls school, she bit. “I flipped,” remembers Suvari, who has three older brothers and claims to have been something of a tomboy. The school sent her to a modeling convention, and she came back with an offer to join the petites division of the Wilhelmina modeling agency. Two summers in New York City and one in Los Angeles followed. After Suvari did a Rice-A-Roni commercial, her family moved out west to help her pursue a career in acting. Occasionally, the pressure of having to perform got to the schoolgirl. “My dad was retired, and he was getting a pension, but when we moved out here, sometimes, with school and everything I felt like, I have to get this part.” A transplant in Los Angeles, who was teased about being from the South, Suvari has a high school experience that was vastly different from the high jinks she depicts on screen. She never touched a pom-pom, and, she says, “I had like one or two friends. I haven’t seen a movie about that,” she says with a laugh. “I wasn’t very sociable in high school. I hung out with some people at lunch, but I wasn’t the person to go to every party or even be invited. I just kind of hung by myself. I couldn’t wait to graduate.” At her Catholic school (she’s Episcopalian but went for the academics), Suvari was a repeat dress code offender. “I would wear a vintage sweater instead of the stupid, initialed sweater they gave us, and I’d wear argyle socks. I’d end up in detention writing the dress code over and over in tiny print. What her alma mater lacked, Suvari has found on location. “If anything, American Pie have me a high school experience,” she says. It was more fun.” Making Loser was a winner for Suvari too. The cast and crew took in hockey games and dinners while filming in New York City and Toronto. Suvari especially appreciated the understanding of Loser’s director, Heckerling, when it came to filming sensitive scenes, such as the one where Dora tries out as a dancer at the strip club where she waitresses. “I got to really talk to Amy about what the camera was going to be doing and what everybody was going to do doing around me. Basically I wasn’t wearing that much, so it was comforting to talk to her.” Since Loser wrapped in January, Suvari has been reading scripts, working out and pampering herself with massages and steam baths at her favorite spa, She likes to paint abstract watercolors, play piano and take hikes in the Hollywood Hills. And there’s also a wedding to plan. She brightens at the mention of Brinkmann’s name. She is coy when asked if they’ve set a date, but her left ring finger bears his engagement ring, a thin white gold band with a small inlay of yellow citrine, his birthstone. He wears a matching ring with her birthstone, amethyst. They met last year in Minneapolis while filming Sugar and Spice. “It just happened,” she says of their romance. Brinkmann is bound to be sharing his betrothed with a growing legion of fans. Shortly after the premiere of American Pie, Suvari got her first taste of fame. She was on location with Sugar and Spice. There was a football game scene being filmed in a stadium with 2,000 extras, many of whom, it seemed, wanted to meet Mena. “All of a sudden people starting saying, ‘Choir chick! You’re from American Pie,’” she recalls. “I had people younger than me, girls, wanting my autograph or my picture,” she says. “And I’m thinking, ‘I’m just like you. I’m probably even dorkier.’” Months later, she is still shell-shocked by the “surreal” attention. “ I’m just basically trying to say, ‘I’m not better than you. It’s not like I’m this super-special person.’” Some might beg to differ.