Here comes Summer

Crooked teeth, good manners, sense of humour - could Summer Phoenix possibly be less Hollywood? Emma Brockes meets River's little sister

Thursday March 28, 2002
The Guardian

There is something curious about Summer Phoenix and it takes a few moments to figure out what: her teeth. They're crooked. They stand out because the rest of her is so California-perfect - doe eyes, sable-soft hair, skin the colour of fried chicken - the whole Hollywood package. But if perfect teeth are a condition of American conformity, then Summer Phoenix is a rebel.

"Hey, I don't even know what generation I'm in," she says with an elaborate eye-roll. (She is 23.) "What am I, the MTV generation? I guess I am. I didn't grow up watching TV, or going to McDonald's or listening to mainstream music. Like, the casting agents are looking elsewhere for the cheerleader role." She gives a withering glare.

At the end of a long day of interviews, Phoenix is slumped in the sofa of a London hotel. She is wearing a patriotic T-shirt and a slight frown. Tomorrow she will take the red-eye to Paris for a day of European publicity. I ask if she is bored of journalists yet and she snaps to attention as if I've accused her of bad manners. "Oh, no! I like meeting you guys and hearing your questions and stuff, what you thought of the film, whatever. It's so bizarre, it's such a small sort of film and I never expected anything to really come of it and, um, I haven't really been doing press for it. I wasn't in town when it premiered, so I'm happy to put my two cents in." Not jaded then? "Exactly. I'm not like Mel Gibson or anything."

Her career is still in its infancy. Unlike brothers Joaquin and the late River Phoenix, whom she looks touchingly like, Summer didn't start acting seriously until she was out of school. She has played the girlfriend of a Jewish Nazi in the award- winning film The Believer, and the title role in Esther Kahn, about an 18th-century Jewish girl who dreams of becoming an actress. Now she is in the hard position of loving her work but recoiling from the onset of fame, which is why, perhaps, she talks with so little regard for the rules of self-promotion.

In 1993, after her brother died of a drug overdose at the height of his fame, Summer withdrew from beauty-pageant Hollywood and embarked on a series of small acts of subversion. She turned up at premieres in baggy student gear; she wouldn't have her teeth fixed; she didn't shave her armpits. "I can't deal with it, frankly," she says. "I think it's going to be my downfall eventually. I've been trying to think of how I can work in this industry without completely selling out." She shrugs. She dismisses beauty as only the beautiful can, but her distaste is genuine.

Her new film, Dinner Rush, is an appealing take on the Mob caper. It's set in a New York Italian restaurant, with Danny Aiello and Edoardo Ballerini as a feuding son and father and Sandra Bernhard as a snooty food critic. "I'm only in, what, like four scenes, maybe?" says Phoenix. In them she plays a Spanish waitress, persuasively glum and intense. Her Spanish is very good. "I lived in Central America for a few years and just learned it. I'm good with accents and stuff; it's mostly that I have a really good Spanish accent, so it sounds like I speak a lot better than I do. But I've been around French people for years and I don't speak a fucking word."

The foundations for what Phoenix would call her "grounded outlook" were laid by her parents, John and Arlyn, who raised their five children in a series of communes and Latin American retreats. River, Liberty, Rain, Joaquin and Summer were spared the brutalities of American public high school and enrolled in "progressive" schools, artsy-crafty affairs that didn't start till 10 in the morning and had daily meetings in which staff consulted pupils. A side-effect of this is Phoenix's endearing strain of hippy-speak - "My boyfriend's attitude is, like, do, do, do. And I'm, like, be, be, be" - but she delivers it with an affectionate smirk. Beneath the tweeness, she says, it's not a bad philosophy. "Ach, I'm just so lucky. You know? When I hear the horror stories of kids and their high-school experiences, I just want to kiss my parents. I did a couple of semesters of music school and I composed my own pieces and I remember one of my music teachers saying to me, 'God, you are so lucky, because the pieces that you write change time signature. You go from 4/4 to 3/8, all over the place. I don't think I could ever play something like that or write something like that because I'm so stuck in the 4/4 mentality.' I sort of look at acting like that: if you have no confines, you have everywhere to go."

There have been times, of course, when Phoenix would have liked nothing better than to fit in. Her progressive school protected her from ridicule - nobody there teased her for bringing tofu salads in for lunch - but as soon as she left and joined the mainstream she stood out like a sore thumb, especially in the film business, where her belief that there is more to life than becoming a movie star is met with dropped jaws. "I'll go on set and work with people and they'll be, like, 'God, you're just so not like all the other actresses I've worked with.' And I'm like, 'Why am I different?'" She starts mock-bawling. "I wanna be like everybody else. I guess I don't have the cut-throat ambition that some other actresses have. I don't know how good that is for my career, but I know how good that is for me as a person. And to me that's much more important."

Under pressure, Phoenix retreats into her family. She is "in awe" of them, she says. Her mother is "this incredible woman. She's just this goddess of unconditional love and she is my therapist. She'll love me for ever no matter what I do or who I am or what my decisions are." Her brothers and sisters are shameless extroverts. "We're always vying for mom's attention, like: 'Look at me! Look at me!' I'm more likely to be the person in the corner waiting to go home at a party than the person who's the life of the party."

River Phoenix was the most idolised actor of his generation, and Joaquin won an Oscar nomination for his role in Gladiator last year, but Summer doesn't feel under any pressure to match their success. "I've been working at this very slowly. I'm like the turtle in the race." She even admits to the inadmissible - that after Dinner Rush, she has nothing lined up. She wants to live a little, hang out in New York with her boyfriend, the actor Casey Affleck (brother of Ben), and see what comes up.

The vast public interest in River's death was a trying ordeal for the whole family and, for the younger Phoenixes at least, forged an equation between success and destruction. Was the attention from River's fans supportive or intrusive? "Eucch," she says, and looks horrified. "I mean, not comforting at all. I think it's beautiful and amazing how many people were touched by my brother, and I see why, because he was an incredible person and so different from anybody, everybody. And that's gorgeous. That's beautiful. But the interest in the personal, private issues of our life felt very intrusive. It was like, 'Aren't we allowed to at least grieve alone?' "

Too much, too young - that's what they said about River. But fame holds no allure for his sister. She has seen how it deforms. So she is feeling her way gently. "It's hard being young and in show business," she says. "You don't know who you are or what you want or any of that, and you're kind of trying to figure it out but you're figuring it out in front of everybody. All of a sudden everything you say is of some great importance. But you're just a kid doing some things."

· Dinner Rush is out tomorrow.

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