Shannyn Sossamon
Interview by Luke Buckmaster.
Shannyn Sossamon is a darkly seductive image of cool. Her moony eyes, creamy brown skin and stoner-chic demeanour linger in that modish alternative air a little to the left of popular vogue.
Sossamon’s film career began unremarkably as Heath Ledger’s GF in 2001’s balderdash period movie, A Knights Tale. She has since trodden a varied path, with roles in mainstream mulch and grungy indie productions.
She has played the mistreated virgin in Rules of Attraction, the cheating girlfriend in The Holiday, the Brazilian bombshell in Undiscovered. She has starred alongside Courtney Cox in the dark TV drama Dirt, with Pink in the horror pic Catacombs and opposite George Clooney in a commercial for Italian wine company Martini.
It’s a CV that appears to have been carefully mapped and deliberately structured in order to present a well-balanced and commercially viable portfolio demonstrative of range and versatility in various media.
But as Sossamon explains to Spook from her LA abode, where she lives with her 7-year-old son, the fashionably named Audio Science Clayton, perception isn’t quite the truth.
“The diversity of all my roles actually came from me being kind of confused and saying ‘you know what, sure, I’ll try that’. My role selections certainly weren’t calculated. When I work with someone who is a cookie cutter, playing by the rules a little bit, then
I think that they just ruin me. I need
to be a lot pickier now. I plan to do things I will more proudly call choices. They are going to be more thought out and decided with passion and gusto.”
Sossamon doesn’t seem to be lacking in either. In addition to acting, the 31-year-old upper crust bohemian dances, paints, writes, plays the drums and once worked as a DJ. She never, in fact, came to Hollywood to act. Sossamon was an aspiring dancer, a dream she held onto during her upbringing in a small casino town in Nevada. She moved to LA when she was 17 and fate dealt her a lucky break, albeit in a different career.
Her nonchalant vibe and easygoing demeanour is perfectly suited to the story of how she made it as an actor in Tinseltown. It is the kind of incidental journey to the celebrity circuit that flies in the face of the common tales of hard-slogging pretty young hopefuls who forever linger on the peripheries of show biz, hungry for a big break that, more often than not, never comes.
Sossamon’s Hollywood story began with one of those fabled who-you-know-not-what-you-know showbiz situations. It was 1999 and she was helping a friend DJ at a birthday party for Gwyneth Paltrow. Francine Maisler, the casting director of A Knights Tale, saw in Sossamon’s eyes a leading lady and, after six auditions, she landed the role and signed on, not because of an insatiable desire to act, but because “it sounded like fun.”
Eight years and many roles later, Sossamon still feels like an undiscovered actor and speaks about the celebrity circuit like an outsider, with the aloof twang of someone who feels she doesn’t quite belong. To Sossamon the idea of having any fans, let alone fans all the way over in Australia, is a bizarre concept.
“I seem to be quite clueless about things like that,” she says. “It’s not because I’m not paying attention or don’t want to be successful, but because sometimes I still feel like an unknown. It drives my manager and the people who care about me crazy, because they want me to recognise the work that I’ve done.”
The filmography of most actors–especially young and pretty ones determined to make a name for themselves- contains roles they, well, may not be particularly proud of in years to come. On the subject of whether she ever looks back and thinks “What was I doing?” Sossamon responds instantly, passionately. “Oh yes, are you kidding? I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings but, yeah there’s a good many.”
She doesn’t want to elaborate and Spook is careful not to squeeze her for names, but we can imagine she might be referring to films like Undiscovered, a hopelessly contrived moral yawn about an up and coming musician maintaining his integrity in the face of temptation. Or, an even better bet, she might be referring to One Missed Call, which was recently listed on the Rotten Tomatoes website as the second worst film made in the last decade.
“With that film I think everyone’s intentions were good,” Sossamon
says. “They tried to make something with depth and I don’t know why that one didn’t quite work. Sometimes you just don’t know.”
On the subject of the work she’s most proud of, Sossamon cites director Roger Avary’s Rules of Attraction, which features an infamous scene in which her character loses her virginity to a creepy frat boy who vomits on her back while doing her from behind (Sossamon reveals the tricks of the trade: they used canned soup for surrogate barf). She also mentions Road to Nowhere, the yet-to-be released feature from cult filmmaker Monte Hellman (Silent Night, Ride in the Whirlwind), who hasn’t sat in the director’s chair for more than two decades.
Sossamon hates being bossed
around “when I’m in the mood I’m in the mood and that’s that,” she says, and hopes to one day establish her own production company, with the intention of making the production experience more amicable and more performance focused.
“The atmosphere on set is so important and I’ve been on so many of them where it’s just shit. It needs to be more sacred. It needs to be more creative.”
