Directed by Drew Barrymore.
Chloe Grace Moretz at 14 (‘but 15 on February 10th’) is not tired, although it’s early in the day and she sat up until 2am the night before ‘to wait to see if the world ended’. It’s the morning after that day at the start of the summer which zealous nut job Harold Camping had predicted to be the date of the Rapture, and she has sat awake with her brother, Trevor, with whom she currently shares a rented house in west London, to see if anything untoward would happen (they’ve tweeted through the night about their soundtrack to this event, Britney’s ‘Till the World Ends’. Trevor has entertained her by a ‘doing a dance and flipping his hair’, a peroxide crop). ‘It didn’t happen,’ Chloe smiles. ‘There was no Rapture. Or if there was I didn’t go to heaven, and neither did you.’ No. ‘Well that’s a bummer, I guess.’
Oh, Chloe. Chloe is a girl from Atlanta, Georgia. Most girls from there, like most girls from anywhere in the Western world, just have ‘schoolgirl’ on their resumé when they get to her age, but she’s not really like them: she already has teenage assassin, perpetually adolescent vampire, daughter with a dark secret (several times over) and gun toting rape-surviving runaway. At home though, with Trevor, she’s none of those things. She’s just Chloe, at what she calls ‘my own normal 14′. She looks ‘normal’, by the skin of her teeth, but she leans firmly in the direction of preternaturally striking; her goofy-growing-into-beautiful features are topped off by a mile of doll’s hair left in from the role she’s in the middle of filming for Tim Burton’s movie adaptation of cult Sixties TV show Dark Shadows, and she’s got a massive T-shirt on which she untucks from her shorts and braces so that she can read its slogan aloud. ‘Magnif… I forgot what it says. Not magnificent… yeah that’s it, magnifique.’
Fourteen, or thereabouts, is how old Jodie Foster was when Scorsese’s Taxi Driver came out and thrust her into a whirlwind of controversy over her role as preteen hooker Iris. Like Foster, Chloe’s just had the chance to prove her serious actor mettle, with her role as Luli McMullen, a small town girl who runs away with a bit of stolen money and a .45 to face the ordeals of a life on the road in Derick Martini’s new number, Hick, and like Foster Chloe’s got a role with Scorsese too, albeit a more innocent one as Isabelle in an adaption of Brian Selznick’s illustrated historical novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It might not be a role at the Foster level of intensity — there’s no drugs or sex or really short shorts — but it was a hard enough role for her to impress Scorsese nonetheless. ‘Working with Chloe was a joy,’ he tells me. ‘She has a powerful charisma; you can’t not watch her, and she’s absolutely focused when she needs to be. And, something rarer, she has an innate sense of emotional honesty. She’s a star, and she also does the work.’ He’s Martin Scorsese (‘Martin Scorrrr-sayyyyyyy-zeeee,’ as Chloe says it when she kind of can’t believe her luck). He doesn’t say that stuff about all the girls. In the past Chloe has preferred to compare herself to Natalie Portman, who was also about her age when she broke through in Leon, and in terms of prodigious talent it’s as fair a comparison as Foster. As far as comparisons to actors that have done what Chloe does at her age as well as she does it go though, those two are pretty much it. Which means, to cut to the chase, that Chloe Moretz at 14 is a pretty unusual creature.
Made more so by the fact that, unlike the swathes of teenage ‘stars’ that have been bouncing out of the Hollywood smile machine lately, Chloe, somehow, seems to have driven the whole thing herself. This is a pretty important fact when it comes to considering her as ‘her own normal 14′. Foster and Portman aside, the obvious thing you might worry about when you think about child stars is their tendency to grow up to become adult messes. To look at it on paper you could easily assume that Chloe, already famous, about to be huge, taking on roles that actors ten years older than her would flinch at, would be just a few years and a bit of bad advice away from spewing out her contribution to the Xanax-alcohol-stolen-jewellery-up-skirt-pap-shot collective cocktail of former-child-star degeneration. Luckily, however, and brilliantly, Chloe’s experience seems to be entirely bereft of the stuff that those kinds of nightmares are made of. There’s no troubled back-story, no high-pressure publicity monsters (as far as I can tell her public image is mainly looked after by her mother and Trevor) and most significantly, no sociopathic stage parents with dollar bills in their eyes.
Her family, she says (many, many times), are like her, ‘normal’. Her parents aren’t in the movies: her dad’s a surgeon; her mum’s a nurse, and neither of them were really even into her doing any of this. ‘My parents kind of think this business is weird,’ she says, ‘and it is. It’s totally backwards. I mean my mom is really behind me whatever I want to do. She’s there to keep me stable if I want to keep going, and she’s behind me if I want to stop, but everything Mom does is just to keep me well rounded. My whole family, especially Trev and Mom, tell me that every day.’
And you don’t feel like you’re missing out on being a teenager?
‘Are you kiiiidding? It’s not like I miss being 14 or something, because I’m 14 every day. I still get grounded. They make it very apparent that I’m just a normal girl, and if I ever started behaving like it was anything else I’d be out of the business in a flash.’ I’m tempted at this point to launch a ‘when I was your age…’ projectile extolling the virtues of being a nightmare when you can be, but it makes me feel old and seems kind of inappropriate, since she’s so perky, so I shut myself up.
Chloe got into ‘this business’ kind of by accident, when Trevor, then 16 (Chloe six) got accepted to a performing arts high school. He’d come home and read his monologues and Chloe would overhear and copy them (‘just by listening. You know, at six you can’t really read very well’) until, eventually, she announced that she wanted to ‘do what Trevvy did’ and, with his help, cajoled Mama Moretz into letting her have a go. ‘No one told me to do that, I just did it and I really liked it,’ she says, with a sense of earnestness that you should assume she has whenever she’s talking about these things. ‘It’s what I love. If I didn’t love it, it would be a pain to have to go to all these places and do all this, and to do things like this all the time. No offence.’
None taken. So you’re telling me that you expected all of this to happen when you were six?
‘No. I mean, you don’t expect, but you hope and pray and you just kind of go with it where it goes.’
When she says stuff like that, sounding like she’s lived a lot longer than she has, she does it in a way that is somehow not annoying: she doesn’t do it in the pretentious way some 14-year-olds do when they want to seem mature or cool or whatever, or in the manner of a School of Disney media training graduate; just in a way that belies that actually, whether it’s through stuff she’s learnt on the job or elsewhere, she has a kind of smartness, a way of just ‘getting it’ that’s as unusual as her talent. For example when she’s talking about her role as Abby in Let Me In, she’s all ‘I just had to research and get really into what she’s thinking. She knows she can’t trust… She has to be deceptive and doesn’t want to be… She loves people but she uses them.’ Or about Derick Martini, she says, ‘He is the next Scorsese of our time,’ and if you laugh, she follows it with, ‘But I can say that because I have worked with Scorsese. I’ve personally never done anything as emotional as my role with Derick. It’s probably the deepest character I’ve ever been to, but in between takes I leave it behind. In between shots I get normal. It’s always been easy for me because I have a normal family and it’s easy for me to break out of those situations. You get really thankful for who you are; especially doing Hick, I got really thankful who I am and the life I had, and how blessed I am to be able to do this and have a normal family.’
She’s being normal again. She has a long list of normal things she normally does to be normal (cooking with her mum, fighting with her brothers, ‘just chilling out being a weirdo. Good weird, as in fun weird’) and it’s important because, despite what she says and without wanting to state the obvious, most of what happens to her is really not that normal at all, even the things that happen off set, and all this being ‘normal’ seems to give her a pretty good armoury to deal with them.
For example, once she was ambushed by paparazzi arriving home from a premiere. Trevor fought them off (‘he’s six-four and really strong, so I felt pretty safe’) and since they then knew where she lived the family decided they should move, which sounds like a major upheaval, but she’s on the move all the time. ‘Between my family and my teacher, who I’ve had for like six hours a day for the last nine years, I think I have a good amount of stability’ she says. She adds a casual ‘I mean, guys, come on, this should be illegal right now, I’m a minor’, but really, she doesn’t think it’s that bad — the main drawback of being of interest to the paps is the way it impacts on her social life. ‘Like, if I don’t want to see a friend I’ll say, “Oh, I’m just really… I’m tired, I’m staying home. I’m not going to do anything today, I don’t feel like going out”. and then me and my mom will go to central city or something and then “chickgwoaaaan!” there’s a picture of me. My friends will be like, “Oh. So you stayed home today.” Ermmmm. Yeah. So I can’t really lie. And one time I went to Six Flags with my friends. We were having so much fun and I was a complete mess. you know, we’d been on a couple of roller coasters. It was me and my two best friends and my brother Colin, and it was this big endeavour to drive all the way from LA to Six Flags and we got there and we’re riding all of these roller coasters, and it was the first time I had ever been on a huge roller coaster. I had just come off Goliath and then Tatsu, which is crazy and spins and stuff. and I’m standing there with my friends and we’re talking and all I see is this flash. I look aside and there’s this guy standing there taking pictures of me. I didn’t say anything, but it’s like, at least ask. I’m glad to give you a picture if you ask me, but you know. I don’t want one of me half way through talking just off a roller coaster looking all… And then he was laughing with his friends about taking the photo and it’s not funny.’
OK, it’s not, but if a dodgy picture at Six Flags is as bad as it’s got, the protecting that her family do that she’s so keen to emphasise is obviously doing its job pretty well. ‘Yeah, I don’t feel like I have any pressure on me from my family or outside or anything,’ she says in response to a comment along those lines. ‘I feel like I can just do what I love because love it: if I want to college, which I do, to study art history, I can go and not worry about looking for a career. I can go and do something I love just to do it. It’s all very light, I feel like I have a lot of lightness on me if that makes sense,’ she says, before adding, ‘I’m just really well guarded, probably more than most 14-year-old girls.’
To that end she didn’t watch some of her own movies, like The Amityville Horror, in which she was possessed by evil spirits aged seven, until recently; she’s desperate to go and see Lady Gaga live (even though she thinks Fame Monster is way better than Born This Way. She can dissect each song almost scientifically, as she can with both of the Adele albums and Skrillex’s offerings) but Trevor still thinks some of the stage show it is ‘too risqué’; she’s not allowed to go on dates. When I ask her about boys she kind of curls herself up and cackles, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m fouuuurteenl I see enough of boys from my older brothers. There’s four of them so, you know, that’s enough boys in my life.’ Trevor, who’s been in the next room throughout this whole thing, shouts over, ‘Maybe you can go on a date next year, Chlo, you don’t need to be doing that just yet.’ I feel like a jerk for asking, and understand why every other interview I’ve read with her asks a more innocent version of the boy question like, ‘So, do you have a crush on Justin Bieber?’ She used to, if you’re interested, though I had assumed she would have hated him. She stops herself mid-sentence when I say that. ‘I do. Oh wait! I didn’t mean that… I mean, I don’t. His story of how he got where he is, that’s cool. I went to the premiere of his movie and they have videos of him when he was a baby drumming on seats. It seems like he was a prodigy.’ Later (we’re still on the subject) she adds, ‘But of course I wouldn’t criticise him. There’s lots of paths to take and, you know, who I am to criticise someone who hasn’t taken the same one as me.’ I, once again, feel like a bit of a jerk.
Not that she’d want me to — I don’t think it would even cross her mind to make a person feel bad (at one point she says, ‘If I said something about someone I didn’t know and they read it and were offended, that would just be the worst’), but because, despite her protestations, she’s not ‘normal’, she’s exceptional. She’s innocent and energetic. She’s exactly what it says on her T-shirt, and she’s intensely aware of the road ahead of her. ‘So many things could go wrong with my career,’ she says, kind of as a final refrain to her normal chorus. ‘So much stuff could go wrong. I could go completely haywire, and my family try to stop that from happening. But I don’t think I have it in me to go haywire. I don’t think I’ll go crazy. I hope not. I don’t want to go crazy. If I wanted to stop I could. But I don’t.’
Check out this first look of Blake Lively and Chloe Moretz in their upcoming film, Hick!
The drama centers around Luli (Moretz), “a 13-year-old Nebraskan girl and her hard-going life on the road after she runs away from her neglectful parents and home. She’s taken in by Glenda (Lively), a hard-living grifter who takes her under her wing,” according to The Playlist.
Hick, based on Andrea Portes’ novel of the same name, will be featured at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Source: JustJared
A new trailer for Chloe’s new film, Hugo, has been released. Check it out below!
Chloe Moretz sent JustJared.com this exclusive video to thank all of her fans for voting for her!
The 14-year-old actress not only won one popcorn statue at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards – she won two!
She won Biggest Badass Star for her work as ‘Hit Girl’ in Kick-Ass and Best Breakout Star for Kick-Ass and Let Me In.
Check out the video below of Chloe in London – she’s overseas filming Tim Burton’s new gothic-horror tale Dark Shadows alongside Johnny Depp.
“Thank you soo much to everyone who voted for me at the @MTV #MovieAwards <3," Chloe tweeted. “i love my fans sooo much and can’t thank you all enough! xoxoxox.”
Source: JustJared
