Last year she was in Winnie the Pooh. Now Chloe Moretz is swearing and slicing off heads in one of the year’s most controversial films. Horatia Harrod meets her.
Chloe Moretz is an actress who has just turned 13. You might recognise her from her role as the smart-talking little sister in last year’s indie romance 500 Days of Summer. At age eight she starred in a re-make of The Amityville Horror, has appeared in Desperate Housewives and, most prolifically, voices Darby, a little girl invented for the animated US version of Winnie the Pooh. Unsurprisingly, this is the only thing resembling a controversy in Moretz’s short career: Pooh purists were horrified.
A great many more people might blanch at Moretz’s latest role: that of Mindy Macready, aka Hit-Girl, an 11-year-old assassin with a salty turn of phrase and a gleeful willingness to part man from limb.
Mark Millar, the creator of Kick-Ass, the bloody, bilious comic on which the film is based, says he wrote Hit-Girl as ”John Rambo meets Polly Pocket”. Moretz swears like a sailor and slices off men’s heads. It’s like preteen Tarantino, revelling in gore.
There is a passing moral reason for all the violence. Hit-Girl and her father, Big Daddy, played by Nicolas Cage, are avenging the death of her mother. But they don’t have any superpowers. Big Daddy makes their costumes, his a Batman knock-off, hers a manga-inspired tartan number. All the brutal tricks that Hit-Girl knows, her father taught her.
Moretz has already received standing ovations from the geeks at Comic-Con, the world’s biggest comic convention, for her work in Kick-Ass. But Hit-Girl is a part that would make many other child actors turn pale. And they are not the only ones.
On the same day I drive along a Los Angeles freeway to meet Moretz, The New York Times has a front-page splash on Kick-Ass. ”Isn’t there a limit,” thunders Nell Minow, a lawyer and denizen of a conservative Christian website, ”to what we can ask children to do on screen?”
Last week the Australian film critic Andrew L. Urban warned that publicity material and the film trailer could lead parents to mistakenly believe Kick-Ass was a frivolous teenage comedy. Here it is rated MA15+, meaning children under 15 can see the film if they are accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. That prompted calls for an overhaul of the film classification system.
Minow has a point. From the first – Hit-Girl opening a brawl with the line, ”OK you c—s, let’s see what you can do” – to the near-last (her brutal one-on-one fight with a grown man), Kick-Ass pushes the limits of what is acceptable. Sex, swearing and violence – in that order – jar with our ideas of what a child should be. In 1976 people were disturbed by the casting of Jodie Foster, then 14, playing a 12-year-old prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. In 2007 there was uproar about Dakota Fanning (aged 12) playing a rape victim in Hounddog. In 2000 a flurry of disgust was even reserved for Billy Elliot because the children swore.
So how is Moretz coping with the furore?
Her thoughts on the issue are straightforward: ”It’s a controversial role. Did it make me nervous? Like I said, it was a role. I never really thought about the aftermath of it. And I knew that everything I was saying, if I ever said anything like it in real life, I would be grounded forever, literally forever.”
Despite the adult nature of the role, Moretz, who grew up just outside Atlanta, seems much like any other American 13-year-old, peppering her speech with ”likes” and ”awesomes” and invariably ”freaking out!” when anything good happens to her.
The self-described ”tomboy girlie girl” had always dreamed of playing a character like Angelina Jolie’s glamorous assassin in Wanted.
Little girls are rarely the leads in action movies, but her mother, Teri Moretz, who reads every script that comes to Moretz, took note.
Meanwhile, Millar and Matthew Vaughn, the film’s director, were having Hit-Girl headaches. Executives were scared off by the script’s graphic language and ultra-violent, blood-drenched mayhem. Moretz wasn’t. Her mother read the script first. ”She was like, Chloe, it’s exactly what you wanted,” Moretz says. ”I read it and I was like, oh my gosh, I have to be Hit-Girl!”
Millar says: ”We were having real trouble finding someone. Then from heaven Chloe descended. It was like Jodie Foster circa 1976 walking in – this tiny person with that much attitude, who swore so convincingly, like a tiny female Joe Pesci!”
Moretz was in. Months of physical training followed. When she wasn’t learning stunt moves, Moretz was being shouted at by former marines. ”They were all like: ‘Get down and give me 20,’ seriously!” she says. ”I did about 50 pull-ups and 1000 crunches a day. Crazy.”
Moretz is now an adept handler of stun and smoke grenades, and can take apart and reassemble a gun with the well-oiled familiarity of a professional soldier. ”It’s like Halloween every day,” she says. ”Imagine that. Doing something totally different from who I am, every day.”
Other child stars have not fared well. Linda Blair, who starred in The Exorcist, says her teenage drink-and-drug benders had their roots in the trauma of spewing pea soup and mutilating herself with a crucifix. For others, simply being on set was terrifying. Sarah Polley starred in Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen when she was nine. She wrote an open letter to Gilliam almost 20 years later, when she heard he was about to work with another young actress on Tideland.
”I remember being frightened most of the time,” she wrote. ”I remember being in freezing water for long periods, losing my hearing for days at a time due to explosives … I had some fun, but it’s pretty much obliterated by the sense of fear and exhaustion, and of not being protected by the adults around me.”
In the US the laws on child actors vary from state to state. Where laws do exist they focus on safety, education, working hours and pay. Nowhere do they cover the moral issues arising from a film’s content. It is up to the parents – and the child’s on-set teacher – to decide whether the child should be allowed to swear or appear in violent scenes (scenes of a sexual nature are covered under pornography laws).
Jane Goldman, one of the film’s screenwriters, understands the concern about Hit-Girl’s bloodthirstiness. ”If people are startled by Hit-Girl’s violence,” she says, ”that’s something they’re entitled to feel, but the fact that they would probably be more startled by the fact that she says ‘c—’ I’ve always felt people overreact appallingly to bad language.”
Millar says part of the difficulty comes because of something lost in translation. The comic book world of Kick-Ass operates according to different standards of behaviour than those in the real world. ”The kind of stuff we’re not that bothered about in comics would cause a furore,” he says.
Some might find this a cop-out but there is no evidence that Moretz has been damaged by the things she has said and done as Hit-Girl. She has the politeness you’d imagine of a good Georgia girl and, despite the Joe Pesci comparison, when she tells me she’s a scaredy-cat, I believe her.
For this Moretz’s family must get some of the credit. When I ask how she plans to avoid the pitfalls of a young actress, she immediately mentions her mother. ”My mum’s the one I look up to for everything,” she says. ”I feel like I’m a lump of clay and she’s moulding me into a woman.”
It must be hard for Teri Moretz to keep her child grounded. Recently Chloe did a photo shoot in couture Chanel and Givenchy gowns, and although her mother doesn’t usually allow her to wear high heels, on that occasion she was forced to relent. And for her 13th birthday party, Paramount offered to host a private screening of Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Moretz and her friends. Teri made sure that her daughter personally picked up all the popcorn that had been ground into the carpet.
(via Sydney Morning Herald)
Empire has posted two new interviews with Chloe, one from the Kick-Ass set (and of which a small clip was recently featured in a behind-the-scenes mini-doc from Empire) and the other from the recent press junket in Berlin.
Check them both out below!
Chloe and her co-star Aaron Johnson attended the Kick-Ass photocall in Berlin, Germany, yesterday. Over 50 pics are in the gallery.
Chloe attended the Dublin premiere for Kick-Ass, along with her co-stars Aaron Johnson and Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Only a couple of pics have surfaced so far, and you can check them out in the gallery.
On the big screen, she stabs bad guys with samurai swords and launches bombs both virtual and verbal.
In real life, her bedtime is 9:30pm. Chloe Grace Moretz turned 13 last month and before she turns 14 she could become a hotter female property than her role model, Angelina Jolie. Later this year she stars in a remake of the cult vampire film Let The Right One In, and Martin Scorsese has just snapped her up to star in his next picture. But the reason we’re sitting with Chloe, her mother, Teri, and two publicists – two more guardians, incidentally, than were deemed necessary when I interviewed Courtney Love – is Kick-Ass.
Directed by Matthew Vaughn, the film is based on Mark Millar’s vibrant and hugely violent comic book series about a teenage loser who resolves to become a crimefighting superhero called Kick-Ass, despite lacking any real superpowers. The movie was supposed to offer a global launchpad for Nowhere Boy‘s British star Aaron Johnson, but the buzz is all about Moretz as Hit Girl, an 11-year-old who is half of a vigilante father-daughter team.
Moretz is not the star, she’s not even the loopiest character in the film – not with Nicolas Cage playing her ever-loving dad as a combination of Pa Walton and Adam West – but Moretz is the character you will remember. In a purple wig, black mask, tartan skirt and fighting leathers, she screams at a denful of villains “OK, you c***s, let’s see what you can do now” and proceeds to slice and dice them all with deadly blades and martial arts moves that would give Jet Li a nosebleed.
In our tiny hotel room, Moretz, dressed in Claire’s Accessories pinks and blues, chats and smiles easily in between sucks on what appears to be an iced frappucino. So let’s get the big question out the way first: did she expect her character’s four-letter word bombs to have become such a talking point from the moment the movie trailers hit cinemas?
“It’s a movie,” she says, a little wearily. “Obviously a little girl can’t beat up and kill huge heavy men. I don’t see how anyone wouldn’t realise that it’s not real, it’s Hit Girl. I’m just Chloe Moretz.”
Has she ever used a four-letter word off-screen? “Never,” she shrieks. “Ooof. My mom would ground me for, like, the rest of my life.” Moretz can’t even bring herself to say the film’s title out loud in interviews, instead calling it “the film” and later she admits that at home they called the movie “Kick-Butt.”
“I knew it was a controversial role, but it was a role I wanted to do,” says Moretz earnestly. “A month or so before I got this script, Wanted (like Kick-Ass, based on a comic by Scotland’s Millar] came out, and I really, really wanted to be a take-charge action heroine like Angelina Jolie.” Who knows how Moretz became aware of an 18 certificate film about hipster assassins, but let’s assume she saw TV trailers. “Anyway, when she read Kick-Ass, my mom was like, ‘Chloe, you’ll never believe this …’ I read it and I was like, ‘I have to be Hit Girl!’ “
In the course of the movie, Hit Girl and her father fight crime with their fists, feet and the odd bazooka. Her most demanding stunts were doubled by an English gymnast, and a Chinese stuntman who specialised in gravity-grazing backflips, but Moretz is proud that some of the fights setpieces are Moretz herself, after four months of action training that included learning to load, clean and take apart a gun. “I learned martial arts moves, gymnastics, combat moves and knife handling,” she counts off. “I actually learned to flip two balisongs (Filipino folding knives] at the same time, one in each hand too. And the last two months of it I spent at the Toronto Circus School! They took me there because they wanted me to get really flexible for the role.”
Moretz has finally seen Kick-Ass herself, and pronounced herself relatively satisfied with her performance. “There are times when I’m running up to stab someone, and my face is going ‘grrrrrr’,” she says. “I was really happy with that, because the sequences are all choreographed and you have to start off on the right foot, or have your head a certain way, or the shot won’t work. So when I’m looking like I want to kill someone, I’m really thinking, ‘One, two, three, FOUR’ in my head.”
There’s always debate as to the credit and debit sheet of being a child actor. They grow up mostly around adults and deal with adult-world paycheques and expectations: experiences that inevitably accelerate adulthood. And while Jodie Foster found there was life after Taxi Driver, she’s outnumbered by child stars who end up working as taxi drivers. More immediately, there’s the emotional turmoil of winning and losing roles. Moretz faced a rejection a couple of years back when she was abruptly dropped from the Disney animated feature Bolt, after recording the voice of Bolt the dog’s preteen owner. Was she disappointed to be replaced by Miley Cyrus? Her bright smile wobbles only briefly.
“Well you get a thousand nos, and then you get one little shining star that says ‘yes’. You just have to go with it. Miley is an amazing woman, she’s very sweet,” she says. Disney might be regretting the decision a little, since Cyrus is now hurtling towards adult roles and away from her old fanbase with almost indecent enthusiasm, while Moretz is currently hotter than steam and already making movies for both adult and teen markets. “Well, it’s what they saw,” says Moretz, evenly. “I’m cool with it.”
Moretz got into acting when she was six. Her older brother Trevor trained at New York’s Performing Arts High School, and his little sister used to watch him rehearse his lines, and later, helped feed him his cues. Her first major film was a remake of The Amityville Horror, and in The Eye she haunted Jessica Alba’s dreams. Not all the roles in Moretz’s CV are unsettling kids – there’s Pooh’s Super Sleuth Christmas Movie and Big Momma’s House 2 – but it does seem that directors are attracted to Moretz’s startling maturity as an actress. In (500) Days of Summer, she pulled off playing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s preternaturally wise little sister, and in the remake Let Me In, Matt Reeves’s anticipated reworking of the Swedish modern classic Let the Right One In, she’s thoughtful about her role as a 250-year-old child vampire in a way that leaves the kids of Twilight looking like dim bulbs.
“A lot of movies glamorise being a vampire but for my character it’s a burden that she has to carry with her,” she says. ” It’s like a devil inside of her, an alternate personality, and when it takes her over, she has no control. The director gave me a journal to write as my character, and I tended to think about little things: if you are 250 years old, could you remember even your parents, or the person who turned you into a vampire? I think it’s these details that help you find a character.”
With her knack for adult-oriented material, it’s not surprising Moretz has to stress how normal she is. When she’s not filming, Moretz attends school in Los Angeles, and insists her friends aren’t interested when she disappears off to work with Jessica Alba or Donald Sutherland. They aren’t even envious of the Tiffany starfish Nicolas Cage gave her when they wrapped Kick-Ass, chosen because he thought she was “a real star”. But when her dad tried to open a can of fizzy soda for Nic Cage by stabbing it with his penknife, she sniggers like any 13-year-old at the memory of parent and actor getting soaked in Red Bull.
She’s also marvellously unimpressed by Martin Scorsese, who is about to direct her in children’s fantasy The Invention of Hugo Cabret. According to Moretz, Scorsese is a man who “talks really, really fast”.
If Kick-Ass is a success, Moretz says she’s keen to revisit Hit Girl (“Maybe with a purple Ducati to go with my hair”) but she has already decided that in the long term she wants to use her acting superpowers for good and is a StarPower Ambassador for the Starlight Children’s Foundation.
“Being an actress is so fun, but I also want to do something that will help the world. Helping kids in Africa and Asia,” she says. “I want to be more than an actor who can just entertain.”
Kick-Ass has its Scottish premiere at Cineworld, Glasgow, tomorrow night, as part of the Glasgow International Comedy Festival. It is released nationwide on Friday.
(via The Scotsman)
