Check out this behind-the-scenes video of Chloe’s Nylon photo shoot, where she talks about her favorite YouTube video and her taste in fashion.
The May 2010 issue of Nylon, which features Chloe and other young stars, is on stands now.
As far as entrances go, it ranks up there with Barbra Streisand’s as Fanny Brice purring “Hello, Gorgeous!” Hit Girl, the 12-year-old masked vigilante in a purple Clara Bow wig and leather jumpsuit crashes into the villain’s hideout, strikes a menacing pose, and utters the line, “Okay, you guys…let’s see what you can do now.”
Only she doesn’t say “guys”—she uses one of the most offensive words in the English language, before proceeding to unleash bloody vengeance upon the bad guys. This is how “Kick-Ass,” the new action-comedy about ordinary people striving to be superheroes, introduces Hit Girl, played by Chloë Grace Moretz. Up to this point, the film’s audience has only seen her as her alter ego, hyper-intelligent but sweet Mindy Macready, and has no idea of just what she is capable.
Hollywood, however, seems to be well aware of just how much the 13-year-old Moretz can handle. Though it’s a cliché to talk about child actors as wise beyond their years, its pretty much a given in the case of this one, who is quickly making a name as the go-to young performer for heady material. After counseling Joseph Gordon-Levitt on love in last year’s “[500] Days of Summer,” Moretz played a world-weary student in the recent “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” “Kick-Ass,” which opens this week, will find her performing stunts and spouting dialogue actors twice her age would blush at. And in the fall, she’ll appear as a hundreds-year-old vampire trapped in the body of a 12-year-old girl in “Let Me In,” the American remake of the Swedish drama “Let the Right One In.” And she recently signed on to star for director Martin Scorsese in his historical drama “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” Moretz already has big fans in her directors and co-stars—including Nicolas Cage, who plays Hit Girl’s warped but loving father, Big Daddy. “I knew she was going to be an enormous star because of how well she performed,” Cage says, adding he gave Moretz a silver starfish necklace when the film wrapped “because real stars are nice people, and that’s what she is.”
Summer Days
On a sunny day at the Farmer’s Market in Beverly Hills, Moretz appears like any other teenage girl, not someone who was the toast of the South by Southwest Film Festival only hours earlier when “Kick-Ass” premiered to a rapturous audience. Eating a glazed doughnut and teasing her elder brother Trevor, she is discussing her Twitter account (at @chloegmoretz) and coming to the realization that she’s going to have to start being more careful about tweeting her locations.
It’s because of Trevor, now in his 20s, that Moretz became interested in acting. The youngest of five siblings and the only girl, Moretz was living with her family in Georgia when Trevor was accepted into the Professional Performing Arts School in New York. Moretz, her brother Colin, and her mother moved with Trevor so he could attend the high school, and a 6-year-old Moretz found herself stealing her brother’s sides when he brought them home. She had always been a bit of a performer; she can recall at age 4 how Trevor would dress her up in various outfits and film her—most memorably as Princess Leia floating in the pool while being attacked by a sea monster, played by the cleaning tube. But while in New York, she began begging her mother to let her go on auditions. “She would say, ‘I don’t know, Chloë; it’s not a business for kids,’ ” Moretz admits. “She kept asking, ‘Is this really something you want with your heart and soul?’ and I would say yes. I love it.”
After Moretz’s year and a half in New York, her father’s plastic-surgery business had him relocating the entire family to Los Angeles, where Moretz was finally allowed to go on auditions. Manager Pam Gold, who had met Trevor through school, also agreed to represent Moretz, and soon she landed her first role on two episodes of the CBS series “The Guardian.” According to Moretz, being on set felt remarkably natural. “There wasn’t much difference between being in front of a camera there and what I was doing in the pool,” she says with a shrug. She also had the aid of an in-house teacher. “Trevor is actually my acting coach,” she notes. “He’s the only person I’ve ever studied with, and he’s amazing.” She points out that Trevor is now offering his coaching services in L.A. (www.trevordukemoretzstudio.com).
Roles in “The Amityville Horror” and “The Eye” followed, as did a role as Peter Krause’s daughter on the ABC series “Dirty Sexy Money,” but Moretz considers “[500] Days of Summer” her biggest onscreen break. She sounds like an old pro when she says, “I knew the film had Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, and I’d always wanted to work with them and always wanted to do a movie like that.” It only took one audition with the casting director and one with the producers and director for Moretz to land the role.
Not that it was always easy for her. “You’ll get a thousand noes and one yes,” she says of auditioning. “There’s a couple parts that I really wanted badly that I didn’t get. But I tell myself that when a door shuts, another bigger, more beautiful door opens.” She cites Olympian Michael Phelps, who was diagnosed with ADHD when he was 9 years old. “People will say you have limits, but you have to brush it off,” says Moretz. “They say you’re not good, or you’re too good. They say you’re too scripted, you’re too pretty, you’re too young, you’re too tall. But you get that one that says you’re perfect, and you book it.”
The Girl for the Job
To avoid getting too attached to roles, Moretz says she usually doesn’t read entire scripts until she gets the part. But two years ago, her mother brought her a screenplay and said, “Chloë, it’s what you’ve been wanting.” Moretz had recently seen “Wanted” and longed for an action role in the vein of Angelina Jolie’s Fox. The script was “Kick-Ass,” and Moretz instantly fell in love with the characters. “I read the script and said, ‘I have to be Hit Girl,’ ” she recalls. “It was an amazing character and so different from what any other kid has done, aside from my idols: Natalie Portman in ‘The Professional’ and Jodie Foster in ‘Taxi Driver.’ ”
Moretz put herself on tape for “Kick-Ass” co-writer and director Matthew Vaughn, then tried not to think about it too much. Months later, she was skateboarding in Santa Monica when her manager called and said Vaughn was in town and wanted to meet her. “I was wearing jeans and a pink top and looked really cute, but I thought I had to be a tomboy, so I threw a big jacket on and hid my outfit,” Moretz recalls. “Then Matthew started talking about how Hit Girl is actually a girlie girl, and I said, ‘Oh! Well, this is me!’ I unzipped the jacket, and he saw I was pink and frilly, and he said, ‘That’s Hit Girl!’ From there, we really hit it off.”
Vaughn had thought casting Hit Girl would be his most difficult task, so he almost couldn’t believe his luck when Moretz was only the second girl he saw. He asked Charlie Cox, the star of Vaughn’s previous film “Stardust,” to read with Moretz and recalls how impressed the actor was. “Halfway through the first take, [Cox] looks at me and mouths, ‘Shit, I have to raise my game,’ ” Vaughn says. “That happened with every actor: They’d be talking to her like she was a 7-year-old, and then I called ‘Action!’ and all of them would be like, ‘I am being blown off screen by a child!’ “
To play the role, Moretz endured two months of basic training before filming began. She learned combat training, gymnastics, bow staff, and how to take apart a gun and put it back together. “Even on my days off, I was training from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” she reveals. “Every single day I would wake up, do crunches, pull-ups, push-ups and go do my training, then come home and go running and swimming. Somewhere in there, I would fit in school.” Moretz is homeschooled by her mother, Teri, whom Moretz frequently refers to as “my best friend for life.”
As for the violence and language the role requires, Moretz shrugs and says, “It’s a movie. It’s a character—a great character—and a role that challenged me and stretched me as an actor.” But Vaughn was aware they were in treacherous territory; when he had originally tried to obtain financing for “Kick-Ass,” many studios blanched. “Most of them said they liked the concept but only if it was done in a PG-13 manner, with no Hit Girl,” he reveals. And though the aforementioned line is in the comic upon which the film is based, he admits it was left out of the original script. It wasn’t until they were filming the scene on set that Vaughn realized the takes weren’t having the right impact. Teri had read the comic and understood the importance of the right word. “She and Chloë agreed that it made sense to shoot one take with the word included,” Vaughn says. That take has ended up not only in the final film but in the wildly popular red band trailer, and it reassured leagues of worried fanboys that the film will retain the same dark, subversive tone of the graphic novel.
Playing the Vamp
If “Kick-Ass” was the most physically challenging experience of her life, Moretz says her work in “Let Me In” was the most difficult for her to tackle emotionally. Writer-director Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield”) knew his film hinged on the right actor to play Abby, the female vampire trapped in a state of arrested development who relies on a guardian (Richard Jenkins) and a young boy (“The Road” star Kodi Smit-McPhee) for survival. His casting director Avy Kaufman had brought in Moretz, and Reeves was instantly impressed. “A lot of kids came in and tried to play this hundreds-year-old vampire, not a 12-year-old girl,” he notes. “Chloë was the first who really understood that she hasn’t been able to grow up and is still a kid in many ways.”
Reeves then placed a call to Vaughn. “Matthew couldn’t say enough about her,” Reeves reveals. “Not only about her ability as an actor but about her as a person. He told me how her family is so supportive and keep her grounded and lovely, which was very reassuring.” Reeves confesses he had trepidation about putting a young actor through such a complicated emotional role. But any fears he had were soon allayed by his star. “Chloë wanted to do it all, even her own stunts,” he reveals. “We did a scene where she was knocked down, and the first time, I was so worried for her. Then she jumped up laughing and said, ‘Let’s go again!’ “
Moretz admits it was hard at times playing “such a deep, dark character,” most notably in a scene where she had to cry—which she accomplished, she says, by thinking about her mother. But at the end of the day, she’s able to leave it all behind. “Oh, yeah, you have to,” she says, “because I love it so much, I love playing these people who are so different from me. It’s not real life; it’s entertainment.”
It’s something Moretz hopes to be doing for years to come, though if it doesn’t work out, she wouldn’t mind becoming a helicopter pilot. “I have a terrible fear of flying, so I feel if I’m in control of the helicopter, I might get over my fear,” she reasons, before adding with a laugh, “Or it might be more terrifying!” For the time being, she loves her career and is aware of how fortunate she has been to have so many opportunities. “We all have an imaginary checklist of things we want to accomplish,” she notes. “Working with Nicolas Cage—check. Playing a vampire—check. Playing an action hero—check. I’ve already checked off about 20 things on my list!”
Outtakes
- Performs the voice of Darby in “My Friends Tigger and Pooh” and voiced a character in the animated film “Bolt”
- Recently signed on to join the cast of “The Fields,” opposite Sam Worthington
- Had an arrangement with her family that for every film role she booked, she got a dog: “That had to end after my second movie.”
- Says the only time she has ever been starstruck was with Daniel Craig, who visited the “Kick-Ass” set
(via Backstage)
Here is a sneak peak at Nylon’s Young Hollywood issue, which comes out next week. The issue features Chloe alongside other young actors like Rupert Grint, Haley Ramm, Stella Maeve, Liam Hemsworth, Chloe’s Kick-Ass co-star Lyndsay Fonsesca, and more.
CHLOË GRACE MORETZ admits she felt a twinge of envy in the summer of 2008 when the action movie “Wanted” was about to be released, and the austere visage of its gun-toting star, Angelina Jolie, seemed to be staring at her from every billboard in Los Angeles.
So she put out the word to her Hollywood representatives: “I really want to do an Angelina Jolie-type character,” Ms. Moretz said recently. “You know, like an action hero, woman empowerment, awesome, take-charge leading role.”
A month later she got her wish when she was offered a part in the adventure film “Kick-Ass” as Hit Girl, a mysterious vigilante who leaves a trail of bullet casings and body parts wherever she goes.
“My mom was like, ‘It’s exactly what you’ve been wanting to do,’ ” said Ms. Moretz, who was 11 years old then. (She’s 13 now.)
The movie, which opens on Friday, is the director Matthew Vaughn’s violent and foul-mouthed satire about aspiring crime fighters who use traditional weapons to compensate for their lack of superhuman powers. While its maladroit title character (played by Aaron Johnson) learns the heroic ropes, it is Ms. Moretz, clad in a purple wig and matching pleated skirt and wielding a mean double-edged blade, who usually utters the foulest language and perpetrates the most gruesome acts of brutality in the film.
For anyone unfamiliar with the “Kick-Ass” comics series (written by Mark Millar, who also wrote the comics version of “Wanted”), Hit Girl has been the movie’s most persuasive ambassador: the Internet went wild this winter for an R-rated trailer in which Ms. Moretz enunciates an obscene word that little girls are definitely not supposed to say, right before she slices and dices her way through a room full of drug dealers.
But Ms. Moretz and her character raise a recurring question about what limits, if any, should be placed on young actors involved in adult storytelling, and to what extent these performers understand the roles that they are playing. For some critics Ms. Moretz’s performance is stirring the same discomfort they felt when a 13-year-old Natalie Portman strutted her stuff for the ruthless hitman played by Jean Reno in “The Professional.”
Mr. Vaughn, who previously directed the crime drama “Layer Cake” and the fantasy “Stardust,” and who wrote the screenplay for “Kick-Ass” with Jane Goldman, described Hit Girl as one half of “the ultimate father-daughter relationship, where Barbie dolls are replaced with knives, and unicorns become hand grenades.”
Raised by her father (played by Nicolas Cage) to be “a fully trained, brainwashed assassin,” Mr. Vaughn said, “she is not normal, and therefore the rules that apply to other people do not apply to her.”
In seeking a young actress who can be both sugar and spikes, it is not hard to see why the makers of the movie would gravitate to Ms. Moretz. On a visit to New York last month, lounging in a private suite at a boutique hotel in Manhattan with her brother Trevor, 23, Ms. Moretz had no trouble acting her age, fiddling with a bottle of designer water or spontaneously singing a chorus from Lady Gaga’s “Dance in the Dark.” (“This is Chloë after dark,” she explained.)
But when discussing her career she assumed the sophistication of an actress twice her age. Each film she appears in, Ms. Moretz said, “sets a new brick in my acting wall.”
“The more bricks I have, the better I am at acting,” she said.
She has built that wall quickly with movies like “(500) Days of Summer,” in which she played Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s precocious younger sister, and the 2005 remake of “The Amityville Horror.” She has hazier memories of other early roles, booked when she moved with her parents and four brothers to Los Angeles for her father’s plastic surgery practice. “I was so tiny,” she said. “I was a little 6-year-old.”
Trevor Moretz, who is also Chloë’s acting coach, and her mother, Teri, read all the scripts she is sent by her agents, and try to balance her grown-up fare with family-friendly movies (like the recent hit “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”). When “Kick-Ass” arrived, the Moretzes felt it was a showcase for Chloë’s grit and athleticism; they recognized its harsher aspects too but believed she was up for the challenge.
“Being the youngest of five children,” Teri Moretz wrote in an e-mail message, her daughter “has a very well-rounded view of the world.” She added: “It definitely pushes boundaries, but Chloë knows the things that Hit Girl says and does are fictional.”
For Chloë herself, Hit Girl was an opportunity to keep pace with her cinematic idols, to do something “no other kid had done except for Natalie Portman in ‘Léon,’ ” she said, using the European title for “The Professional.”
Not that Ms. Moretz knows that Luc Besson film firsthand. “I haven’t even seen it now,” she said glumly. “I’m not allowed.”
Nor had she seen many of the performances that Trevor regarded as Hit Girl’s antecedents, including Ms. Jolie in “Wanted” and Jodie Foster in “Taxi Driver.” She was, however, given a special dispensation to watch Uma Thurman in the “Kill Bill” movies. “It was hilarious,” Ms. Moretz said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m killing people with real blood.’ It’s fake.”
Before filming on “Kick-Ass” began, Ms. Moretz spent several months in Los Angeles, London and Toronto training in gymnastics, body conditioning and weapons safety. (“Always check your gun when someone gives it to you,” she said. “Make sure it’s a fake bullet.”)
During the six-month shoot she was also told time and again by her mother, her brother and her director that Hit Girl, and not Chloë, was the one swearing and shooting at villains. The lesson seems to have sunk in. “When they call cut, I leave it behind,” Ms. Moretz said. “You should see me after a crying scene.”
Ms. Moretz’s co-stars praised her for her maturity on set. Mr. Cage, who started acting in his teens, said he appreciated the dangers that child stars face “when not all the ideas are completely formed, and you can get into a lot of trouble.” He added, “You can do things that derail your path.”
Ms. Moretz is “not in it for those reasons a lot of people get involved in filmmaking, the look-at-me syndrome,” he said. “She’s interested in building characters.”
But the filmmakers are bracing for the reception that the movie and Ms. Moretz may receive. In Britain, where the movie was released at the end of March, David Cox of The Guardian assailed its creative team and Ms. Moretz’s mother for allowing that swear word spoken by Chloë to become “acceptable parlance for children in mainstream movies,” adding, “We’ll be the poorer for it.”
Mr. Vaughn said this kind of condemnation was hypocritical because it attacked the movie’s language while essentially forgiving its violence. “I was like, ‘Does it not bother you that she killed about 53 people in this film?’ ” he said. “I’m like, ‘Would you rather your daughter swore, or became a masked vigilante killer?’ They’re going, ‘Yeah, I don’t know.’ ”
Via e-mail Teri Moretz wrote that criticism of her or her daughter did not hurt her. “We know who we are and what we believe, so we don’t listen to other people’s opinions,” she wrote.
The flap over the movie has hardly hurt Ms. Moretz’s career. She will next be seen playing a child vampire in “Let Me In,” an American remake of the Swedish horror film “Let the Right One In,” and has been cast in a film adaptation of “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” the Brian Selznick children’s novel about a Parisian orphan and his robot, which Martin Scorsese plans to direct.
Until his sister reaches the age when she is old enough to choose her projects for herself, Trevor Moretz said it is his and his mother’s responsibility “to look out for her in this industry, and make sure there isn’t any manipulation or exploitation.”
“She’s a very smart girl,” he added.
Ms. Moretz fired back, “Woman!”
He conceded, “She’s a very smart teen.”
Though she plans to continue acting, Ms. Moretz said she might like to fly a helicopter or go sky diving to help conquer her fear of flying. (“When you’re of age,” Trevor said, “go for it.”)
Asked if there was anything she wanted to do on screen that her family would not yet allow, Ms. Moretz said, “I want to wear heels, if that counts. Just give me some Christian Louboutins and a gun.”
(via New York Times)
