'It makes me want to blow my head off when actors become activists," says Dominique Swain, the 21-year-old actress best known for starring as Lolita in director Adrian Lyne's 1997 film, based on Vladimir Nabokov's notorious novel.
"I feel people should keep their opinions to themselves. I just feel that people don't really feel what they say. Especially people in the entertainment industry. They speak to hear the sound of their own voice. Actors are some of the most vain and self-serving people."
It's quite the statement for someone who is in Toronto to protest the use of fur in fashion. Outside the department store, The Bay, on Bloor Street, Swain has just unveiled a billboard of herself, photographed nude at the front of a classroom writing the words, "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur."
The Hudson's Bay Company began as a fur-trading company, and this is a skin against skin protest. Nudity versus animal fur, courtesy of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA.)
In 1990, PETA launched the campaign when four supporters ditched their clothes and jumped up onto the runway as the lights dimmed during a fashion show in New York by Oscar de la Renta, who often includes extravagant fur designs in his collections. They danced about carrying a banner with the slogan printed boldly across it before they were carted off, handcuffs their only apparel. Since then, celebrities have bared their skin in support of animals keeping theirs. Model Christy Turlington has posed in the buff. So has Pamela Anderson Lee.
"Oh, yeah, I know I'm contradicting myself and that I'm falling into the same trap," Swain acknowledges cheerfully, later over coffee. "But I considered for 10 days before I decided to do it. I didn't want to be made fun of for it and I haven't always not worn fur, but the opportunity to do it fell into my lap and I knew that I felt very strongly about it. If another cause had come along, I certainly think that I was not going to strut my naked ass all over the world, that I would have chosen to turn it down, if I wasn't impacted emotionally about it."
Asked if she is a vegetarian or if she wears leather, she answers no to each question calmly, her gaze unflinchingly steady. "Arguably, I guess I'm the biggest hypocrite in the world," she offers with a shrug. "But I think that [protesting the use of]fur is a good place to start."
When Lyne cast Swain in Lolita, he plucked her from obscurity. She was 14 at the time and enrolled in Malibu High School in California, a few commercial auditions to her name. "The thing about Dominique," he told the press back then, "is that she is fresh and a bit eccentric."
She still is.
"I love animals," she continues. "I had a ferret that I used to, like, wear around my neck as a live stole. I had two ferrets actually, called Vermin and Wendy." The animals live with her father, an electrical engineer and computer programmer, in his house in the hills outside Malibu. Her parents separated when she was 15. She had a happy childhood, she says, as the second youngest child of four. She liked to read and paint. There was no television in the house.
"When I was about 4, the big antenna dish on our house blew down and we never replaced it," she says. "I loved books about science fiction and fantasy, stories that are larger than life."
It was reported that when Swain was offered the role of Lolita, she asked her imaginary friend, Rosalind, whether she should do it. Rosalind said yes.
In her apartment in Santa Monica, where she currently lives by herself, Swain still refuses to get a television. "I don't want to waste a whole lot of time watching TV and not know where it went," she explains.
Despite her youth, there is a worldly maturity in Swain's gaze. It's a Lolita gaze, the look of a woman who wants to know more than is healthy. But she is not the nymphet you might expect. She is self-possessed, and there is a brooding, almost melancholic, intelligence to the way she stares balefully at me, answering questions calmly but candidly.
She has always made decisions with disarming confidence. To get the part in Lolita, she didn't do the Lana-Turner-by-the-soda-fountain thing. She made her way past the 2,500 hopefuls by sending the producers a video of herself, reading passages of Nabokov's book. For sex scenes, a body double replaced Swain, and a cushion had to be placed between her and Jeremy Irons, who played the creepy Humbert Humbert, whenever there was body contact, such as when she had to perch on his lap. She said she had had no sexual experience, but when Irons found it difficult to even feign intimacy with the teenager, she reportedly encouraged him.
She won critical acclaim for her portrayal of Lolita: "A marvellous performance -- a mercurial blend of the guileful and the guileless," said Time magazine. But her career never took off as expected. She went on to play the daughter of John Travolta's character in Face/Off, her only other role in a blockbuster movie. Her other film projects ( Girl, Intern, Happy Campers) have been largely forgettable.
Perhaps it's the curse of playing Lolita. The young actress, Sue Lyon, who played the role in Stanley Kubrick's 1961 version of the film, plummeted from fame and into drug addiction and bad marriages. "I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to world stardom at 15 in a sex-nymphet role to stay on a level path thereafter," she famously cautioned.
Indeed, Swain had difficulty returning to normal life following the film. She chose to get a tutor rather than return to high school. "There was a very specific group of girls who didn't like my being famous," she tells me. "But I thought it was fantastic. I thought it was just fine," she says, her voice growing louder and emphatic.
"Acting wasn't something that I thought that I'd want to do. It just fell into my lap, and then it was just so much fun. Looking back, I wouldn't change anything. At the time, I thought doing Lolita was the most natural thing in the world because I was really good at being a teenager," she laughs. "And up until then, nothing in my life had even compared, had even come close, to that experience. I think that at that tender age, it's just something you should get to do and that few do. In the little bubble of time that you're doing a movie, you just experience all these emotions, the ups and downs of the character you are playing. It's like life in a nutshell. I was just really, really lucky. Now, I'm just trying to focus that luck and that drive and make it something that I get to do for the rest of my life."
To retain that focus has not always been easy, she acknowledges.
She has clearly had her share of disillusionment about the movie business.
"I look for a character that I identify with, a story that I want to tell, and different people that I want to work with, and it's just hard to find that combination all put together before I arrive. Someday I hope to kinda build it from the ground up and put all those pieces in there myself so that I'm completely happy."
After Lolita, most film offers involved nudity, which she refused to do. "I turned down stuff specifically because of nudity, because it doesn't take a whole lot of class to yank your clothes off," Swain says. "Because I had a body double in Lolita I think the goal was 'Let's see what she really looks like.' They were sending me scripts with no substance to them."
Recently, she enrolled in Santa Monica College with the intention to pursue studies in English literature, art, creative writing and biology.
"I never made it through the door. I decided that I didn't want to get out of university and then realize that I had the opportunity to do what everybody else wanted to do all along. Every five minutes, I'm re-evaluating what am I doing exactly, what I want to do. But I think that's really healthy to do."
Swain is a quirky mixture of contradictions: dewey in appearance -- she wears a clingy top and tight, low-cut jeans -- but seasoned and smart about the film business.
She is an clearly extrovert, laughing about her life in Los Angeles, where she hangs out with celebrities, pop sensation Christina Aguilera and Jenna Malone, the young actress who starred in Contact and Life Is a House. But she retains an unaffected, casual demeanour that suggests a rich introspective life, as though she eschews Hollywood superficiality.
"I have a little posse [of friends] I guess, but I don't always socialize with people in entertainment. I don't relate to all people," she says flatly.
Despite her stand on nudity, here she is in the much-hyped PETA poster without a stitch on. (The photograph is composed in such a way that little is revealed.) She runs five miles a day, she says, "so I don't deserve to be fat." She didn't go on any special diet before the shoot. "I really didn't know I was going to do it, so I just trusted in my New Balance [running shoes]and, you know, in God," she says playfully. And despite her desire to distance herself from the Lolita legacy, the poster actually suggests it. It makes you wonder whether the decision to do it was naive or shrewd. Well, maybe it's just evidence of another Swain contradiction.
"This [photograph]is really my retaliation against the Lolita image. I'm the teacher in this shot, not the student. I've moved on," she asserts with just the right combination of innocence and defiance.