NEW YORK — For the record, Chloë Sevigny is not dating
Jersey Shore's Pauly D. Last week, the
Big Love actress and the Situation's less sinister sidekick were photographed courtside at a Knicks game, and gossip blogs gleefully speculated they were an item. But seriously, people? "I was just looking at his hair," says Sevigny, the same week. Amused and mortified by the thought of them coupling (her tone suggests more of the latter), the 36-year-old alterna-kid icon swears she's only seen
Jersey Shore "a few times" and only said "one thing" to him the entire game. Mostly, she was mystified by his blown-out guido crown. "It looked like . . . egg yolk. Or Elmer's Glue. [His hair] had a white glaze thing kind of happening and I was like, 'How
the ****? Does he go upside down? What's the process?' I should have asked him, but I didn't think that engaging him would be worth it — not to be mean or rude, I was really interested in the basketball game."
Also for the record, Sevigny finds herself clarifying statements a lot more than she'd like. Last year, the Springfield, Massachusetts–born New Yorker called season four of
Big Love — the HBO polygamist melodrama in which she co-stars as Nicki Grant, one of Bill Paxton's three onscreen wives, the fundamentalist daughter of a criminal false prophet — "awful." The word just slipped out during
an interview with
The Onion AV Club, and she's since apologized profusely to the show's writers. But sitting across from her at Café Orlin in the East Village, to promote
Big Love's fifth and final season, it's easy to see how this happens. Chloë Sevigny is not a media-trained Hollywood creation, she's a lifelong East Coaster who grew up hanging with skateboard kids and happened to fall into acting (thanks to her friendship with
Kids/
Gummo writer/director Harmony Korine). In conversation, she's funny, self-aware, and sardonic — and her profession of pretending to be other people seems like the least fake thing about her. Frankly, she's kind of awesome. You'll see.