Christina Ricci has been a Hollywood star since the age of 10, but it’s taken her three decades to feel in control of her career. She talks motherhood, hidden scandals and finally being the leading lady with Jane Mulkerrins.
Christina Ricci glances up from stirring her tea to deliver a look of shocked, and slightly pitying, disbelief. I’ve just admitted that I never saw her as the sort of teen star who drunkenly stumbled out of nightclubs, or got into mischief at debauched Hollywood parties.
“I did things in public that were so ill-advised,” she insists. “I’m so thankful there was no social media back then.” She breaks off and giggles. “My publicist never had a child, I believe, because she had promised her firstborn to so many journalists to squash stories about me. But I had no sense of reality, because I was plucked out of reality when I was eight years old.”
Those youthfully feckless days are long gone: Ricci is now 37, married, and mother to Freddie, two. “My life is mainly play-dates,” she sighs happily. But the impetuous trait that led to such teenage waywardness isn’t entirely buried, resurfacing to inform her latest role, that of Zelda Fitzgerald in Amazon Prime series Z: The Beginning of Everything. A sought-after southern debutante, Zelda became the wife of The Great Gatsby writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a marriage characterized by alcoholism and infidelity. Ricci was never knocking on the door of rehab centers, but she identifies with her alter ego’s recklessness.
“Zelda and I share a lack of forethought,” says the actress. “People call it bravery, but it’s not; it’s a total lack of consideration of the downsides. She made a lot of choices early on that were easy, and then she paid for them later.”
There are parallels, too, with Zelda’s fame: first as a renowned local beauty in Alabama during Wwi; then, at 19, thrust into the international literati of the ’20s. Fitzgerald based many of his female characters on his wife, dubbing her “America’s first flapper”; a glamorous emblem of the louche, live-for-the-moment Jazz Age. “Her life in small-town Montgomery was a lot like being a child star, then she became even more famous when she got to New York,” nods the actress. “That kind of fame definitely cuts you off from what’s expected of you.”
We’re sitting in a cafe in Williamsburg, the fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood Ricci has called home for the past six years. Anyone keeping an eye out for the somber, raven-haired young star who once played Wednesday Addams probably wouldn’t clock Ricci today: she’s gone blond, and it’s changed her demeanor dramatically. “I’d secretly wanted to go blond for a really long time,” she admits. “I actually wear a lot of wigs in Z..., but I used it as an excuse, and I’m shocked by how much I love it,” she laughs. “It’s like the way little girls love sparkles – it’s just such a pretty color.”
Indeed, Ricci – who has historically inhabited dark, difficult roles, such as the sexually curious Wendy Hood in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm; manipulative teen Dede Truitt in The Opposite of Sex; and Charlize Theron’s lover, Selby Wall, in Monster, and whose manner in interviews for many years matched (sample topics: death and incest) – has a noticeable lightness to her now.
It’s a change that has come with age, she acknowledges, but is also down to her finally feeling in control, professionally. Ricci not only plays Z...’s title role, but is also its executive producer, having found and optioned the book on which it is based – Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler. “I was actively looking for opportunities for myself,” she explains. Her previous television series, Pan Am, had been canceled after just one season, in 2012. She was then fired from another Tv show at the read-through stage. “It was really horrifying and unpleasant, and I felt like I had been used,” she says of the experience. “Since I was a child, I’d been doing what other people told me to, and I decided, that’s not for me anymore. I’m going to shape my own experiences.”
Ricci grew up in New Jersey, the youngest of four children of Sarah, a former model, and Ralph Ricci, a lawyer and psychiatrist. At eight years old, she was spotted in a school play, and it was suggested she audition for commercials. A year later, she landed the role of Kate Flax, Cher’s younger daughter and Winona Ryder’s sister in 1990’s Mermaids, and at 10 played the malevolent, morbidly precocious Wednesday in The Addams Family. Working from such an age has, she says, left her with a deep need for order. “There’s so much downtime with being an actor, that if you don’t create structure and routine for yourself, you will lose your mind,” she says. “I write packing lists, I check things off, I get to the airport early. That’s who I am.”
Recent changes in her own domestic life have also brought about radical shifts. Three and a half years ago, she married James Heerdegen, a dolly grip [film technician] whom she met on the set of Pan Am, which she credits with changing her “absolutely”.
“Marriage shows you your flaws in how you deal with things, and having a child forces you to grow up at the speed of light,” she says. “I’m a completely different person than I was before I had my child.
“Because I was so celebrated for being a child, I think I held onto that immaturity for a very long time,” she continues. “It was the thing that made me special. Then at a certain point, like, 35, it’s not so special to be immature.”
Her style has also come of age. “I love looking like a ‘lady’,” she purrs. “There’s nothing I like more than a tiny little Chanel suit and big jewelry. I’m 5”1 so I’m obsessed with proportion – I really have to have a waist, or it has to be super-short…and I am too old now to wear anything super-short without feeling ridiculous.”
The distinctive looks that made Ricci stand out as a child have, she believes, prevented her from winning certain kinds of roles as an adult. “I’ve never been cast in this sort of romantic lead,” she says of Z. “I’m not a traditional leading lady. In life people look different, but in movies there is a certain standard of beauty. It doesn’t bother me that people didn’t see me that way, because I did see myself that way.”
There is a humility about Ricci that is surprising given how long she has spent in the limelight. “When I was a child, I was told, ‘Life is just not fair, honey, and you’ve got to make the best of it,’” she recalls. “I don’t think anyone is telling their kids that anymore, and it’s important. Life isn’t fair; the right thing doesn’t always happen for you.”
But you can try to make it happen. Though Ricci is currently awaiting news of a second season of Z..., and blithely admits that she has no other acting jobs lined up, she and her husband have become producing partners, and have two projects in development. She’s also keen to move into directing. “I am going to start the way I should, with short films,” she says, before pulling on her tweed Miu Miu coat and dashing to collect Freddie, her favorite project of all.
Watch Z... on Amazon Prime now
