Moore seems to buy her own non-celebrityness so genuinely, you start to believe her. Maybe she's just a regular 22-year-old actress/model type strolling the steroidally consumerist streets of SoHo like all the other actress/model types here, drinking coffee and window-shopping. There is something weirdly normal about her, tucked into her North Face parka with the faux-fur collar ("I could never wear fur, never"), her striped scarf trailing over her shoulder. Maybe it's that Orlando, Florida, breeding. Or that the
Mandy Moore persona hasn't yet fully penetrated the grown-up world—her cultural input has thus far been mostly via bubblegum pop and pubescent tearjerkers such as A
Walk to Remember, released in 2002. Maybe it's her normal human proportions; she doesn't have the extreme alien beauty that supermodels and
Uma Thurman have.
"Mandy is obviously drop-dead gorgeous," says Diane Keaton, who plays her mother in the upcoming film Because I Said So. "She's America's beautiful girl, with this open face and this open heart. But she looks like a regular person. Like a really, really pretty regular person. I couldn't take my eyes off her." (Continue reading after the jump, more scans in the gallery)
(As long as we're on the topic, I should stop the tape here on Mercer Street to give
Moore a onceover and see if
Tom Everett Scott, her
Because I Said So costar, was right when he told me she's "even more attractive in person": heart-shape lips and flawless skin, yes; but also, at certain angles, an unnervingly accurate vision of what she looked like at age 13.)
So forget that she dated the tennis star
Andy Roddick and often appeared on TV courtside yelling her head off; forget that, according to his recent interview on H
oward Stern, she was deflowered by celebrity lothario
Wilmer Valderrama, a claim she says is "utterly tacky, not even true, and it hurt my feelings because I like him"; and forget that she is now dating one of Hollywood's great young hopes, the actor/director/smarty-pants
Zach Braff. Counter to all that evidence, I begin to feel that it's just me and this cool regular girl foraging for vintage clothes on a brisk early-spring day.
Then, at a boutique in SoHo, the disturbingly blank face of an old man appears in the window. He puts a big black lens to his eye and starts shooting. "Is that guy taking your picture?" I say. "Yep," she says, without looking up. Who knows how the guy picked up on the scent of
Mandy Moore. Or how the second paparazzo, a woman, gets word and comes running. But they have hustled over here because they believe that pictures of
Moore shopping are worth something (she's a celebrity!), and while she is kind of annoyed (crestfallen, in fact: "They just ruin your day," she says), she isn't surprised. She exits the store and walks among the genuinely anonymous actress/model types with a sense of purpose. She does not alter course, turn heel and run, or even put on her sunglasses: She is ignoring the paparazzi the way you'd ignore your spastic brother in the backseat on a long car trip. But this ghostman, this tired old paparazzo with a New York accent and flat feet giving labored chase through SoHo, is most likely the harbinger of things to come for our heroine. The ghost of celebrity Christmas future, yelling, "Miss Moo-ah, Miss Moo-ah, can you give me just one nice shot?"
The occasion for
Mandy Moore being on the cover of this magazine is her launch into adult-land. The booster rockets of teenage fame have been jettisoned. The film
American Dreamz, in which she plays a twisted reality-TV contestant judged by a panel including the President of the United States, has recently been released. And then in quick succession: the epic ensemble
Southland Tales and the romantic comedy
Because I Said So. She's here in New York filming an independent movie called
Dedication with
Billy Crudup and
Tom Wilkinson—not exactly like being on tour with the
Backstreet Boys.
Keaton, a woman with some perspective on the arc of an actress's career, predicts this for
Moore: "You meet someone like
Sarah Jessica Parker, who is a huge celebrity and a pro at being a celebrity—she has adapted her life to manage that in most graceful fashion. Well,
Mandy's not quite there yet. But this will be something that her life will have in it. And it's a much bigger responsibility even than for me back in the
Annie Hall days. It's more powerful now. She's a celebrity on the cusp of huge celebrity."
I have read that
Moore loves
Jon Stewart. Like, her favorite thing to do is sit at home and watch
The Daily Show. It's part of her purported jammies lifestyle. Not
Hugh Hefner silk pajamas; more like the footy kind. She doesn't really drink. She has never done a drug. And today, over breakfast in the West Village, she is at pains to explain this is not just hype. She really does love to get cozy.
"I'm a homebody," she says with die same relish that
50 Cent might tell you about getting capped. "When I'm not working I want to be in, like, comfy clothes watching TiVo."
But let's backtrack:
Jon Stewart and
Zach Braff. I mean, don't take this the wrong way,
Mandy, but, like, if you ran
Zach Braff through the FBI aging machine, wouldn't you get
Jon Stewart?
"I guess I have a type!" she says. "I like a good Jewish boy. With a sense of humor."
"Having read up on your relationship in the gossip rags, I was expecting to see your $250,000 engagement ring. What up with that?" I say.
"What up with that? I haven't seen it either."
"What about that website that claims to link to the Tiffany registry for your wedding?"
"That's what my mom saw in the newspaper. That's when she was like, 'These people are crazy!'"
"They supposedly had
Brad Pitt's registry as well."
"Oh wow, then we're in good company."
"Do you believe in marriage?"
"Oh yeah. My parents were high school sweethearts. So I have that example."
"Hollywood doesn't seem to produce that many—"
"Successful marriages? I know. I don't know why that is."
"I think some people might get married realizing that—"
"It's not going to be forever? But I know that when I get married, I want to know. I don't want to go in with the mentality, Well, maybe this will work and maybe it won't."
"Have you seen your man since you've been in New York?"
"
Zach was just here visiting. We stayed at the Mercer Hotel because I'm staying in this small apartment; like, 700 square feet. I told him it's only got a double bed. He was like: 'Mercer.'"
"Dude, that's not small—250 square feet is small."
"That's what my friends from New York say. Anyway, he's coming back this summer to film his new movie in Jersey. I don't totally get the thing
Zach has about his hometown. I don't feel that way about Orlando.
Maybe because Orlando doesn't have that tight sense of community."
I don't think that's it. This woman on the cusp of mega-celebrity (
Keaton, paragraph five) was born in New Hampshire and moved to Florida at six weeks old, when her father, a pilot for American Airlines, was relocated there for work. She lived in Orlando until she was about 14, when she was discovered by the FedEx man: Her parents had rented a recording studio so she could make a demo to send off to wherever these things are sent and become part of what was then the preburgeoning teen-pop movement. While she was recording, a guy who worked for FedEx heard her sing, told her she was phenomenal, and called his friend who signed urban artists for Epic. ("It's funny, because there's nothing urban about me," she says.) So the Epic guy flew down to hear her and gave her a contract on the spot. It's not the only time someone, smitten with her voice, face—her entire pop-star package—has swept her away.
"The studio had me looking at
Jessica Simpson," says
Adam Shankman, who directed
A Walk to Remember. "But I was driving up Laurel Canyon, I heard
Mandy's song 'I Wanna Be With You,' and I thought, Who the hell is that little angel voice? I went to the Virgin record store, saw her face, and flipped out. I said, 'That's my girl.'"
That
Moore's talents were manifest at age 14 is why she doesn't get
Braff's hometown fetish. She was gone during those years when adultish longings hatch. Those of us who remain captive in our small teenage worlds tend to transfer our longings (loneliness, desire, beauty, friendship, sex) onto our hometowns, hanging them from the trees we grew up near and the houses of the first people on whom we had crushes, like Christmas ornaments, where they remain, powerful and sad, whenever we go back home. But
Moore's whole world wasn't some suburban town. Her whole world was the actual whole world.
"I'm not a big, like, going out person," she says when she's asked about her clean-living ways. "I sort of, like, skipped over that whole phase in my life."
"What phase did you go to?" I say.
"I went to, like, adult phase."
People assume that what happens when a previously normal boy or girl becomes a teenage star is that he or she has his or her insides scraped out and replaced with pure, Styrofoam ambition. Maybe it's their own ambition or maybe it's their parents', but at 14, your drive is not to "express yourself." Conventional wisdom dictates that people develop their voices (writing, singing, acting, etc.) during the crucible years of struggle—while living in Hell's Kitchen or Silver Lake with three roommates, eating ramen noodles and going on 746 auditions a week. Teen stars skip the starving-artist phase.
"I came out when I was 14, singing songs about candy,"
Moore says. "I was told what to sing and how to sing it, and I felt like a puppet. I don't think people cared about me or what I wanted to do musically. It was more about: This is what sells records. I totally felt disposable."
When you hear
Moore sing, even on the lighter-than-air, overproduced early records (So
Real, 1999, and
Mandy Moore, 2001), it's obvious why the FedEx man plucked her from obscurity: She has a clear, virtuoso, pliant voice with range. It's also apparent that her producers put her on the dial-a-voice program: Sometimes she sounds like
Shania Twain, other times she has the meandering vocal show-offmess of a mini
Mary J. Blige, and on, say, 2003's
Coverage, she sounds more like what you'd get if you grafted
Mariah Carey with
Carol King. But there's always something, for lack of a less teen-poppy term, real that comes through. You can detect an actual person knocking around in all that market-tested production, even if it's not more than a faint SOS tapped out on prison bars.
"I saw
A Walk to Remember before casting her,"
American Dreamz director
Paul Weitz says. "
A Walk to Remember wasn't.. .well, actually, I kind of liked her in it."
Weitz goes on to say that, in
Dreamz, she was capable of more than playing a version of her pop-star self: "I think she's able to handle a certain kind of comedy. She's able to go into sort of an extreme character without winking at the audience. She can play someone who's sociopathic incredibly well. I think it's because she seems like an incredibly nice, smart person. So it's fun for her to play the other side of the coin."
This is basically why
Moore has an acting career. Somehow she's been able to emerge unscathed from the muck of teen culture. She's now acting like a young thespian just arrived from the starving-artist phase. She's dating a young
Jon Stewart, not a young
Donny Osmond. She went out and got a role in the independent movie
Saved! (2004), a fairly risky, fairly controversial satire about Christian fundamentalists. And she was good. Her character was
Mean Girls meets
The Ten Commandments; you could feel her relief at getting to play a haughty b*tch instead of a sugary leukemia patient (
Walk to Remember). She also played herself on
Entourage last year, giving the public the opportunity to get used to the idea that
Mandy Moore might be cool.
"I think
Saved! was the beginning for me," she says. "It was the start of people saying, 'Hey, maybe she's a serious actress. Maybe she's in this for the long haul.' And once you have that feeling, doing work you're really proud of, you want more of it."
Moore's transformation is a sign that maybe it's time to rethink the legacy of teen pop. Like with just about every previous and subsequent youth-culture movement, it seemed pretty clear that the advent of bubblegum pop (
Britney,
Justin,
Mandy, et al.) had been presaged in Revelations as a sign of the impending apocalypse. But at the very least, being put through the teen machine teaches you how to be an entertainer. How to sing, dance, do a satellite radio tour—how to be a professional by age 16. And how can we not be impressed by the ingenuity of these youngsters, emerging as they have into adulthood?
Lindsay Lohan is proving herself pretty adept at keeping famous by changing her hair color.
Lance Bass wants to be an astronaut.
Britney Spears isn't in jail for welfare fraud.
Jessica Simpson is a legitimate divorcee sex symbol.
Justin Timberlake, The Mickey Mouse Club kid, made an excellent album four years ago, and now he's in a bunch of movies where he proves he can actually act. And then there's
Moore, not simply cashing in her chips for the most extreme kind of fame available, but straining for transformation, to be creative, to challenge herself. Doesn't that restore your faith, if even the supposedly plasticized are actually yearning humans? Isn't that the kind of resilience they make biopics about? Can't you see the trailer:
Moore telling her record company to screw off so she can go follow her heart? It's a triumph of the human spirit!
She may not do shots and dance on the bar at Hogs & Heifers, that supposed rite of passage of girls on their way to becoming America's sweetheart. But she does have a self-proclaimed vice: shopping.
Moore is, as she says, addicted. Where will you find her on her days off in Manhattan? Perusing the vintage shops on the Lower East Side, or the more rarified climes of the Mayle Boutique in SoHo. But for someone so supposedly warped by compulsion,
Moore on a buying spree is not what you'd expect. Here's how it goes :: She says, "I think I'll stop by A.P.C." Then she stops, barely stops, by A.P.C.
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