Hollywood's tough southern belle on living with llamas, feeling "naughty" and love in the fast lane


Beautiful. Brainy. Lethal.

At least onscreen, Ashley Judd is quite the killer. Although her dramatic performances in Ruby in Paradise, Smoke and Simon Birch gave her critical credibility, it's been death-laden thrillers like Heat, Kiss the Girls and the recent smash Double Jeopardy that have lifted the acting Judd to the level of pop-culture celebrity long enjoyed by her country-singing mother and sister.

With her new psycho-thriller Eye of the Beholder, opposite Ewan McGregor, the 31-year-old Kentucky native delves deeper into violently demented behavior than ever before. A far cry from the poised, self-controlled intellectual who only appears to lose it at UK basketball games.

The girl can act.

---------

Your career has been gathering steam in recent years, but with Double Jeopardy, your first $100 million-grossing hit, you really seem to be taking off. How are you handling the success rush?

Well, being down to earth is always an objective for me. I just think it's so important to have your inner peace and your quality friendships and to love what you do. That's what my life is about.

The other--I'll just see what happens. I don't necessarily think about it, but it's definitely the resilience of the values that were instilled in me.

Guess a lot of that came from seeing your mom and sister hit it big after you were all living in near-poverty conditions.

Some of it is the journey we've had in life, in terms of coming from being "materially impoverished" and to having stuff. That so throws you--if you learn your lessons well--into your spiritual self. Because the stuff doesn't change who you are, it doesn't improve the quality of your relationships, it doesn't give you peace of mind.

It's that way with movies. Doing a certain kind of movie, with this supposed level of prestige, isn't going to make me happy. It's how I feel when I'm doing the work that makes me happy.

What about Eye of the Beholder made you happy?

I kill a couple of people! [Laughs.]

Uhhh, anything else you want to say about it?

I play a very peripatetic and rather lost soul. Ewan McGregor's a surveillance agent who becomes obsessed with me and, from a distance, he follows and sort of enables me to have this illicit life. I have a vague sense that someone is there throughout the film, and then at the end we meet.

Okay, that makes two killers you've played in a row, though they obviously have different motivations. And you reportedly pursued both movies tenaciously. Does that tell us anything about you?

I didn't really know what I was getting into. It's not something I felt the need to get psyched up for, to do research on or whatever. It was more like a scary adventure at Disney World, going into that forest not knowing what's going to happen.

When [Beholder director] Stephan Elliott asked me, "Can you handle it?" I started to cry, because it doesn't come naturally to me to fake my way through things.

But isn't that what acting is? Doesn't the nature of your job make you feel somewhat out of sync with reality?

Sometimes. You know, as hard as you do work, there's this whole sort of naughty, secretive thing about it. It doesn't matter if you wrapped at 5 in the morning; sleeping until 5 in the afternoon, then going to the supermarket with your hair unbrushed to get a burrito makes you look at the rest of the world like, "Y'all are normal and I'm not, and I don't have any explanation to give you, but see ya round."

Eye of the Beholder makes the point that communication technology can have the effect of isolating people.

Talking on the telephone I find very draining. I find the act of it really intrusive. I mean, I'm really over the whole concept of telephones. What gives you the right to call me at 11 o'clock in the morning? How do you know whether there is a place in my day for that presence of the external? Know what I mean?

Okay, we won't call. But how about email?

I like to email so much! I like an ongoing correspondence between people. I think that in writing, our friends' voices are much more interesting and revelatory. I'm drawn to seeing how my friends express themselves in written words, more so than I am trying to chat with them. And I find it to be more sincere, not to mention the fact that it can be done at one's leisure.

Do anything else with your computer?

That's about it, but I just saw recently that there are games on there. I guess I'll have to see what those are, though I hardly need more game diversions in my life.

Oh, yeah, that Wildcats thing of yours. You have quite the exuberant courtside manner.

Well, I like to carry on. Some Kentucky fans are a little more subdued.

Where does the passion for basketball come from?

It's the greatest college-basketball program in the country, it has the most illustrious history, it's produced the most entertainment the sport has known... Let's see, what other superlatives and hyperbole can I come up with here?

Is this an alumna talking?

No, I've always been around it. Everyone in our family, it seemed, knew a thing or two about it. Before I was a fan, my Aunt Margaret would tell me about Papaw Judd leading the kids in the neighborhood into the car and driving them to Lexington on the old, two-lane state highway and Midnight Madness.

It's still kind of amazing that you were a Phi Beta Kappa candidate at UK when, at an earlier point in your life, you lived in parts of the state that didn't even have electricity.

We had a really wonderful rural lifestyle there. There was no TV. We made our own soap and sometimes churned our own butter. My sister started to sing, and I became captivated by books--absolutely rapt.

And now you live in an old farmhouse outside Nashville.

It took me four years to restore. My sister gave it to me, and it was built in 1819. It had to be restored from the inside out. It's a beautiful house but very humble, made entirely of materials taken right off the farm. We had to insulate it, wire it, things like that. It was a lot of fun.

You call it a farm. Is that just a euphemism, or do you actually work it?

We've got sheep and llamas and horses. Lots of flowers, a small vegetable garden.

And your sister's and mom's homes are nearby. Do their fans ever come to your door looking for them--or, now, to their places asking for you?

There's kind of this unspoken thing in our county where, when fans come around, they're sent to the wrong places. There's this huge, huge house, and there's this little house behind it that's an exact replica on a smaller scale. This one gas station guy tells people, "Yeah, the mama lives in the big house, and the daughters live out back."

Country girl though you may be, you come off so intellectual at times that I imagine some people--perhaps some with power in Hollywood--find you intimidating. Do you ever hold back expressing your intelligence in certain situations?

Like, do I have to downplay it for the schmucks? No. I think that being perceptive and having interests is nothing but an asset. What I think I find a little more often than what you're suggesting is people's surprise that I might have an urban side to me or that I'm well rounded in ways they didn't expect either an actress or maybe a southerner to be. And I'm not saying that those stereotypes exist. I'm making a guess as to why I walk into someone's office, and after five minutes, they'd go, "You know, you're so urban." Guess you don't chew tobacco at business meetings.

I think that aspect of my life has been greatly overrepresented. [laughs]. There were some teamsters on Time to Kill who had this chewing tobacco that was manufactured in Texas, and we goofed off and chewed it sometimes. But it's not like a chronic habit--I mean, I don't know if I've ever actually purchased a pouch.

Not that we'd ever think you were a redneck if you did. Case in point: Some women date race-car drivers, but choosing a Scottish one like Dario Franchitti requires a certain level of sophistication. You do have to tell us, though, how fast you've gone with him.

Pretty fast.

Is it scary?

No. I completely trust him.

Nothing seems to shake you. And you indeed have a reputation for supreme self-assurance. Is that a constant, or do you have your vulnerable moments?

It comes and goes. I just think you have to be very protective of your own world, and the self can be very inundated. If you're porous, that can become problematic.

Which--since you're now one of the most sought after actresses in Hollywood--brings us to the subject of self-image. Even if you refused the first movie role you were offered [in Kuffs] because it required nudity, you're not shy about showing off your figure. Have you always been that way, or has there ever been something about your body that you wished you could change?

No, just sometimes my attitude. [Laughs.] I'm very comfortable with myself. Sometimes I'm a size two, sometimes--for a movie or because of laziness or for whatever reason--I'm a little bit bigger than that. It doesn't matter to me. I'm totally cool with whatever happens, because I know it's my responsibility and it's within my power, the way I look. I think feeling powerless about that might actually be the key to why so many women freak out.

If you could change something about yourself, what would it be?

Wow. In a way, it would be cool not to sleep, because then you could do stuff. But I love to sleep, because I really enjoy dreaming. I think dreaming is really one of the most brilliant aspects of being alive.

What kind of dreams do you have?

Oh, my gosh, what kind of dreams don't I have? Oh, man. I am a very active, lucid dreamer. I dream in color, I dream underwater. I'm directing movies at the moment in my dreams.

SOURCE: E-Online - 01/2000

>> Back