All photos by Shelby Duncan
Jena Malone has a beautiful feature in the latest LADYGUNN Magazine. She talks about her acting career and gives us some insight into her method, plus she talks about her audition for Catching Fire, "I blew them out of the water." The gorgeous photographs are by Shelby Duncan
LG: Congrats on THE HUNGER GAMES, by the way.
Jena: Thank you! Can’t comment on it yet, but I’m allowed to say how excited I am to be working on it. It’s a fucking dream! My little sister recommended I read it like two years ago and now she is dying.
LG: Nowadays some girls are instant celebrities, whether they deserve it or not, because they played the “Hollywood” game.
Jena: Seriously, you get one film, you hire a publicist and a stylist, all of that, and instantly you look like a celebrity. Where is your voice? Where is your point of view? That’s what made Julia Roberts so interesting when she was younger. And people like Madonna. That’s what makes Meryl Streep interesting every single time she walks out the door. She has a point of view. These other women buy their point of view from stylists or fashion people or agents. But they make far more money than I do. They are getting job offers that I could only dream of. There are some aspects where I wish someone would have just told me when I was a hot-headed 17-year-old, I could have just played the game a little straighter and I would have been able to have more doors open now.
LG: Well, THE HUNGER GAMES, c’mon, that’s a pretty big coup.
Jena: That’s the funny thing, the only reason I got this is because I blew them out of the water in the audition. It wasn’t because I played the game right and wore the sexy skirt, it was because I went in there and really auditioned and they actually had a casting director that wanted to cast real actors. That is not always the case.
LG: Especially in such a large franchise.
Jena: Right, I often see a lot of the younger actors who are like, “What should I do?” Honestly, it’s hard either way. It’s hard to be yourself and it’s hard not to be yourself. Both have a means of making you feel insecure and not sturdy in your job. It’s such a delicate thing. You’ve got to play the game a little bit. Even that’s a stylistic choice, even that’s a persona. It’s all a guise, a dream within a dream, so what’s really the truth of it? It’s far deeper inside, not on the outside. I think that’s what I am learning now. How to appreciate the material aspects that basically form that language of Hollywood without depreciating my internal aspects.
Read the rest of this great article at Ladygunn
Thanks to TheHob.org for the tip!