Melanie Lynskey comes out from the shadows

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Melanie Lynskey, New Plymouth girl turned Los Angeles-based actor, is sitting in an Auckland hotel room doing impersonations of Melanie Lynskey.

She is also, the 24 year-old says with the naivete of youth, nursing the "worst hangover in the world."

Only the very young can look like Lynskey does - fresh-faced, bright-eyed - after a night on the town. Only the very young have the courage to face a camera lens the morning after sans makeup.

Not that too many actors, however young, would own up to a night on the other end of a couple of wine bottles. You're more likely to have them tell you, while they sip at a water bottle, that they were in the gym at 6 am.

Lynskey's a good actor but not much of a pretender. She's wearing old jeans and trainers, a cowboy shirt. The only trapping of a Hollywood lifestyle is a terrifically kitsch bag - it features a kitten in a patch of beaded daisies - from the terrifically expensive Bloomingdales.



Lynskey is that rare thing: the budding celebrity who says honest things. She'll tell you, for example, that she played "a very boring character" in a Stephen King mini-series because it was "good for my career ... but it was like sleepwalking through it."



She is home to promote her new film, Snakeskin, the Gillian Ashurst-directed "supernatural road movie" which premiered in Auckland last night and is due for general release in October.

It's her first major role in a New Zealand film (she had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in The Frighteners) since Peter Jackson's heavenly Heavenly Creatures in 1994. She was 15 then, a schoolgirl with dreams of becoming an actor.

"Be careful what you wish for," says the Snakeskin character Seth, a walking Marlboro Man who is as dangerous to the health as a lifetime of filter tips.

What Lynskey wished for were the best parts. Here's Lynskey, at the age of six, when her family were living in London. She's playing herself losing out on the part of Mary in the nativity play to another girl. A haughty Lynskey to teacher: "Can you explain to me why I didn't get this role? Is it the accent? I can do the English accent. Is it because she's blonde?" Lynskey can still remember the blonde's name: Wendy.

When she grew up and went to Hollywood for the first time aged 18, she found herself surrounded by "Wendys."

She was over-overwhelmed by a self-consciousness fed by a diet of auditions. "The whole culture was bewildering. Meeting all these girls ... I'd never seen anyone that skinny. I didn't fit in. I felt so awkward." Directors would say to her "You were really amazing in that film [Heavenly Creatures]." And she'd say, "Oh, no, I wasn't really. You don't have to say that."

They stopped saying it. Lynskey stopped eating, stopped going to auditions,"went a bit crazy." And came home. She "moved in with my boyfriend, went on the dole, got even fatter. It was awful."

T HE breakthrough came when she auditioned for a never-made Gaylene Preston film, Ophelia.

When Preston asked the young actor why she was just going through the motions, Lynskey "just broke down crying." She gives a good repeat performance: "I've had this awful time. I was in LA ... and now I'm on the dole and live with my boyfriend and I hate him."

Preston advised her to go away and change everything she had to change. She did a play, took voice lessons, "went on a diet." And said bye-bye boyfriend?

"I'm afraid I did," she laughs. "It wasn't his fault. Gaylene Preston ruined my relationship." But she is serious when she says, "I don't even know if she realises how much she did for me."

For years interviews with Lynskey - when she was interviewed at all - would mention that she grew up in the shadow of Mt Taranaki and grew up as an actor in the shadow of Heavenly Creatures co-star Kate Winslet.

Lynskey would turn, in terrified fascination, to the "whatever happened to ... ?" stories in magazines.

She thinks she's done enough now to halt the Winslet career comparison. She was Drew Barrymore's nice stepsister in Ever After; starred with Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates in an adaptation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard; played a New Jersey girl in Coyote Ugly (she couldn't resist the combination of the accent, "big hair and fake nails").

In Snakeskin, she is Alice, a girl from small-town NZ who, as Lynskey puts it, "chooses a persona for herself as a way of trying to escape." Alice wants an adventure in Wonderland: "I wished so much that my life could be one of those Hollywood movies - and adventure around every corner." It's a tongue-in-cheek trip with plenty of drugs, violence and allusions to other stories.

Lynskey is great in it. She spends the film, shot in Canterbury, sporting a teensy-weensy skirt, and ample cleavage. Alice is all bravado; playing at being sexy. Lynskey knew girls like Alice at school. Those who were never going to be the "cool girl at school;" those who revelled in a parallel fantasy world. "I was kind of like that."

What she is like now is an ambitious young actor in a town where that makes you a cliche.

But you couldn't say she lives the cliched life, at least not yet. For one thing this actor in a road movie can't drive. In LA that makes it just her and street people who walk places. Tell people you walked to a meeting and it has as much impact as saying, "Hey, I just shot up heroin on the way here."

She lives in an apartment complex where her neighbours are all Texans, all related. They get in a keg, hang fairy lights and have huge parties. When she went in search of an apartment "they were all sitting outside drinking beer. And I was, like, do none of them have jobs? I like that."

Well, she likes it in the neighbours.

In a few years, if burning ambition has anything to do with it, a Lynskey interview will quite likely be something altogether different.

You'll get the standard celebrity interview: the minders will be lurking, the questions, and the answers, prescribed. Or maybe not. Being Lynskey might still mean turning up to interviews with no makeup and no pretensions. Now that would be the stuff of Wonderland.