Take a chance on Mena

Mena Suvari has a fine, full-lipped mouth, which was certainly one reason the director of her new horror film, Trauma, decided to show it painted throughout with shiny, blood-red lipstick. Maybe it was her mouth, too, that induced him to have someone thrust a large spider between her character's lips.

A mean trick to play on a pleasant young actress, I couldn't help thinking as I met Suvari at a Zen tea house in West Hollywood. She is polite, impeccably turned out in designer jeans and an embroidered cotton shirt, and poised in a way that did not immediately suggest a ready familiarity with hairy arachnids shoved under her tongue.

"They used a mouth double," she confesses. A mouth double? "Yes, she was an American woman living in London. She'd known the spider before. She put in a mouth guard and everything. It was serious business, I'm telling you. This was a very professional, well-behaved spider."

There is a fresh-scrubbed, wholesome quality to Suvari, which is no doubt what first attracted casting directors to her and landed her part after part as the teenage cheerleader type - she actually was a cheerleader in American Beauty.

She admits she doesn't do well when it comes to daredevil stunts. "I never was a risk-taker," she says. But she is also anxious to move away from the stereotyped image Hollywood appears to have of her, and prove she can be effective in a wide range of parts and dramatic modes. Being risk-averse has not affected her willingness to be gutsy as an actress.

A couple of years ago, in the little-seen druggy adventure Spun, Suvari played a crystal-meth addict. "I had resin on my teeth. I didn't wash my hair for a week," she says. "I even had to take a poo on camera."

Did she do that for real, I ask, or was there a bottom double for the close-ups? Suvari laughs. "No, they didn't show that part. They did show the poo, though, which was a well-softened Reese's peanut butter cup. I'm telling you, when you soften a Reese's peanut butter cup, it makes for a very convincing poo."

Suvari, it must be said, has not had a whole lot of luck marrying these more adventurous parts with the kind of box-office success and public attention she enjoyed five years ago with her two bona fide hits, American Pie and American Beauty.

Despite the speed with which she climbed the great Hollywood beanpole five years ago, she is now very much the working actress, struggling for parts like anyone else and fighting against the mentality that says you should be cast in parts that resemble what you have already done in the past.

"For a business based on creativity, I have to say there isn't much," she says. "The attitude is, if you haven't done it before you can't do it. It's so frustrating - why can't they take a damn chance? Doesn't anybody believe in anybody?"

Not that she is bitter. She has worked consistently and learned many valuable lessons even from the films that weren't hits."About a year or two ago I finally figured what I was doing in this business," she says. "Instead of people just telling me what to do, I'm now learning more about myself."

When fame first hit, she was really too young - just 19 - to understand the enormity of what was happening. "When I was working on American Beauty [as the teenager who arouses Kevin Spacey's lustful attentions], I was just happy to have a job," she says. "I felt I'd just fallen into it. I worked hard, I did my job, but I didn't do that much. I hadn't had that long struggling period to appreciate the success."

The struggles came later - the realisation that all anyone wanted to cast her in were teenage parts, the frequently thwarted desire to branch out and extend her range.

"I didn't want to keep playing high-school roles," she explains. Even at 25, she could probably still pass for 18 on screen. Suvari's great appeal in her early films is that she looked convincingly like an all-American girl, with just a whiff of something more exotic, no doubt down to the fact that her mother is Greek and her father is Estonian.

It's not exclusively a high-school look, but casting directors don't necessarily appreciate that. It has been her choice - and to her detriment, commercially - not to fall for the obvious and keep repeating what she has done in the past.

There are signs her gamble is beginning to pay off. There was her role in the acclaimed television series Six Feet Under, the black comedy about undertakers dreamed up by American Beauty's screenwriter, Alan Ball. Suvari plays Edie, the lesbian lover of a seemingly sexually confused Claire Fisher.

Despite appearing in the show for a half-season, Suvari says the door is open for her to return to the series.

"Don't worry," she says, referring to the show's rising body count, "I'm still breathing when I leave."

Her latest big-screen project is an as-yet untitled project starring Jennifer Aniston as a woman who suspects her mother was the model for the Katherine Ross character in The Graduate.

Suvari started shooting that film earlier this summer, only to find herself in the middle of one of the most sordid intrigues to hit Hollywood in years. First the cinematographer was fired, then the director, Ted Griffin, who had written the script, and then roughly half of the principal cast.

Not that she had anything bad to say about his replacement, Rob Reiner. "Obviously, they have to start from scratch, because there's a new director with his own vision," she says. "I will do cartwheels for Mr Reiner if he asks me to."

And with that, our tea-time chat is over. Charming, polite and just a tad impenetrable - Suvari may have aspirations to be an alternative film actress, but in this particular foray into her publicity duties she came across as a seasoned old pro.

- INDEPENDENT