Amber Tamblyn: "Joan" Spreads Her Wings

We got to know and love her as "Joan of Arcadia" then watched talented 23-year-old Amber Tamblyn branch out into mainstream features like The Ring, The Grudge 2 and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The redhead is now taking on the indie film world with a tough role as a teen accused of murdering her newborn baby in Stephanie Daley in which Amber co-stars with famed actress Tilda Swinton; the white witch in "Narnia".

We sat down with the actress on a cozy, cloudy afternoon at a posh hotel in Beverly Hills recently to talk about her role in "Stephanie", her future film and TV plans, her poetry and her show-biz upbringing. Picture Amber in flowy, black and green patterned silk, high-necked dress. We were chatting with a few other journalists and the actress came into the room unannounced and joined in before we realized... oh, she's here. Very friendly gal...

Amber: Okay, [Stephanie Daley] is going to outsell Spider-Man. That is my prediction. [she laughs]

TeenHollywood: Well, it's a very well-acted film and you are great in it.Let's start with a really heavy one: There is a heartbreaking scene where Stephanie has a baby in a bathroom stall. What did you do to get there as an actress?

Amber: Well, it was a good combination of conversation and preparation between Hilary Brougher [the film's director] and myself, and actually Tilda Swinton as well. We sat around for about a week before we started shooting the film and discussed many intimate details about our lives. I learned as much as I could about child-birthing, and talked to my mom about it, because my birth was 26 hours, and on no medication. It was very rough. And Tilda and Hilary have had twins, and so I just sort of talked to them about the process and feelings of it.

TeenHollywood: How was actually shooting that scene?

Amber: Hilary was great because she set it up where it was a fast shoot. We went in there, took a camera in the stall and I would just go. But before every take I would just ask for a giant bucket or bowl of ice water. And I would have them hold my hair back and just stick my head in it and hold my breath as long as I could until I felt like my face was burning off. And actually the following week I had all these burn chafes on my cheeks that they had to keep covering up with aloe vera and then make-up on top of it.

TeenHollywood: Pretty extreme. What did that do for you?

Amber: That gave that red, intense blotchy look that you can probably only get from pregnancy, I imagine. But it's not just a red face, it's the stress and strain. And then I'd go in the bathroom and, before we rolled, I'd just do fire-breathing, which is a technique that my mom trained in a lot during pregnancy. You breathe in and out really fast. It's supposed to help you get through the pain. So I did that and it would make me sort of dizzy. And then I was sort of quiet and pushed.

TeenHollywood: Do you think Stephanie was just blocking out whether or not her baby was born alive?

Amber: I think she didn't take care of the baby. This is what I would say: that she didn't take care of the baby because she didn't know she was pregnant, because she was clearly outside of herself. So what I think, because of that, the baby died. It came out and she subconsciously said, 'I don't want it to live,' and it died, when clearly it was probably a stillbirth. That's probably what happened. It died upon being born, yeah.

TeenHollywood: When you were offered this role, had the director seen some previous work of yours?

Amber: Yeah. I heard Hilary say that her casting director was a really big fan of "Joan of Arcadia" and sent her a couple of episodes and said 'you've gotta see this girl.' So, she sent it and Hilary thought it was really great and her only concern was that I was 21. So, when we met with each other though and when I have no make-up on, I still look like her right now. I look like Stephanie, that young. So she went 'okay, it's gonna work'.

TeenHollywood: How did you get the script in the first place?

Amber: My agent called me and said, 'You're never going to believe this, but Tilda Swinton is attached to a script called Stephanie Daley, which is about two women identifying their guilt as women through birth and stillbirth. And it would be you and her, and they're offering you the part.' And I fell off a chair. And not only that, but because it was Tilda Swinton, and she is probably like one of the top three actresses I would ever want to work with. So I read the script, I thought it was amazing, and Hilary Brougher flew out to Los Angeles, we had lunch, we talked, and that was kind of it. And then it was pretty much good to go.

TeenHollywood: Did this character follow you home afterwards? I would think it would be pretty hard to shake.

Amber: It was very hard to shake, the entire circumstances of this film were hard to shake because several things were going on. In my personal life, a relationship was coming to an end. It was a very difficult relationship [with music producer Travis Burkheimer, nine years older than her] coming to an end right when I was shooting the film. And we were also shooting in upstate New York in the Catskills at Hunter Mountain where there was no phone or internet service. The house I stayed in was apparently haunted at some point. It was a very lonely and isolating feeling, so all of those things I really just allowed them to become much more a part of me so that I could use the weight of all of them in playing out the character, I think. You'd get up in the morning and there'd be dead silence and they tell you to keep your back porch screen shut because bears will come in the house. Really, it was that kind of place.

TeenHollywood: At the end of shooting this, were you ready to say, 'okay can I do an action movie or a light comedy now'?

Amber: I did 'personal' things like Grudge 2 where I get dragged around on the floor by some crazy ghost and then he breaks my neck and then I went and did Blackout which is Rigoberto Castaneda's new film and I'm in an elevator struggling with a mass murderer. I had to get some s**t out of my system. Then Spring Breakdown came right after that and that was sort of like Parker Posey and Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch and we're all on a beach and we're flying kites and we're being silly and girlie. It was really fun.

TeenHollywood: Do you feel like we need more publicity for young women to know that they can leave their newborn babies at a safe house rather than discard them?

Amber: Absolutely. I guess there's a woman at USC recently who murdered her baby, stabbed it like 130 times, something awful. You hear the horror stories but you never hear why. I mean, certainly the news doesn't [cover that], because they're just there to dramatize things. So you don't hear the circumstances behind it. And clearly a lack of the tools of education, of knowing your options, is a major part of it. And parents play into that, family plays into that, as well as the school system plays into that. The great support systems are places like Planned Parenthood, and there are tons of them, which will give you all of your options and tell you all of your rights. And I think that that definitely needs to be out there more.

TeenHollywood: This is a very serious movie. Was there a chance for you, director Hilary and Tilda to lighten up at all during filming?

Amber: Absolutely. Tilda and I, because there was nothing to do up there, we went to Woodstock. We drove down there together a couple times and got lost. And we saw Grizzly Man four times in the theater because we loved it so much. We were obsessed. We were even trying to compare it in some way to Stephanie Daley, and have those characters be other people. You know Tilda, she was like (putting on accent), 'I feel like I'm more of the bear presence, let me explain why.'

TeenHollywood: Do you think both pro-life and pro-choice advocates can get something out of this movie?

Amber: Absolutely. This film doesn't have anything to do with the choices that you make, it has to do with the choices that you don't make. That's what the two characters are all about. They don't make any choices, and that's what happens to them. And it's about the outcome of that. It's about prevention and it's about protection, and about how you should teach your children and talk to them, so that maybe they won't have sex at 16-years-old at a party, you know? I think that would be a major step forward.

TeenHollywood: Let's lighten up. Have you been doing anything with your poetry?

Amber: Yeah, I've been writing a lot.

TeenHollywood: Is there a theme to your next poetry book?

Amber: Ummm...It's a lot of inside Hollywood anger. I'm telling a lot of dirty stories in a lot of different formats that I think need to be told, and I hope that young girls really enjoy the hell out of it. I think they will, and I think they'll know exactly who I'm talking about. But it's a mixture of that, and it's a mixture of bad relationships. This is much more of a flushing out. My first book was clearly just for me to say, 'Hey, let me represent myself to you and here's the poems I've been writing since I was 14 to 21'. There were some good things in there but there's also a lot of pieces that had a lot of juvenilia, were very young, sophomoric a little bit. Which I like, because I wrote them when I was 13. War poetry! What did I know? So this one should be interesting.

TeenHollywood: Do you join writers' groups or workshop your poetry?

Amber: I've been doing a pretty deep workshop with a couple of really great poets. One of them is named Derrick Brown and another one named Mindy Nettifee out of Long Beach, California. She has a book called 'Sleepyhead Assassins'. I think it's one of the best books of poetry I have ever read from any era. So, we've been work shopping. Jeffrey McDaniel, who is my favorite poet ever, says 'you've got to imagine you're a** off' and I feel like that's what we've been experimenting with in this writing group; really deepening imagery and metaphor and finding things that are cool.

TeenHollywood: Is there a title for the book yet?

Amber: I'm thinking of naming it 'It's Hard to Face Your Problems when the Problem is Your Face'. But, there are a couple names like 'Laughs Look Like Upside Down Cries'. I don't even know. It's in progress.

TeenHollywood: You grew up in an artistic household [Amber's dad is actor/dancer Russ Tamblyn who was in the classics Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story.] Did that ground you?

Amber: I wouldn't say grounded me. It certainly rooted me in something. I grew up in my family around a lot of artists. Then there's Neil Young which is his own thing. They're all mildly crazy and they're getting old now. They're in that place reminiscing where they talk about old stories. The other night my dad had a little party at his house; this barbeque thing, just sitting around, playing music, reading some poetry. They were getting drunk and at about 11:30 at night, they literally drunk dialed my godfather Dean Stockwell and he was in Taos. It was probably like an hour later and he's asleep. [Dad goes] 'Dean. Remember when you fell off the Harley, remember that?' They were just talking all this nonsense. They're like 'Let's call Dennis [Hopper]'. They had like a thousand people they wanted to call. I was like 'mom, take the phone away. Somebody's gonna spill a '60's secret. It's gonna be bad. Let's keep it the way it is'.

TeenHollywood: Hilarious! The "Joan of Arcadia" fans really loved that show. I just talked with Chris Marquette from the show. Would you think of doing episodic TV again?

Amber: Ah, Marquesha. I love Marquesha. Funny you ask. I just did a pilot for CBS. I did it because Michael Cuesta wrote it. Michael Cuesta did "L.I.E." and "Twelve and Holding" and created "Dexter" and has done a lot of "Six Feet Under". He's a very interesting director. It's a show called "Babylon Fields" and it's with Ray Stevenson, Kathy Baker, Jamie Sheridan and it's about everybody coming back from the dead. Everyone in the world, Indian tribes, everything. It's not an apocalyptic scenario but it really focuses on this one tiny town on Long Island and this girl Jeanine and her father [Jamie Sheridan] comes back from the dead and he's a corrupt cop.

TeenHollywood: Sounds like a fun Night of the Living Dead!

Amber: What we, the audience, find out is that someone, either Kathy Baker or myself, put an axe in the back of his head and that's how he died. He finds the axe and places it in the back of his head and realizes that that's how he was killed and then goes on to investigate his own murder. So it's about him trying to fix all of these awful situations and relationships that he had as well as other characters and, eventually, there's going to be some really hilarious things like zombie AA where they all go to meetings so they don't eat flesh. I mean, it's really dark, dark comedy. It's right up my alley. I guess when I read it I was like 'CBS is going to do this? Are you kidding me'. They said, yeah, they want their 'Heroes' or 'Lost', they want something along those lines. I said 'well, if they're crazy enough to put money behind it, I'm crazy enough to do it. Let's do it. It's great'.

TeenHollywood: Do they all come back from the dead at once or gradually?

Amber: Gradually but within like a couple of days. You see things on the news that it's going around the world with rioting and all that kind of stuff but it mainly focuses on this town and people coming out of the cemetery. Oh, my God, there's some funny things that I won't give away but it's really great and my character Jeanine Wunch and she's this Long Island girl who carries a gun and is really kind of clumsy but sort of sweet and a little hardcore. It's a great character role. I read it and everybody was saying 'don't go back to [TV]' I don't want to go do Scooby Doo 5. There aren't enough roles to keep me sustained. I'd rather be doing something like this where it's consistent and it feeds me. I think it's going to be a big cult thing. I like sticking with the cult theme; soap operas, horror films, God. I stick with the cult stuff. That's my target. All I need to get now is a guest role on like "Battlestar Galactica" then, I'm good to go. I love that show. That and "The Wire". It's all I watch.

***

Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.