Inconspicuous
Anna Paquin is a child star who never went astray.

Anna Paquin is pretty damn well-adjusted for someone cursed with the double whammy of being both child star and supporting actress winner.

Photo by Roberto D'Este

A cursory internet search turns up no lawsuits against her parents lurking in her past, no sex-tape scandals, no liaisons with Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine.

An Academy-Award winner at 11 for her role in The Piano, instead of crashing and burning or relying solely on her gap-toothed adorableness, Paquin resisted peaking at 13. Instead, she steadily built her career on a foundation of substantive parts. She showed a penchant for characters who were dark, quietly troubled souls and played them with the sensitivity of a young Jennifer Jason Leigh. In the past decade, Paquin has perfected the role of the oddly beautiful misfit in films like Almost Famous and The Squid and the Whale and on-stage in Neil Labute and Philip Seymour Hoffman productions. This May she caps her run as the angsty teen mutant Rogue in X-Men: The Last Stand. She’s also nabbed the lead role in Kenneth Lonergan’s second feature film, Margaret, which opens this fall.

In real life Paquin is less misfity, less tarty, but still adorable, if completely inconspicuous. In fact, she went completely unrecognized in a black hoodie, Converse, and no makeup, as she sipped tea on mismatched china in an East Village teashop.

I was doing some research on you on the IMDB and found all these odd little biographical tidbits…
You mean things that are written about you by people who have never met you?

Yeah! I want to ask you about some of those.
I think I’ve had numerous attempts to try to get those down, because seriously, I don’t know where they got some of that stuff from.

Ok, so – is your favorite color green?
Yes. That one’s right.

You have two cats and one dog
Well, yeah, when I was a kid, but not currently.

Do you play the cello?
Not anymore.

You were born in Winnipeg?
Yes.

How Canadian do you feel?
Canadian? [Laughs]. I don’t know where I feel like I’m from. I’m kind of half-and-half – half New Zealander, Half-Canadian, but I’ve lived in the United States since I was 16, and have been working here since I was 11 or 12. And I’ve traveled a lot. And I live in New York, which is pretty much a little bit of everything. So at this point, the closest thing I could call an identity is as a New Yorker.

Are you in college at Columbia University?
Technically I’m deferred. I did one complete year and a couple of false starts, but then I had to work.

What are you up to in New York these days?
Making my apartment look like I actually live there. That I’m not just squatting there with some boxes. I’ve actually lived in my apartment for about two years, but there’s nothing on the walls except a few photos of my family.

I read that you keep your Oscar in your bedroom closet so your friends wouldn’t see it.
I think it’s currently sitting on top of the dresser that’s behind a door in my apartment. So it’s migrated out of the closet. A friend convinced me to put it somewhere, not so it’s visible, but so that it’s not hidden.

I also read that you’ve never seen The Piano.
No, I haven’t, not as a grown-up who was allowed to watch an R-rated movie with lots of nakedness and sex. I haven’t sat down and watched it start to finish. But I don’t really make it a habit of sitting down and watching any of my films except when I see them originally, and even then I watch most of it like this [shields eyes with hand]. I get really self-conscious. But I think most actors are like that.

You got to work with Jane Campion on your first movie which is pretty incredible…
Yeah. I was completely unappreciative at the time and had no idea that everyone else I was working with was like an A-level person, ungrateful little child that I was. 'Harvey who? Holly who? Well, they were really nice. I liked them.'

You never really did the whole “teen comedy” thing.
Well, film age-wise, I was looking about 10 or 11 during that entire period of time. I went in for a couple of those films and I kept getting told I was too young to play 15 or 16, which I actually was.

So with all the travel you’ve done for films, what’s the first thing you do in a strange city?
Check out the room service menu. On movies there’s a lot of sitting around and a lot of hotel time, which doesn’t really suit me so well. I start to feel like an animal in a zoo. I do a lot of Pilates and look for arbitrary things to fill my day. I try to import family members and friends to come keep me company because I really don’t like being by myself that much.

Living out of a hotel seems really hard, because the luxury of something simple, like making a snack, seems difficult.
I know. I like to do things myself and not have to ask people to do things. Like – “could you please take some things OUT of the mini-bar so I could put some milk in there?” I prefer being home in New York.

Early on, you seemed to be playing pretty angsty teenagers. How was your actual high school experience?
Honestly, it wasn’t great. I moved around a lot – and shifting countries halfway through high school is not so great for the social life. And I ended up working, like, all the time, so I felt like I was barely even there. I would show up and take some classes and then be off again. People stop asking you to do things because everyone assumes you’re always busy. So it wasn’t really the ideal life, but I was doing something good for me, and that was one of the trade-offs.

So, did you get to do all your teenage rebellion on film instead of in real-life?
No, I did plenty in my real life.

Care to share?
Of course not.

Lili in The Squid and the Whale seems to follow along the same line as other characters you’ve done. Is there something that appeals to you about more tortured individuals?
She wasn’t so much tortured as she was wanting to bring out her inner darkness. She tried to put herself in provocative situations that would somehow better inform her as a more interesting writer. She’s much less of a victim than a lot of the characters that I’ve played.

And so what about your character Lisa in Margaret?
She’s in a junior in high school on New York's Upper West Side…

Wait, so she’s a high school junior and you’re playing her at how old?
I’m 23. I still get carded for R-rated movies. One of these days I’m going to get to graduate from high school, filmically-speaking. The basic premise is that she is complicit in a bus accident that kills someone, and lies to the cops about what happened.

It must have been odd to work on Margaret with Kenneth Lonergan and Brett Ratner (on X3) at the same time. I’m trying to think if there’s any overlap.
The only thing in common is that they’re both shot on film.

Is there anything you want to add that I haven’t asked you about?
No. I signed all these confidentiality things, so there’s nothing I can really say about X-Men 3, because they can, you know, have me killed or something.

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