Click here to view the video. There was no embed option, or I would have posted it below as well. The interview is a little old (from September 2008), but since I didn’t have it on the site yet, I thought I’d go ahead and post it. Better late then never, I suppose.
Actrice très douée et également superbe (ce qui n’est pas pour déplaire), Mia Kirshner a connu à ce jour sa plus grande heure de gloire aux yeux du grand public dans le Dahlia Noir (elle était d’ailleurs bien la seule). C’est sans compter que Mia promène sa jolie frimousse et sa forte personnalité dans des séries TV, de 24 Heures Chrono où elle avait joué une méchante, à The L Word où elle tient l’un des rôles principaux. C’est autour de la sortie de la saison 4 de cette série, déjà disponible dans les bacs, que nous l’avons rencontrée cet été pour une interview sans langue de bois, où l’on constate qu’elle n’est pas forcément accro aux séries TV et loin d’être atteinte du carriérisme aigu dont bon nombre d’actrices à Hollywood sont victimes. Ce qui quelque part est rageant étant donné son talent.
I decided to give in and watch the final season and capped episodes 6.01 – 6.03 over the weekend. I will most likely not be doing weekly updates with caps because my online time is pretty limited right now, but I will continue to post caps from this season as time allows. That is unless they pull some crap like they did in S4 that just made my blood boil. I will refrain from ranting about that again though. Enjoy the new caps!
At a Los Feliz café, Mia Kirshner seems nothing like Jenny Schecter, the narcissistic diva she portrays on the Showtime lipstick lesbian drama, “The L Word.” (more…)
On an unrelated note to those of you who emailed me over the past week/weekend, I will be responding very soon. I’ve been super busy at work and home and haven’t had a chance to catch up. I just wanted to write a quick note to let you know that I hadn’t forgotten about you.
Best known for her role as The L Word’s bookish drama fiend Jenny Schecter, Mia Kirshner is very clear about one thing: to her, acting is a “day job.” Since 2001, the 33-year-old actress has devoted her extracurricular energies to I Live Here, a collage-style literary documentary of uprooted peoples in strife-torn nations that Random House released in November. The product of refugees herself (her father was born in a DP camp to Holocaust-survivors parents), Kirshner gives readers a gut-wrenching firsthand glimpse into the lives of the disenfranchised in such hotbeds of turmoil as Burma, Ciudad Juárez, Malawi, and the Russian republic of Ingushetia. With The L Word’s final season debuting in January and Kirshner planning to propel I Live Here into an even more ambitious outreach project, you have to wonder what she’ll be choosing as her next day job. (more…)
The cable star’s travelogue of global hotspots is elaborately designed and knottily layered
If you get annoyed when actors engage in activism, Mia Kirshner is right there with you. The 33-year-old actress — who played a stripper in the revered 1994 movie “Exotica” and has worked steadily since, most often in roles as a sexualized smarty-pants, like her character Jenny Schecter on “The L Word” — said recently, “I think some actors have exploited their philanthropic efforts to promote a film.”
Kirshner was saying such things because her new book, “I Live Here,” is unmistakably philanthropic. During the past six years, she traveled to four messy and malignant parts of the world — the Russian republic of Ingushetia; Burma; Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua; and Malawi -— that have large disenfranchised populations. “I Live Here,” is the product of those trips: Its four separate volumes, one for each region, tell stories about the women and children in these places through journal entries, collages, photographs, paintings, graphic novellas and images of found objects. Kirshner wrangled many collaborators; J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons are the co-authors, and there is a boatload of other contributors, including some of the subjects themselves. (more…)
Most journals are about our own little problems. But Toronto actress Mia Kirshner travelled to four desperate parts of the world to bring back the tales of the most vulnerable people, Gayle MacDonald writes
For the past seven years, Toronto actress Mia Kirshner has been obsessed with self-financing and publishing her debut book, I Live Here, a harrowing tribute to the overlooked victims of war, corrupt governments and crippling disease.
“I worked on the book – all the time,” says Kirshner, a gorgeous, dark-haired slip of a thing who started acting as an extra in low-budget television and saw her career take off after nailing roles in Love & Human Remains and Exotica.
“I drove my friends and family insane because they said it’s all I talked about. I know it’s true, and I’m sure, very annoying to be around. But it literally has been an odyssey, an obsession for me. Because once I saw how many people have sacrificed so much … well, I became obsessed,” she says with a smile.
Kirshner says all this while in town last week to present her so-called paper documentary at the International Festival of Authors. The 33-year-old explains that she became fixated with the idea of the four-part book – which took the actress and many collaborators to some of the most ravaged places in Chechnya, Myanmar, Juarez, Mexico, and Malawi – after 9/11. (more…)
There is a 2 page article in the September 2008 issue of Glamour magazine (Penelope Cruz on the cover) about Mia and her work on her book I Live Here. I picked it up yesterday and it’s a really great, though rather short, read and includes photos and artwork from the book. I will have scans available as soon as I can, though it may be a little while as I am having some issues with my scanner and I’m getting ready to move in a couple of weeks.
Brian De Palma has made legendary crime and noir-ish thrillers, so adapting James Ellroy seems like a perfect fit for him. His film of Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia combines all those elements – seedy gangsters, hard boiled detectives, violent crimes and a macabre sense of humor. He talked about that and more when I caught him out junketing for The Black Dahlia.
“But that’s the tone of the book,” said De Palma. “That very much exists in the book. I was just talking to some journalist about this is closer to Sunset Boulevard with the funeral of the monkey and when he arrives at Norma’s estate. It’s like, ‘Okay, how are we supposed to take that?’ I mean, you take Bill Holden’s kind of wry analysis of what he’s watching and this is very much true in this piece too because once you’re at the Linscotts, you’re in a nut house. These people are insane and the way that Ellroy wrote it is sort of like a comic opera. I don’t know how else to explain it, and so what I did in order to get that approach to the audience originally was to shoot the entrance in first person. I said, ‘Okay, you want to see these people? Let them look at you. Let Mrs. Linscott just look at you like you’re trash.’ ‘How is a policeman in my living room?’ So that was the adjustment that I made. When you have a dog stuffed with the newspaper with his first million dollars and Hilary [Swank] just started tosses it off like the weather, I mean, you go, ‘Wow. I’m in a looney bin here and everyone seems to think it’s quite normal.’ That exactly how I did it. It was very much in the tone of the Ellroy book”
“What’s it like to work with Scarlett Johansson?” I may not be the most adept interviewer, but I’m not about to blow my twenty minutes with Brian De Palma at the historic Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles with so routine a query. Actually, it’s the director himself posing the question, only it’s with weary sarcasm and to no one in particular – a grim acknowledgment of the boilerplate interrogations he’ll be enduring all day at the hands of personalities from Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra and all the other glitzy, low-cal entertainment news shows.
