The female actors that inspired Chloë Sevigny’s career: “Powerhouses”
In the 1990s, Chloë Sevigny emerged as the newest young ‘it girl’—as she was lovingly dubbed—working with cool figures like Sofia Coppola and Sonic Youth while establishing herself as a model. Off-screen, she worked as a seamstress, but soon, she shifted her focus to acting, landing her first role in Larry Clark’s controversial film Kids.
The actor seemed drawn to contentious movies, unafraid to play roles that were boundary-pushing or offbeat. She followed Kids, in which she played a teenager navigating New York’s youth culture, where the AIDs crisis loomed over each interaction, with a role in Steve Buscemi’s debut feature, Trees Lounge. Then she was back to collaborating with Kids screenwriter Harmony Korine, starring in his film Gummo and even taking on the role of the costume designer.
Since then, Sevigny has appeared in movies like Boys Don’t Cry, American Psycho, Demonlover, Dogville, The Brown Bunny, and more recently, Queen and Slim and Bones and All. The actor is, decades later, still considered an ‘it girl’, with legions of social media users regularly sharing images of her outfits or edits of her film roles across platforms, admiring her innate sense of authenticity.
The actor’s résumé seems to reflect this sense of boldness and fearlessness that she seems to radiate; she prefers independent filmmakers, divisive themes, and arthouse and avant-garde approaches. It’s very unlikely we’ll ever see Sevigny in a superhero movie or a showy blockbuster – for the actor, powerful performances are at the centre of what she is drawn to. Naturally, then, her acting inspirations are all female actors who she considers “powerhouses”.
She loves the kinds of women who can pour themselves into a role and leave an indelible mark on the viewer. In an interview with Kim Kardashian for ‘Actors on Actors’ by Variety, Sevigny revealed, “In high school, I got into the more independent scene. And I was also just drawn to certain actresses.” The first person she lists is Mia Farrow, whose career took off in the 1960s and 1970s with roles in movies like Rosemary’s Baby, Secret Ceremony, See No Evil, The Great Gatsby, and Death on the Nile.
The actor often appeared in psychological and horror-adjacent films during the early years of her career, and she quickly captured people’s attention with her award-winning performances. In Secret Ceremony, Farrow starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor, playing a young woman who strikes up an unusual mother-daughter relationship with Taylor’s character, with events soon spiralling into strangeness. Taylor is another actor that Sevigny dubs a “powerhouse,” admiring her illustrious career. The actor, widely considered a Hollywood legend, also appeared in movies like Cleopatra, A Place in the Sun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
Sevigny also highlighted “the great Italian actress” Anna Magnani, whose career began in the late 1920s and continued through to the early 1970s. She appeared in one of the greatest Italian movies of all time, Rome, Open City, as well as some Hollywood pictures, like The Rose Tattoo, for which she won an Academy Award.
Of course, she had to mention one of the greatest stars of all time, Gena Rowlands (“and all the [John] Cassavetes movies”), who delivered some blistering performances in movies like Opening Night, A Woman Under the Influence, and Love Stream. While she is best known for appearing in her husband Cassavetes’ movies, she also starred in Night on Earth, The Notebook, and Persepolis, becoming widely respected in the industry for her sheer magnetism and emotional prowess.
The cinematic choices these women made were certainly bold – and sometimes even transgressive – and their influence is more than apparent in Sevigny’s impressive filmography.
