Christina Ricci on “raving lunatic” Vincent Gallo and her most conflicting experience
There comes a time in a child actor’s career when they must transition to more mature roles, and Christina Ricci didn’t wait around, moving away from family-friendly roles before she’d even turned 18.
The actor, who made her acting debut alongside Cher in Mermaids when she was just nine years old, enjoyed a very successful start to her career during the 1990s. With performances in the likes of The Addams Family as the moody and macabre Wednesday and Casper, in which she led the film alongside a CGI ghost, Ricci proved herself to be one of the most acclaimed stars of her generation.
By the time she was 17, however, she was ready to move on to more challenging roles, resulting in a hectic period for Ricci, which saw her appear in titles like Pecker by the legendary cinematic troublemaker John Waters, the drug-fuelled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the indie romance The Opposite of Sex. One project from 1998 stood out as her most enduring role, though, even if it saw her work with someone she would later describe as a “raving lunatic”.
Ricci landed the part of Layla in Vincent Gallo’s indie drama Buffalo ‘66, a young girl who gets kidnapped by Gallo’s Billy after he gets out of prison. He forces her to pretend to be his wife in front of his parents, but the pair soon develop an unusual connection despite Billy’s lack of redeeming qualities.
The actor gave an incredible performance as Layla, vulnerable, emotionally charged, and sometimes playful, but Gallo’s intensity marred her experience of shooting the film. The actor is not exactly an easy-going guy, with his perfectionism and propensity for spitting vitriolic comments making him one of cinema’s most controversial figures (don’t even get me started on his website).
Ricci might’ve had eight years of practice as a child actor, but her experience shooting Buffalo ‘66 was unlike anything she’d been a part of before. She told Huff Post, “That was very confusing because it was my first movie away from home, or without my mother. [Gallo] didn’t want my mom to come. He wanted me to be up there by myself. I was 17 and I had never worked with anyone like this, and I had never worked on a movie that was that low-budget before.”
Adding, “I’d always worked on things where the more money, the more structure, the more protections in place, all this stuff. But I spent most of that movie trapped in a car with a raving lunatic.”
Gallo seems to be an unstable character, just like Billy, and Ricci was clearly on the receiving end of his frustrations while shooting his directorial debut. He even said horrible things about her following the release of the film, despite the fact it had performed well with critics.
Talking to Independent Film Quarterly about the potential of a sequel, Gallo disgustingly said, “If I could get hold of some of the lipo’d Christina Ricci fat, I could clone it and recreate that sweet chubby girl, pickup at the bathtub scene where Christina begins by farting under water and my character Billy Brown has to hold his breath all the way back to the bowling alley.”
It’s a miracle that Ricci was able to walk away from Buffalo ‘66 with some semblance of positivity about her experience. One thing was for certain, though: she was not going to be working with Gallo again.
