“I was ready to quit”: the role that stopped Juliette Lewis from turning her back on acting
Juliette Lewis earned validation at just the right moment in her career.
Being part of a film production is challenging in many different ways, and those impediments are exacerbated for younger people on set. Many child stars who are popular during their youth struggle to earn the same amount of acclaim when they grow older, with many choosing to leave the industry. It’s exactly what could have happened to Lewis if she hadn’t received a compliment from one of the industry’s greatest filmmakers.
Lewis had landed a role that any young actor would dream of when she got to play one of the Griswold children in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the third instalment in the popular comedy franchise that starred Chevy Chase, but despite her success in the film, she was still a teenager in the aftermath, and had to deal with being doubted by older members of the industry. “At 16, I was ready to quit,” Lewis admitted to The Guardian, “I’m always trying to quit acting. I’m always, like, ‘this is the last one’. I was doing a really bad sitcom, and they hired an acting teacher for me to get me to conform to that broad sitcom-style acting.”
While she did come to a point of saying to herself, “Maybe this wasn’t cut out for me”, it became clear that she was simply not being given the right opportunities. Being in a mainstream comedy film is different from being on a sitcom, and the latter was an environment that she was not destined to thrive in, so thankfully, Lewis said that she was encouraged to stick with her chosen perspective after a particularly positive audition.
“On the sitcom, they were trying to make me into this machine, this robot,” she explained, “When you have a Scorsese validating your naturalistic instincts, you think, ‘Maybe I’m doing something right after all’.”
Lewis had auditioned and earned the role of Danielle, the teenage daughter of the lawyer Samule Bowden, played by Nick Nolte, in Cape Fear, a remake of the classic 1962 horror film, and while the original film had Robert Mitchum in the role of the ruthless serial killer Max Cady, Scorsese’s version featured Robert De Niro, and this experience of working with the two star names was eye-opening for Lewis.
The Cape Fear remake faced a great deal of hesitation, as there is a trend of classic horror films being rebooted to diminishing results, but Scorsese had managed to offer a more visceral, frightening, and thought-provoking spin on the material, and it was particularly acclaimed for how much Lewis had added to the role, leading to both her and De Niro ending up getting Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ and ‘Best Actor’, respectively.
Lewis’ performance didn’t just show that she was better suited for films than sitcoms, but proved she was capable of taking on controversial and even disturbing material, and it was only a few years later that she would end up starring in another serial killer thriller, Kalifornia, which Brad Pitt would go on to cite as the film that allowed him to open up as an actor.
Deciding not to quit ended up making Lewis a ‘90s icon, with roles in Natural Born Killers, Strange Days, Mixed Nuts, and From Dusk Till Dawn, and her trajectory should stand as a reminder for any aspiring actor that success is just one role away.
