Actress Mena Suvari said that being pulled into the sex abuse culture of Hollywood helped her nail her role in the 1999 film, American Beauty.
In an interview with The Guardian, Suvari explained how her abusive relationship with a lighting engineer she met in Hollywood helped her execute her role as Angela in American Beauty, because she “identified” with the character.
In the film, Kevin Spacey’s character develops an obsession with Suvari’s character, who is his daughter’s insecure but sexually precocious friend.
“I identified with Angela,” Suvari said. “I knew how to play that role, because I was so schooled in it — I felt unavailable in a million other ways, but I knew how to play that card.”
The actress added that she would go home from set, where she felt adored, to “the worst relationship of my life, where I was being extremely abused.”
“It was very dark for me at that time, [and the film] felt like a respite, because I could go to work and be important there,” she said, adding that her boyfriend would call her names and tell her how stupid she was.
The American Pie actress also noted that when she first started out in the entertainment industry, she got into modeling, where she was taught that how she looked was the only thing that mattered.
“Everyone was raving about how I looked 18. But I was 12,” she said of her first modeling shoot. “What was communicated to me was that I was an adult, therefore I can act like an adult.”
