Sunday Star-Times (a NZ paper) from the 15th of April...

AN L.A. STORY

Melanie Lynskey took years to leave her plump schoolgirl image behind. But, as she tells Lynda Herrick, Hollywood caught up with her just as she was finding herself.

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Actor Dean O'Gorman is urging Melanie Lynskey to cut short the interview and come out for dinner. She'll go along for the company-- "but I won't be eating. I've got a scene in my underwear tomorrow". It's a far cry from the days when Lynskey, 22, made her glowering 1993 screen debut in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, about the Parker-Hulme murder in Christchurch. That was when the New Plymouth schoolgirl tasted the poisonous chalice of the critics.

"Some of the reviews of Heavenly Creatures said wonderful things about my performance, but it's hard to be a teenage girl and read yourself being described as plump and dumpy," says Lynskey, who is working in Methven with O'Gorman on a feature film called Snakeskin-- her first work in New Zealand since the Jackson project. With six films due for release over the next year,  including Snakeskin, Lynskey's career is getting busy.  But it hasn't been as easy or spectacular as the rise to superstardom of her Heavenly Creatures co-star Kate Winslet, via a voyage on Titanic. Too soon after making Heavenly Creatures, Lynskey--who was discovered by Jackson's partner Fran Walsh-- moved prematurely to Tinseltown armed with that single much-acclaimed body of work, but no self-esteem.

"When I went to LA that first time I had no confidence, it was crazy, like jumping into the fire."After six weeks and some humiliating auditionsalongside "leathery waif" wannabes, she fled back home and studied film and theatre for 18 months at Victoria University, while pondering the prospect of one-hit-wonder oblivion. Then film-maker Gaylene Preston advised her that if she wanted to get into films, "make yourself strong"and Lynskey's attitude began to evolve-- as did her figure.

"The most important thing anyone can do if they're going to be an actor is take time out and decide whether you're strong enough within yourself to cope with all that rejection and scrutiny," she says. "You need to think about who you are. Acting is using things from within yourself to create a character and if there's not enough in yourself, you can't do it." It's helped that Hollywood is moving beyond bimbo stereotype, thanks to the commercial opportunities of a burgeoning indie film industry and the success of unconventional looking actresses such as Christina Ricci and Drew Barrymore, who Lynskey worked with on the Cinderella remake Ever After.

"There's been a real change in Hollywood," she explains. "I go up for romantic leads all the time now. They are more open to interesting looking people and more open to what qualities people can bring rather than having stereotypical skinny blonde things. I always think people like someone they can relate to."

Her most mainstream project so far is Coyote Ugly (out in August), a film by Hollywood blockbuster kind Jerry Bruckheimer of Flashdance, Top Gun, The Rock, Con air and Armageddon fame-- none of them exactly bastions of the feminist cause.  But Coyote Ugly, explains Lynskey, is a "chick flick" set in a raunchy New York bar. One of its big strengths is that it's written by Kevin Smith, who made the hugely controversial Dogma (as well as Clerks and Mallrats). It's also a plus that it stars the incomparable John Goodman (The Big Lebowski).

There's more Hollywood chick-flick fodder for Lynskey in But I'm a Cheerleader, with Natasha Lyonne (American Pie), and she enters the strange world of obsessive KISS fandom in Detroit Rock City, with Edward Furlong (Terminator 2).

Last year she worked in Bulgaria in a remake of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, with Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates and has just completed Shooters, set for first screenings at the London film Festival later in the year. It's a London gangland film in which Lynskey plays a tough young woman married to a coke fiend intent on "just one last job". It seems Lynskey likes "tough and sexy". In Snakeskin, a twisted road movie written and directed by first-timer Gillian Ashurst, she plays a wild young woman called Alice who is "really sexy".

"Not overtly sexy, but one of those people who has incredible energy. She looks like she's been up all night doing bad things and still wakes up looking gorgeous," she sighs enviously. Lynskey has been based in London for the past couple of years, but when she leaves New Zealand at the end of May, she'll make her home once more in Los Angeles, where she has three suitcases stored in her agent's garage.

The Lynskey buzz is growing, she says. "If you have work in the can which hasn't been released but people are talking about positively, like Coyote Ugly, your currency increases-- which sounds nasty and it is nasty.You get to go up for different kinds of movies and you cross your fingers someone will give you that big break." Dinner with Anjelica Huston, parties with Drew Barrymore, auditions and movies in Europe, London, New York, Hollywood-- and Methven: there must be times when Lynskey ("just call me Mel") must pinch herself? "It's strange, it's bizarre, it's like living in a parallel universe," she says. But she'll never forget how it started, when Fran Walsh scoured the land looking for "a sullen, brooding schoolgirl"-- and found Lynskey two weeks before shooting started.  

"When Fran found me it was one of those weird things when you have to believe it is your destiny, that it was meant to happen, because it was so random and strange," reflects Lynskey, adding that her family in New Plymouth are all "a bit over it now". And what of her Heavenly Creatures co-star, Kate Winslet, who got her first film job on that movie as well? They got together for dinner last year with Jackson and Walsh, and Winslet, laughs Lynskey, "is an old married woman now!"