Thank Heaven . She’s a big girl now… but underneath it all,
Katie Holmes will always be a Mud Hen.
by Adam Rapoport

Beauty, they keep telling us, is in the eye of the beholder. Nonsense. As Katie Holmes stands as still as a statue on a corner in downtown Durham, North Carolina, on a cold January night, beauty isn't a matter of opinion or interpretation - tonight it's a simple fact. You look at her cascading, shampoo-commercial hair, and her hip-hugging jeans doing exactly that, and you feel almost dizzy. The thirty-some Dawson's Creek crew members gathered around her don't exactly offer much in the way of competition, but who could? Holmes is tall (about five feet nine), has dance-class posture, and just before the cameras begin to roll on this particular take she waits like royalty as an assistant sweeps over and gently removes a black overcoat from her shoulders.

If she looks high maintenance, that's the point. For if you have ever watched Dawson's Creek (admit it, you have), you know that her character, Joey Potter, is about as easy as a quantum-physics exam. It's not that she's nasty; it's just that she's kind of an uptight fussbudget - one who's always twisted up over doing the right thing and bungling ways to hook up with her crush and across-the-creek neighbor, Dawson. For five years, an entire generation of girls (the 12-to-17 bracket in ACNielsen-speak) has tuned in en masse to the WB's one-hour melodrama for a steady diet of frank sexual banter, roller-coaster plotlines and more angst than any teen should be able to digest.

And later this year, these same girls will see Holmes opposite Benjamin Bratt in Abandon, a psychological thriller written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, the Academy Award-winning writer of Traffic. Holmes plays a straight-A college student (which is kind of like saying John Wayne plays a cowboy) wrestling with the mysterious disappearance of an ex-boyfriend. Bratt plays an investigator who - surprise - winds up involved with the distraught coed. Abandon isn't Holmes's first foray into movies (she has appeared in six, including, most recently, Wonder Boys and The Gift), but it signals her first lead role. And with Dawson's Creek reaching the end of its run (Holmes and fellow cast members James Van Der Beek, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams have one year remaining in their contracts), the 23-year-old Toledo native finds herself in the same situation as most folks her age. She's finishing one chapter of her life, ready to start another.

Only, on this brisk night, when the director calls "action!" and Holmes starts yelling at an actor playing a street person, she doesn't seem 23 at all. Or, at least, you hope she doesn't. Because if the average 23-year-old were this driven and this confident, we all might want to start watching our backs.

Sitting in her hotel's lobby three hours before her shoot begins, Holmes is folded into one of those huge, squishy lounge chairs you find only in hotel lobbies. When she gets up, she looks less like an actor-on-the-verge than a floppy puppy, the kind who hasn't quite yet grown into her oversize paws or long, gangly limbs. She has big, luminous eyes and cheeks that grandmas probably can't wait to squeeze between their thumb and forefinger. A sweat-stained Toledo Mud Hens cap pulled over her yet-to-be-combed hair only adds to her adolescent charm. As does her voice. Over the phone twenty minutes earlier, she sounded so much like a 10-year-old, I half thought someone was playing a prank on me.

"She's still very much a girl on the cusp of being a woman," Bratt says. "And that, in my point of view, is a wonderful place to be.” It's also a slightly confusing place, frankly. Trying to reconcile Holmes the girl with Holmes the actor can, at times, be like separating Bruce Banner from his steroidal pea green alter ego. When I ask Holmes if she's itching to graduate from the WB, she gives an answer fit for a politician. But with her, it flies. Because as nearly every actor, direct or producer who has worked with her will tell you, she remains - despite five years of fame - genuinely sweet, sincere and considerate. "I don't feel like I'm better than Dawson's Creek, and anybody who does think so, well, good for them," she says with just the slightest bit of Fargo tinting her accent. "I mean, you think to yourself: I should be doing other things. But we have a good time, and it's nice to be in Wilmington - to be away from it all."

Wilmington, North Carolina. Therein lies one of the secrets as to how Katie Holmes remains Katie Holmes. She has never lived in Los Angeles, or anywhere else, for that matter, since leaving home in 1997. Other than the show's college scenes, which are shot on the Duke University campus in Durham, Dawson's films twenty-two episodes a year at a thirty-two-acre Wilmington production facility built by Dino De Laurentiis in 1983. Holmes owns a modest town house near the beach and drives around town in a Honda. During the three months she has off each summer, she works on films or travels. And, without fail, she returns to Toledo to see her family.

You could argue that the Holmeses are a clan scripted for television, but it's a script no one would buy these days. Katie and two of her three older sisters ("all of whom are much prettier than I am," she insists) attended Toledo's Notre Dame Academy, the same Catholic high school their mother, Kathleen, attended. Her brother, Martin junior, played football for Harvard. They grew up in a four-bedroom brick house and were driven to their various practices and recitals in a black Caprice station wagon, not so affectionately known among the kids as the hearse. Martin senior, a lawyer, put in long hours at the office, but he was always home by seven for dinner. The Sopranos they were not.

Today, all the Holmes siblings except Katie live in Toledo. The family - nephews included - gather several times a week for dinner, birthday parties or basketball games. Holmes's sister Nancy, with whom she shared a room growing up, coaches the girls' team at St. Ursula's, "the other all-girl school," Holmes days with a roll of her eyes. (By the way, Katie is actually the shortest member of her family: Dad's six four, Martin junior is six six, and her sisters and mom are all about five eleven.)

"Her entire family is beautiful," explains Kevin Williamson, the creator of Dawson's Creek as well as of the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer and the Scream series. "And they're inside-and-out beautiful. I sent her a Christmas gift, and I'm down in North Carolina and I get a phone call. It's her whole family singing 'The Twelve Days of Christmas.' She's like, 'Call me back on my dad's cell; we have to sing another song!'"

If Williamson's story sounds too Ozzie and Harriet to stomach, you may want to take some Maalox. Consider the following:
* After scoring pretty much straight A's in high school, Holmes racked up a 1310 on her SATs (1230 pre-Stanley Kaplan). That was enough to gain her acceptance at Columbia. "They said they're holding a place for me whenever I want to enroll," she notes. "That's something I don't want to shrug my shoulders at, because it's a really nice opportunity."
* Her best friend is not Bijou Phillips or Tara Reid or some other gossip-page tartlet but Meghann Bire, a fellow Toledan she has known since kindergarten. Katie and Meghann appear in the coffee-table book Best Friends.
* Holmes has never smoked pot or done ecstasy. "I don't really...dabble with drugs. I'm afraid I'm going to be the one case where the ecstasy gets caught in my vertebrae or something," she says while managing to laugh at herself.

Good girl equals boring girl. At least, that's what some would have us believe. But spend a day with Holmes and you're seduced by her just the same. She won't bother to sex you up or shock you, like, say, Angelina Jolie would, but she'll make you all batty, nonetheless. Ultimately, she is more the girl you want to take home to your parents than the girl you want to take home. And professionally? Well, Holmes is unquestionably a star among the Total Request Live set. She's appeared on numerous magazine covers over the past few years, and her relationship with American Pie's Chris Klien, discreet as it is, still lands her on Page Six.

But whenever I mention her to my colleagues and friends, many of whom are in their early thirties, the most common response I receive is: "Who's that?" This, although these same people have undoubtedly seen her work. In her short career, Holmes has had a remarkable knack for landing the kinds of film roles the Jennifer Love Hewitts and Sarah Michelle Gellars of this world haven't been able to. As a high school senior, with no previous professional acting experience, she earned the part of Libbets Casey, Tobey Maguire's high school crush, in The Ice Storm. From there she appeared in Go, director Doug Liman's underrated follow-up to Swingers; in Wonder Boys, she was Michael Douglas's sexy but brainy coed temptress; in The Gift, she played a trashy, two-timing country-club fiancee; and because no one bats a thousand, she appeared in two films that rolled off the teen-scream conveyor belt, Teaching Mrs. Tingle and Disturbing Behavior.

It's a resume that has caught the attention of Hollywood's cognoscenti (if not of the average 30-year-old moviegoer). Stephen Gaghan was so impressed with Holmes in Wonder Boys that while writing Abandon, he changed the name of the lead character to Katie. "I was amazed that someone her age could hold her own with Michael Douglas," he says. "And when she came in to audition for the part, she nailed it. I guess sometimes your intuition is actually right."

As an actor, Holmes relies as much on her expressions - especially with her eyes - as on her words. She draws from a repertoire of go-to looks. There's the one in which she bites the right half of her lower lip while glancing downward - as in "I know I'm not supposed to say this, but I'm going to." There's the mouth-agape, eyes-straight-ahead, I-can't-believe-you-just-said-that look. And finally, there's the good-girl-trying-to-be-bad look, in which she cracks a slight grin and beams her big eyes full on, as in "I'm not even going to say anything, because you already know what I'm thinking."

But for Abandon, she had to demand more of her budding talent than simply looking coy and cute. She spent two months in Montreal making the film, playing what she calls the most challenging part of her career. Gaghan concurs, insisting that "it's not a kiddie role. There's a reason she works with Ang Lee (The Ice Storm) and Curtis Hanson (Wonder Boys)."

Taking the part falls in line with Holmes's career strategy: Find good films and work with quality actors, preferably older ones. "I spend nine months a year working with people my age on Dawson's," she explains. Wonder Boys afforded her the opportunity to match skills not only with Douglas but also with Frances McDormand, Rip Torn, Robert Downey Jr. and Tobey Maguire. Appearing in The Gift meant being able to punch the clock with Giovanni Ribisi, Hilary Swank, Greg Kinnear and Cate Blanchett.

It also meant doing her first nude scene, something Holmes harbors no regrets about, although she confides that neither her parents nor her brother could bring themselves to see the movie. "I thought [being nude] was important to the scene and the character," she says. "I thought it was true. I just hope there aren't a lot of pauses on DVD players."

In the scene in question (which, for the record, is worth pausing), Greg Kinnear's character, a school principal in a small southern town, discovers that his fiancee, Holmes, has just cheated on him. Infuriated, he throws her against a parked car in the middle of the woods and strips her of everything but her bikini underwear. "You just fucked him, didn't you?" he yells, then smacks her around, ultimately killing her. It is a bracing scene, especially when you consider that it was played by a 21-year-old.

"That she unabashedly embraces her sins, with her top off, and tells him to fuck off, so to speak, belittles him to such a degree that he strikes out in a rash moment," the film's director, Sam Raimi, says. "And therein lies the focal point of the picture."

Raimi had never worked with Holmes before and was unaware of her spit-polish-clean image. But he couldn't help gushing about how impressed he was with her as an actor and how "she was mature beyond her years." Gaghan also praised her professionalism and pointed out how few opportunities there are for an actor under 25 to carry a movie. "And she carries Abandon," he insists. "I've been staring at this movie a lot while editing it, and maybe I'm biased, but Katie is a movie star."

Is she really? Or are Gaghan, Raimi, Bratt, and Williamson just taken with Holmes the woman? When you hang out with her, you experience something similar to guilt by association, only the opposite - kind of like innocence by affiliation. She's such a good and likable person, she makes you think you too must be a good person.

But those who don't know Holmes personally, namely critics, haven't been as gushing. In reviews of her various films, she receives minimal ink, whereas Blanchett garners heaps of praise and Sarah Polley, Holmes's 23-year-old costar in Go, plays her part "with improbable grace" (The New York Times) and was dubbed a "star in the making" by USA Today.

In fairness, Holmes's parts haven't exactly been meaty. In Wonder Boys, she totals just six and a half minutes of screen time (yet obviously made the most of them, according to Gaghan). And with the exception of her part in The Gift, she has generally played some variation of the good girl. As one coed I spoke to on the Duke campus said, "I like her, but she should do herself a favor and start playing some different roles."

While lunching with Holmes on my second day in Durham, I try to find out how she views her career so far. It is three in the afternoon, and she wanders into the hotel lobby looking like a character out of Almost Famous - travel bag over her shoulder and what one might assume is a hangover, if only this weren't Toledo's favorite daughter. Holmes had been working night shoots all week - roughly from 5pm to 6am - and on this, her last day in town, the toll is obvious. Because of a cold, her nose is chapped, something she promptly apologizes for. We sit down for lunch, and she orders exactly what she had the day before - French onion soup (whose lid of gooey melted cheese she pushes aside) and a Caesar salad with grilled chicken. About halfway through the meal, I ask her if she thinks she is a good actor.

Holmes puts down her fork and pauses for a second. "I don't know," she finally says, almost plaintively. "I hope so. But I'm so young. I hope I can keep doing this.... I think I've been able to do some good projects. But I hope I'm a really good actor when I'm older."

When Holmes talks this way, which is quite frequently during interviews, it's almost as if, for her sake, you want her to be more of a bitch. You want her to stand up and say, "Damn right I'm a good actor - and I'm only getting better."

And perhaps, in some ways, she does to this - only not verbally. Holmes has always been extremely ambitious. In high school, she enrolled in Margaret O'Brien's International Modeling School in Toledo and took annual trips to New York for the International Modeling and Talent Association convention. As a senior, she landed an acting agent and scored herself the role in The Ice Storm.

For her Dawson's Creek audition, she set up a video camera in her basement and roped her mom into reading Dawson's part. If that weren't awkward enough, Holmes had to recite such lines as "Well, you have genitalia" and "How often do you masturbate?" Apparently, she read them quite well. Kevin Williamson had all but cast another actor ("more of a tomboy," he explains), but when he saw Holmes's tape, he did an about-face. As he says in his best screenwriter patois, "She had those eyes - those eyes just stained with loneliness."

But when Williamson's office called Holmes to say they'd fly her out to L.A. for a screen test, Holmes told them they'd have to wait - she was starring in her high school production of Damn Yankees, and she wasn't about to miss opening night. After Williamson got over the shock of being told to wait, he told his assistant to call Holmes and offer to fly her out the following week. She showed up, and the WB had found its ambassador to teen America.

The better you get to know Holmes, the more her confident smart-ass side begins to surface. When I mention that nearly every article on her exclaims how mature she is, she cocks her eyebrow and quips in her best diva accent, "Oh, yes, I'm very mature. I really should be hanging out with 40-year-olds."

It's a sense of humor that came in handy last year when she hosted Saturday Night Live. Her agent called her appearance on the show her Bat Mitzvah, not necessarily the best metaphor for a Catholic girl from the Midwest, but an apt one nonetheless.

On the show, for the first time in her career, Holmes looked not like a teenager but like a woman - tall, stunning, more cheekbones than cheek, and in command. That is, after she overcame the same nervous glitches any Bat Mitzvah girl would. When she bounded onto the stage for her monologue, the shoulder strap on her dress became unhitched, forcing her to awkwardly and bashfully clutch it. Then her first joke bombed ("I just lost my virginity to my ex-boyfriend's best friend. And Dawson's Creek has been crazy this week!") But as the show picked up steam, Holmes did, too, seeming to grow before the audience's eyes.

In one of the evening's funniest skits, Holmes played an Angie Dickenson-like cop on a movie set. Will Ferrell was a ponytailed thug whom Holmes interrogated by grabbing his package and twisting it like a water faucet - take after painful take. "Whatsa matter, Spinelli?" she demanded. "You want your mama?" Holmes played the part so convincingly, it made you wonder if she was not such a good girl after all. It makes me ask her about the tattoo on her ass.

Or, at least, it makes me try.

"I don't have a tattoo," Holmes says coldly and slowly, after a long, suspicious pause.

"Um, one of the girls on the photo shoot said you had one."

"No. I have a birthmark." Another awkward pause.

"Where's your birthmark?"

"Uh, it doesn't need to be discussed. My family is the only group of people that needs to be aware of such a thing."

Birthmark? If Holmes is lying, she really is a hell of an actor for a 23-year-old girl.

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Adam Rapoport is a GQ senior editor.

Article from the Katie Holmes Pictures.com site.