Collider Ladies Night is all about paving the way from a creator’s earliest dreams and successes to their latest achievements, so who better to guest on the show than Julia Stiles? Stiles is essentially in the 90s romantic comedy hall of fame for her work in 10 Things I Hate About You. After that she joined one of the hottest action franchise out there with The Bourne Identity before securing an Emmy nomination for her performance in Dexter Season 5. And now she’s three season into leading her own series, Riviera, which just celebrated its Season 2 debut on Ovation TV on Saturday, May 8th.
Riviera features Stiles as Georgina, an art curator married to an extremely wealthy collector, Constantine Clios (Anthony LaPaglia). At the start of Season 1, Constantine is killed in a yacht explosion, leaving Georgina right smack in the middle of his suspicious dealings. The show follows Georgina as she tries to adjust to life without Constantine alongside his ex-wife (Lena Olin) and their children, all desperately trying to keep the family fortune intact.
A lengthy list of titles right there that only scratches the surface of Stiles’ filmography. We’re covering all of those aforementioned shows and films and more on this edition of Collider Ladies Night, beginning with Stiles’ experience auditioning for 10 Things I Hate About You.
“In my early auditioning years, especially because I was kind of an angsty teenager or maybe more serious or thoughtful, when I would audition for commercials I remember in particular, they would always tell me, ‘Oh, you’re so serious! You’re too intellectual. Be more bubbly! Be more effervescent!’ And of course, it’s like asking a woman to smile. Then I read Kat and it just completely jumped off the page to me. I thought, ‘Wow, this is so refreshing. This girl is feisty and opinionated and unapologetic,’ and if I wasn’t that, I wanted to be that.”
Following the success of 10 Things I Hate About You, Stiles added two more Shakespeare adaptations to her filmography - Hamlet and O. While Stiles did enjoy great success in that specific department, she was also determined to not just play one thing. “I wanted versatility in the types of movies that I was in and then also the types of characters that I was playing.” But Stiles also admitted, “I don’t know how much control actors really have over their own careers.”
A degree of control did eventually come though, and Stiles used that control to secure parts like her role in Hustlers. Here’s what Stiles said when asked when that control started to kick in:
“Only in the last five years, I want to say. Maybe five or 10 years. Nothing really had changed in terms of what I was being offered or anything in the industry. It’s more just my becoming more thoughtful about choices that I was making and really pushing for certain roles that I wanted, like the role in Hustlers. I really loved that script and the part really spoke to me and the subject-matter really spoke to me and I knew that Lorene Scafaria was gonna do an amazing job with it and so I advocated to be in it, which years before that, I probably would have been more passive I guess.”
Want to hear more from Stiles on titles like Dexter, The Bourne Identity, Saturday Night Live and more? Check out her episode of Collider Ladies Night at the top of this article and listen to the uncut version of the conversation using the podcast below:
Julia Stiles Video Interview Breakdown:
- 00:43 - Dicey Questions! Hear all about the strangest wrap gift Stiles has ever received, which past film she’d like to remake and the seemingly silly question she was afraid to ask when she was first starting out.
- 02:54 - Stiles looks back on her earliest auditions and why the role of Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You really clicked.
- 04:12 - What was it like working with a director who was also an experienced actor on the movie O?
- 05:29 - How Stiles felt about doing a lot of Shakespeare adaptations early on; when she felt like she started to have more control over her career.
- 07:03 - Stiles discusses what it was like feeling out of place in Hollywood for a period of time and how that changed.
- 08:33 - Why Stiles decided to step away from the industry to go to college and if having a degree has influenced her career.
- 11:20 - What was it like hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live?
- 12:03 - Nikki was originally meant to die in The Bourne Identity; how exactly did Stiles find out about the change?
- 12:55 - How Dexter changed Stiles’ concerns about committing to long-running TV shows; what it was like receiving awards season nominations for her work on the show.
- 15:32 - What made Riviera a must-do show for Stiles; why working opposite Lena Olin caused her to fall out of scenes.
- 18:33 - Stiles names her three favorite teen romcoms of the 90s.
- 19:38 - Find out who Stiles thinks is changing the industry for the better and what her biggest fear overcome is right here!