ALISON PILL

How she transitioned from Lindsay Lohan sidekick to a sharpshooter in Dear Wendy

by Rebecca Flint Marx - photo by Kevin Trageser

Say this about Alison Pill: The girl doesn't take no for an answer.

When Thomas Vinterberg, the director of Dear Wendy, was less than impressed by Pill's audition for this film, she wrote him a letter explaining why she needed to be in it. "I remember thinking, ‘I’m not giving up that easily,’” says Pill, in between sips from a grande coffee during an early-morning chat near her home in New York’s East Village. She was determined to work with Vinterberg, the Dogme director nest known for The Celebration, and Lars von Trier, the controversial filmmaker who supplied Dear Wendy’s script. And it didn’t hurt that Pill believed that she was “crazy enough for another chance” to be in a film that demanded a certain amount of mania.    

Her perseverance - and her willingness to abandon her sanity – paid off. Pill had been working on the Lindsay Lohan comedy Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, feeling “a little lost,” she admits, when during a layover at Chicago’s O’Hare airport she got a call from her manager relaying the good news. “I started crying in the airport,” Pill says with an enormous grin. “I’d never wanted anything this much.”

Anyone who sees Pill in Dear Wendy, the surreal, allegorical tale of a small-town teenage gang strangely obsessed with both guns and pacifism, will walk away with the impression that the 19-year-old wouldn’t be caught dead in Juicy Couture or, for that matter, another Lindsay Lohan movie. Pill plays Susan, who’s first described as a girl who stinks and has no boobs. Over the course of the film, Susan becomes empowered through her mastery of firearms. She’s eventually transformed from an awkward loner into a sharpshooter who looks like she took poise lessons from Emma Peel.

“It was a religious experience to pick up a gun,” Pill admits. “I’d never understood the attraction before. But when you’re shooting, it’s almost sexual. There’s an automatic physical change.” Her immersion in gun culture during the film’s shoot made her question the potential impact of a film that fetishizes weapons while offering a sober, cautionary message. “It’s a lot wider than a Lars von Trier anti-gun movie,” Pill says with an earnestness patented by the very young and those who work on a von Trier production. “It’s a European study of American culture to some extent, but people shouldn’t focus too much on its anti-gun message – it’s not as dogmatic.”   

"It was a religious experience to pick up a gun."

            Pill becomes even more animated when she describes the film’s two-and-a-half-month shoot, which, despite Dear Wendy’s setting in a depressed mining town somewhere in the southeastern United States, took place in Germany and Denmark. The only girl in a cast that included Jamie Bell and Mark Webber, she has plenty of fond memories of the experience. “We got to be really close,” she says. “We did crazy improv and made up chants. And [as the only girl] I got to hear a lot of stuff I probably wasn’t supposed to.”

            Back in New York after the shoot, Pill reunited with Webber onstage for the well-received production of Neil LaBute’s The Distance From Here. Playing the girlfriend of a high-school burnout, she received the kind of praise that must have been unimaginable to her when she first realized she wanted to act. Born and raised in Ontario, Pill got her start as a child, narrating audiobooks. “It was a job I did one afternoon a week,” she remembers. “I thought, ‘I’m now a professional actor,’ and got an agent. My mom wasn’t so keen – she’d heard all the horror stories about child actors.” After Pill’s first role as an extra in a kung fu movie, her mom was sure that her daughter was bored by the long waits on the set. “But I was thinking, ’This is it. I can’t not do this,’” Pill says, smiling at the memory.

            She went on to do some small Canadian movies, including The Life Before This, a drama co-starring Sarah Polley and Stephen Rea. “That was the start of my addiction to independents,” Pill says. In 2003, she got her biggest break to date in another indie, Pieces of April, playing the straight-laced younger sister of Katie Holmes’ punked-out title character. “The whole shoot was 15 days,” Pill says. “It was so much fun.”

            Pill’s enthusiasm for odd characters and small budgets is further reflected in her current work: there’s One Way to Valhalla, which casts her as a “hippie anarchist chick,” and a TV pilot with Ellen Burstyn and Dylan Baker that features Jesus as a principal character. Describing what she looks for in a project, Pill displays the kind of sound judgment lacking in many actors twice her age. “You have to find a director who has interest in things that are more important than a box-office bonus,” she says. “There are a lot of directors who love actors, and a lot of directors who love fame. You have to find the former.”


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