NYLON - October 2007 - (Page 110) THE BODY POLITIC What more does Kelli Garner have to do to prove she’s a serious actress? By Nick Duerden. Photographed by Carol Cohen Still in her pajamas at 11 o’clock on a bright August morning, Kelli Garner is sitting in the front room of her Los Angeles home, a pained look on her pretty face. An act of kindness has somehow resulted in calamity, and she is scratching frantically at every nook of every golden limb. “Fleas,” she says embarrassedly. “I’ve got them, my house has got them, and it’s not funny.” She points at an exposed ankle. “There, look. Another one.” A few weeks back, she explains, a couple of stray cats turned up at her back door, and although allergic to cats, she was benevolent enough to feed them. And now she has their fleas: “I’m covered in something like 50 bites. I need Pest Control, and I need them quick,” she says. Garner looks like she was drawn by a mischievous Walt Disney, what with the eyes, the chest, the high cheekbones, and the soft blonde hair. In essence, she’s a Baywatch babe, or would be if Baywatch babes read Tennessee Williams and had a soft spot for Chekhov. And it’s this that makes her so unexpectedly bewitching: There is more to this woman than meets the eye. “I had no idea my life would go in this direction,” she says, “because I guess I could have taken a different route entirely.” The “image thing,” as she puts it, is hard to fight. “OK, sure, I have a body,” she sighs. “I’ve had one since I was 16. But the attention it brings me, in life as well as in the industry, makes me really uncomfortable.” To date, her curves have rather stereotyped her: “I’m mostly cast as the Lolita type, either a blonde bombshell Lolita, or the girl-withblack-hair-who-smokes-weed Lolita. Either way, I’m inevitably the sexpot ” Born in California, Garner’s early ambitions lay in soccer, and she dreamt about becoming the next Mia Hann. A shy child, she then underwent an abrupt change of character in her teenage years, inspired, she says, by Jim Carrey’s manic turns on the TV show In Living Color. “Suddenly, I’m 14 years old at a friend’s bar mitzvah, and I’m doing a limbo dance in a really short skirt. Afterwards, this guy comes up to me and says, ‘Well, aren’t you cute,’ and he gives me his card. Turns out he was in the film business, and six months later I was doing TV adverts and trying out for movies.” Her breakthrough role came in Larry Clark’s controversial Bully (2001) as, she says, a “crack whore junkie,” and two years later, she played Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend in The Aviator, not necessarily a dream come true, she says, “because I never even dreamt of the possibility of working with Scorsese.” She can next be seen as a “geek with dyed hair” in Lars And The Real Girl, a quirky, low-key tale about a friendless man (Ryan Gosling) who finds solace in a $6,000 sex doll. Garner plays the titular Real Girl desperate to show him a life beyond latex. “I really feel with this film that I’ve been able to show my soul rather than my body,” she beams. “And that’s a big relief.” Early next year, she’ll transfer to New York where she will appear in Chekhov’s The Seagull on stage. She can’t wait to leave Hollywood, she admits, and not just because her actor boyfriend (whom she’d rather not name) lives in Manhattan. “Hollywood can be an ugly place, and it can do ugly things to you. I want to avoid that side of it as much as possible, and I also want to do so much more with my life than just act. Like travel, read books, open my own bakery.” Your own bakery? “Sure, absolutely,” she says. “I love to bake. Don’t you?” stylist: jill roth. hair: syd curry for solo artists.com using urbanexperiment. makeup: jake bailey for soloartists.com using dior cosmetics. dress by vivienne westwood anglomania, watch by marc jacobs, boots by bruno frisoni. http://soloartists.com http://artists.com
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