Newsweek |
Sixteen-year-old Dominique Swain had worked only once - as a stunt double on The Good Son when Adrian Lyne chose her as his Lolita from among 2,500 teen-temptress wannabes. That film has yet to be released, but she's now done a second film, John Woo's sci-fi adventure Face/Off, and it is being released. Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage as an FBI agent and a terrorist, respectively, who switch faces; Swain plays Jamie Archer, the daughter of Travolta and Joan Allen. "She's a typical high school girl," Swain says, "creative, rebellious, and trying to find out who she is." The role of a typical high school girl is probably the right follow-up to playing Lolita, a character for whom Swain's birds-and-bees education didn't exactly prepare her. "My mom was really up front with me," laughs Swain. "She said, 'This is what people do,' and I was like, 'No!'" For Lolita, Swain had to simulate sexual situations on film that she'd never experienced in real life; a body double did the honors on the down-and-dirty interludes. "I was really a failure at going though the motions of sex. My hips were moving, but I didn't know what I was doing. It didn't look realistic. They kept moving the camera back because I was just...terrible!" she giggles. "But Adrian said it actually added to the scenes, because Lolita wasn't supposed to be that experienced sexually." In real life, Swain is a junior at tiny Malibu High School, where she gets no flak from her classmates. "I've been going to school with the same 150 kids since I was five years old," she reports with a grin, "so they know I've always been prudish Dominique." |
Text Corie Brown