Twenty years since her last BUST cover, Hollywood’s untamed icon is back, ready to talk about the role she’s been working toward for a lifetime—and how building a career by breaking rules has kept her fierce, free, and never predictable.
When I call Juliette Lewis, she’s beaming.
Smiling behind oversize glasses and wearing a denim shirt layered under a moto jacket, she apologizes for the “dark, spooky hotel” room that acts as a backdrop for our chat. She’s just left a fan convention and the high energy of the day is still playing out on her face. Busy, and perhaps a little tired, she’s still excited to talk to BUST, 20 years after her last cover story with the magazine.
“That’s a trip. I totally remember that,” she says. It was 2003, a year before the Oscar-nominated star decided to take a five-year hiatus from acting. She’d been on camera since she was just 14 years old and wanted to spend time focusing on her other love, live music, as the formidable front woman of rock outfit Juliette and the Licks. “This is a full circle for me,” she smiles, recalling the conversation about art, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. “It would’ve been right around where I turned 30 or 30-ish,” she says. “It was very important for me to start my music because as a kid I always wanted to be a singer. Not to say I didn’t wanna act—I wanted to do all of it. When you’re a kid, in your little mind, nothing is segregated. It’s not compartmentalized. I grew up with musicals like Rocky Horror Picture Show, Flashdance, and Grease. It just lit my soul and imagination on fire. As I grew into a teenager and then got successful only doing movie making and characters, I was much more insular. I didn’t know how to articulate myself and I was very closeted about my singing. I feel like singing is more one’s truth and very close to the soul. I wanted to have it. I wanted to make mistakes.”
That desire to make mistakes but go for her dreams anyway has served Lewis well. Her breakout role in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear as the rebellious teenager Danielle Bowden made her a household name and nabbed her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Awards nomination for her stellar performance. Since then she’s continued to create a successful career of undertaking unconventional characters: from the murderous and sadistic Mallory Knox in Oliver Stone’s 1994 cult classic Natural Born Killers to the cool yet damaged fan favorite Natalie Scatorccio in Showtime’s hit series Yellowjackets.
But now she’s taking on a role she was born for: the gritty, calloused, ruthless, and deranged Cut Throat Bill in American Western thriller The Thicket. Directed by Elliot Lester, written by Chris Kelly, and adapted from the novel by Joe R. Lansdale, The Thicket follows bounty hunters Reginald Jones (played by Peter Dinklage) and Jack Parker (Levon Hawke) as they attempt to retrieve Parker’s sister (Esmé Creed-Miles as Lula Parker) after she’s been kidnapped by Bill.
In the film, Lewis shapeshifts for the role—which was initially written for a male character—and is unrecognizable in voice, demeanor, gait, and appearance. It’s an achievement she’s been working toward her entire career: the ability to completely disappear into a character. It’s also a stark contrast to the warm, philosophical actor (and singer and entertainer) who chats giddily with me from the other side of the phone.
When I asked what made her want to take on the role of Cut Throat Bill, she answered quickly. “Everything,” she says. “From when I first heard about the role and I read the script and the description of a villain that you can’t tell is male or female…she gets confused a lot as being male. She’s a savage killer. Her reputation precedes her.” The opportunity was a no-brainer for Lewis and met her criteria for never “playing someone ‘nail on the head.’”
“I’m always trying to really find the humanity within the character. But this character was particularly challenging because I was playing somebody I felt was at the end of their line and fully emerged into darkness. Just at the last scene, there’s a flicker of her humanity that was lost. That’s what excited me about it.”
For Lewis, Bill was the “role of a lifetime, a dream.”
“It sort of spoke to me the more it unraveled. I was just having a lot of full-circle moments in my life with this role. It was really profound and very quiet, even though I’m playing a savage killer. She’s not loud. I wanted to play something deeply immersed in survivalism but also in savage pain.”
One of those full-circle moments was going back to the type of film set she used to tag along to with her father, actor Geoffrey Lewis. “The amazing part of it was that every day, I thought of my dad. I would be commiserating in a little tent with my gang of guys, trying to keep things levelheaded, jovial…talking or not, whenever we wanted. I had a 15-pound weighted belt around my hips and all these layers. I just felt like my dad. I thought a lot about him and also about what a trip it was that my life brought me to this: playing a villain in a Western.” One of her dad’s standout roles was as Stacey Bridges, a central antagonist in the 1973 Western High Plains Drifter. “The first set I’d ever been to was a Western when I was eight, but I don’t know what it was called,” Lewis smiles. “I was just my father’s daughter. It was during a time when he probably didn’t have a babysitter, so he’s gonna bring his kids to work. I was literally babysat in the hair and makeup trailer because those were the days.” Recently, Lewis posted a photo from one of those backstage moments on Instagram. She’d asked one of the extras if she could take a picture while holding a fake rubber knife at his throat. “I’m being tough like my dad and I was all of eight years old,” she says. “That’s my introduction to movie making. That’s how I grew up. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a princess.”
Lewis may have never wanted to play a character in a tiara and frilly dress. Still, taking on Cut Throat Bill wasn’t exactly a fairy tale. They filmed in just 22 days in freezing cold Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in a climate and conditions she describes as “physically very difficult.”
“It was high altitude and you’re just brittle and it was very long hours,” she adds. Still, she was able to tap in. “Doing this for as long as I have, I’ve learned to trust my instincts, and I do things very intuitively,” she says. “So when the description was laid out about the role my thing is to formulate: What does that look like? What does that sound like? A woman who’s called Cut Throat Bill and has experienced near decapitation.” In the film Lewis’s cheery, West-Coast delivery takes on a rough, gravely inflection. “That just came to me, that voice. I just tried it at home and then I sent a video to the director going, like, ‘I think this is the character.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, go for that.’ You always want your director to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I was so happy that Elliot was a daredevil and that he was into making interesting choices…things that aren’t safe is what I mean. You’re either gonna fail or you’re gonna succeed, but you don’t wanna do anything in the middle.”
When I ask Lewis why Bill has been her favorite character to play to date, she laughs it off as hyperbole. “But it is one of my favorites,” she explains. “You know why? Because it was so hard,” she says. “I thought I had failed. Then when I saw the scene with me and Peter Dinklage, I finally gave it up to myself. I’m really hard on myself. And I saw this clip—I hadn’t seen the movie yet—and I went, ‘Oh, I think I did it. I think I fooled myself!’ I’ve never been able to fool myself. It’s a whole long thing to explain. I always wanna disappear. I was like, ‘I see a whole other thing energetically there.’ I was proud of having accomplished that.”
When asked about her other favorite roles, Lewis revisits them enthusiastically. “Natural Born Killers, that was the first time I learned fight training and full-on action sequences and all about gun safety in that movie. Adele Corners in Kalifornia, she’s what I call my first official character and it’s where I use my voice. Sometimes I’ll pitch my voice lower, higher, depending on the character. I felt like she was like a stunted nine-year-old because of a traumatic incident she had at nine. The director, Dominic Sena, allowed me to improvise a lot and that was the first time I’d done that. There are so many.”
Another reason The Thicket felt like a favorite for Lewis was because it allowed her to return back to her beloved medium after a litany of series work. “I was doing TV shows,” she says. “I had the pandemic and then for three years just a fully packed schedule that was just TV show after TV show. They’re five- and six-month commitments and the way TV shows are made are totally different from film. So for me it was a return to my DNA. You have your one director, you have your known script. It was a return to a medium I felt I could create in. That’s just with knowing your beginning, middle, and end and fully inhabiting and working on a character that I know all the ingredients of and working with a single director. That was very important for me. I love the medium of movies. I’m gonna hold out hope that we will still wanna go see them even though the industry is ever-changing. I felt that role for me was a lot of growth. It was extremely challenging. I think the post or whatever I wrote about it was after I had felt I accomplished it. But during it, it was so hard.”
Despite her propensity for film, it was a series that transformed the way she looked at how she approaches projects and how she views critical response. “A huge turning point for me was Yellowjackets,” she says. “Because for a while, in this industry and this profession it’s a bit difficult because you get so conditioned to having to prove yourself. Like, ‘You’re gonna say I’m this, well, I’m really that!’ or ‘You’re gonna label me super intense and scary. Okay, I’m gonna do comedy!’” Lewis notes her decision to do a Nora Ephron, Steve Martin, and Adam Sandler comedy called Mixed Nuts as an example of that overcorrection. “It didn’t hit, nobody really saw it. I always wanted to do characters and variety. I thought I wasn’t understood as a creative person,” she says. So when she picked up Yellowjackets, she worried that people wouldn’t see her clearly. “I did have a fear of, ‘Are they just gonna think I’m intense? And who’s this they were speaking of?’ It’s usually the very square corporate somebody who makes the decisions. That’s ubiquitous because what I learned is, it wasn’t the public. So this turning point that happened was people’s response to my role of Natalie was so beyond positive. I was floored. We were all isolated, shooting out in Vancouver. I was in my head; I had just gone through a lot of personal stuff, and the reception of Natalie was so positive. That forever changed my thing, you know? I can lighten up. I could afford to lighten up and go, ‘Oh wow, people see me, they see my value.’ It was this whole epiphany.”
Since her last BUST cover, Lewis has kept her connection to music airtight, whether it’s playing festivals as Juliette and the Licks or carrying around a portable JBL player to blast her favorite songs out wherever she is. “I was just at this convention, a fan expo, and I brought the speaker with me, and I have this playlist—it’ll be everything from ’80s to Gorillaz, A Tribe Called Quest. I like to go ’80s because I like junior high music, which to me is instant feel-good,” she says. “I did a few one-off shows with my band and one of my biggest pleasures is when I get to invite someone I’m a fan of to open for us. There’s this new artist named Caroline Kingsbury. She is so special and I love her EP. It reminds me of stuff from my childhood, a very deliberate sound and a super melodic, incredible singer. And another artist, I Speak Machine, she’s brilliant and more industrial synth rock. She’s been around since the ’90s, really special. What else? I always go back to Pink Floyd in my car. I could go on and on.”
When it came to getting into character for Cut Throat Bill, Lewis had the perfect soundtrack. “There were a few songs,” she says. “This character was so dark. I analyze acting a lot and what I’m doing, metaphysically, is literally holding space for darkness. You’re holding space energetically for this entity, and it was not pleasant. I’m striving so much to do it realistically and not to be cool or look the part. I want to fully feel the thing and inhabit it on a cellular level. So I would play music as I was driving into the set, it was a long drive and it was nothing but barren, white snow everywhere. It was so cold and I’d listen to Radiohead’s ‘I Might Be Wrong,’ M83’s ‘Solitude,’ Aphex Twin’s ‘#3,’ and Nico’s ‘It Was a Pleasure Then.’ Very haunting, meditative songs.”
Through music, mistakes, trial and accomplishment, Juliette Lewis has learned how to exceed and still not attach to expectations. “I’m very much about the experience now,” she says, when asked what’s changed in her creative approach since her last BUST cover story. “I focus on the experience during something rather than the expectation. I think as you get older, this is a better way and better approach to lean into just living life. Get out of the idea of what you think something or someone should be and just get into what is and make it the best you can.”
Top Image: Image Credits: Photographer, Ryan Pfluger; Styling, Danielle Charlton; Hair, Paul Norton; Makeup, Su Han; Pr (On-Site), Jen Appel
