At The Movies

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Alicia Silverstone, an actress who proudly proclaims her Judaism,
is Eve to Brendan Fraser's Adam in "Blast from the Past."

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SERENA DONADONI
Special to The Jewish News

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ctress Alicia Silverstone may
have gotten her first break
in Aerosmith videos and
The Crush, but the role that
created an indelible image was Clueless
(1995), where she perfectly embodied
a bright girl whose genuine compas-
sion was cloaked by slang-filled valley-
speak and a massive wardrobe.
Her latest film is the romantic come-
dy Blast From the Past (opening today), a
sweet-natured confection which finds
the 22-year-old Silverstone as a jaded
Eve to Brendan Fraser's naive Adam, a
young man who has been raised by well-
intentioned parents in a bomb shelter.
She's currently at work on a film
adaptation of William Shakespeare's
comedy Love's Labour's Lost, which
director Kenneth Branagh has trans-
formed into a 1930s era musical.
In Los Angeles, Silverstone dis-
cussed the appeal of Blast From the
Past, which proves "there are really
nice men out there," even if they grew
up underground.

nc-Kc-- fZi-s -raw

JN: How much will a teenage audi-
ence really know about the Cuban
missile crisis, when this film begins?
AS: What I liked about Clueless was
that it appealed to kids, but if you lis-
ten to the dialogue, it was very much
for the witty, older adult. That's what I
appreciate about this. The bomb shelter
thing is not something any young per-
son is familiar with. But because it's
Brendan Fraser down there, and you
get to see him develop, it all figures
itself out. I think the important thing is

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1999

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an adult can identify with a lot of this,
and the young people can identify with
the love connection.

JN: Why is Eve so defensive and
angry when she meets Adam, who's
very old-fashioned, almost courtly, in
the way he treats her?
AS: For me, what was really important
about Eve was that she was really tor-
tured by the goodness in Adam. It
wasn't his weirdness; she did not like
how nice he was. It was really pissing
her off because she'd spent so much
time building up these walls so she
could deal with guys.

JN: So Eve takes everything he says
and does in the wrong way?
AS: Everything that he says to her, it
hits her in such a deep place that it
makes her full of rage, because it's
accessing that part of her that's not
been touched.

JN: What made it important for you
to approach her in this way?
AS: I thought, that's super interesting
to me, that struggle, and everything
became really funny to me all of a sud-
den, whereas before it was so romantic.

JN: What makes Eve different from
the other characters that you've played?
AS: She's a survivor; all that's important
to her is getting by. The last thing she
needed was some idiot guy falling in
love with her who was going to hurt
her. Because if you like a guy, you're
going to get hurt, that's her idea. Which
is a very typical thing now, I think,
because we don't have a lot of goodness
out there being shown to us. E

