TRANSCRIPT Bullseye with Jesse Thorn: Chloë Sevigny

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Transition: Gentle, trilling music with a steady drumbeat plays under the dialogue.

Promo: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

Music: “Huddle Formation” from the album Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team—a fast, upbeat, peppy song. Music plays as Jesse speaks, then fades out.

Jesse Thorn: It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. I’m going to say one word to describe Chloë Sevigny—uh, cool. She started out as a model, then she was in music videos for bands like Sonic Youth and the Lemonheads. Then she started acting in arthouse movies. Her debut was in the very, very big deal indie film, Kids, directed by Larry Clark. She went on to bigger things. She weas nominated for an Oscar for her work in Boys Don’t Cry. She was in indie movies like The Last Days of Disco and Broken Flowers. She had regular roles on shows like Big Love and American Horror Story. Her latest project is Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. It’s a TV miniseries based on the real-life feud Truman Capote had with a group of New York socialites, the Swans. Sevigny plays C. Z. Guest, an actress, author, and one of the aforementioned swans. That show is running now on FX.

I talked to Chloë a couple of years ago. She had just starred in The Girl from Plainville. It’s a TV drama series inspired by the so-called texting suicide case. Conrad Roy III was 18 years old when he died by suicide in 2014. His girlfriend, then 17-year-old Michelle Carter, was charged and later convicted in connection to his death. The series explores the events leading up to Roy’s death and the relationship he and Carter shared. This is a clip from the pilot of the show. Conrad’s family is getting ready for his funeral. His mom, Lynn—who is played by Chloë—asks her daughter for her thoughts about an outfit she has picked out.

Transition: Music swells in then fades.

Clip:

Lynn (The Girl from Plainville): Well, how about this one? (Beat.) Syd.

Syd: (Flatly.) Yeah.

Lynn: How about this?

Syd: It’s fine.

Lynn: You would’ve told me, right?

Syd: What?

Lynn: If you knew he was thinking about it.

Syd: Yeah.

Lynn: I don’t know why I asked.

(A text notification pings.)

Lynn: Coco’s friend. That girl, Michelle. Such a sweet girl.

Syd: She texted you again?

Lynn: Yeah, she’s hurting. I think she wants to be close to us or something. Did you know they were so close?

Syd: (Beat.) Sorta.

Lynn: He left her a note.

Syd: What did it say?

Lynn: A lot. He loved her.

Transition: Music swells then fades.

Jesse Thorn: Chloë, welcome to Bullseye. I’m happy to have you on the show.

Chloë Sevigny: Thank you, Jesse. Happy to be here.

Jesse Thorn: Did you think about—when you were preparing for this, did you think about what kind of teenager you were?

Chloë Sevigny: No, I’m more thinking about that and processing the work posthaste, which is generally my process.

(They chuckle.)

I kind of make sense of it—

Jesse Thorn: You post-intellectualize?

Chloë Sevigny: I kind of make sense of it afterwards in a way. Which is backwards, I know. I guess preparing for press, like I more kind of reflect on it. I think during—while I’m in it, it’s more instinctual.

Jesse Thorn: What kind of reflections have you made in preparing to do press? What have you thought about?

Chloë Sevigny: I thought about—you know, my own adolescence and… the security and love I had from my family and yet I still struggled. I wouldn’t say I struggled with depression. But I mean, I was hormonal and had problems that lots of teenagers have. Then as a parent, like how do you read that? I guess I was thinking. You know? Now, I’m a mother and thinking about my son and when he becomes a teenager. Like, how do you know if it’s serious or not? And that, to me, is terrifying. ‘Cause like Lynn thought that Coco was on the up and up! He was—you know—thinking about going to school. He had just gotten his captain’s license. They went to the beach. He was like going to visit his friend at school. Things seemed fine! And then that night, he took his life. And she thought they were very close.

[00:05:00]

I imagine she wanted to be—you know—really involved but not intrusive. Like, that’s the sense of her that I got from watching her interviews. But… how does one know? I mean, we’re dealing with a mental health crisis in America, right now. And—you know, and we see—you know—very successful, happy, beautiful people suffering in all walks of life. You know? It’s like there’s no guarantees. So, I guess—yeah, I’m mostly terrified, going forward, how to interpret my teen’s feelings.

(They chuckle.)

Jesse Thorn: Was it appealing to work as a sort of down to earth mom?

Chloë Sevigny: Yes. I think over the years in my career, I’ve played a lot of very grounded characters and kind of the moral compass of many a story and/or film. And I think, yeah, showrunners, directors see something of that in me. This, you know, quote/unquote “realness”. But when I was offered The Girl from Plainville and I watched the documentary on HBO, I Love You Now Die, I was just very taken by Lynn. By her personality that she put forward in the documentary. Because you know, whenever there’s a camera on we give a certain version of ourselves, and I’m sure she was protecting certain aspects. But I was, yeah—I was just taken, taken by her humor and her attitude and just the way she spoke.

Jesse Thorn: It feels like it would be a hard place to live as an actor for the amount of time that it takes to make a series that says sort of long and deep as this, you know. It’s not a—this isn’t two weeks of work; you know what I mean?

Chloë Sevigny: No, it was about five months. My son was just over a year, and I live in New York City, and we were shooting in Savannah. So, I was going back and forth a lot, and there was a lot of time away from him. So, it was kind of like a double whammy, dealing with the subject matter and then dealing with my first time away from him and then what that would mean going forward. You know, I’m an actress; this is my career, and I love it and I—you know, I have a lot of great opportunities, and I hope to continue to have those. But what is it going to mean moving forward doing this? So, I was—yeah, it was a lot to kind of think about and take in and process.

Jesse Thorn: Especially when you’re doing a story that’s about a character trying to understand where they were connected and disconnected from their kid.

Chloë Sevigny: Yeah, it was pretty—it was a pretty painful place to be for five months.

Jesse Thorn: Did you have a plan for how you were going to have a kid in your life and how you were going to integrate your family and professional lives? Like, did you always have a scheme or was it something that you were like, well, something will happen, and I will figure it out?

Chloë Sevigny: No, he was a happy accident. Yeah, I had him later. I was 45. I had struggled earlier in my life with conception. And so, yeah, he came along. We’re like we’re just gonna figure it out. Yeah. You know, it was like the best thing to ever happen to either of us.

Jesse Thorn: What kind of teen were you before you—you know, like when you were in your late teens, when you were 17 or 18 or something, you sort of embarked upon your career. You started modeling and, and ended up acting and et cetera. But before that, what kind of teen were you?

Chloë Sevigny: Like, junior high or like freshman/sophomore year?

Jesse Thorn: I’m talking about 14 and 15, you know what I mean?

Chloë Sevigny: Yeah. I mean, I think junior high was pretty—I was pretty happy. I was like just—you know—into like playing softball and Esprit clothing and like, you know, going to the pizza parlor and hanging out at the beach. And I was pretty popular. I also grew up, you know, in a really wealthy community without a lot of—without as much as everyone else. So, there was always a little bit of a divide. And I think around that age, I started to kind of distancing myself from some of the more popular cliques. But my town was really small, and I had known everyone since kindergarten. So, you’re just basically all together. You know.

[00:10:00]

And then, when I got into high school, my brother dated this girl that was from California. And she had purple hair and wore Doc Martins and kilts and—or I guess maybe that was eighth grade. And I became like obsessed with her. And I was like I wanna be like, quote/unquote, “alternative”. Maybe that was eighth grade, because I remember my first day of eighth grade, I wore like striped stockings to school and like this mock neck, knit, two-piece outfit and like shell toe Doc Martins or something. So, yeah. That must have been eighth grade when I started the alternative vibes. (Laughs.) Or aspirations. When I was like, “Okay, I don’t wanna be an Esprit girl. I’m looking for something else.” Which was hard to find where we lived.

Jesse Thorn: Did you grow up in a family where that was unusual or expected?

Chloë Sevigny: Well, my brother was doing it, so it was kind of like, you know, he was paving the way. And my father was a bit of an outsider. So.

Jesse Thorn: Yeah, the reason I ask is because like I know almost nothing about your parents, but there’s like a line in a bio somewhere or something that said that your dad was an accountant and later an art teacher. And I was like, oh! Well, I don’t know what that is!

(They chuckle.)

Chloë Sevigny: Yes. I think he had always had aspirations to be an artist, and his family was pretty conservative, and he went the business route. And I think he was always, you know, kind of kicking himself for not being true to who he was. So, they encouraged my brother and I. Like, I actually started acting when I was quite young. I went to summer theater camp in kindergarten, and then I was doing, you know, plays in school and summer theater camp and started doing commercials. I was in a Voltron commercial, I think in first or second grade and was doing like catalog modeling in Connecticut. And so, people think that this happened like in my later teens, but it was something I had aspired to since a very young age.

Jesse Thorn: I’m like really excited to learn about this Voltron situation.

(They giggle.)

Chloë Sevigny: Go, Voltron Force! Yes. (Laughs.)

Jesse Thorn: You dropped that one in there like we were going to slide past it, but I think we need to address these—

Chloë Sevigny: The poor man’s Transformer. (Laughs.)

Jesse Thorn: Maybe the rich man’s transformer, Voltron! Voltrons were pretty cool!

Chloë Sevigny: I was the pink lion.

Jesse Thorn: So, was it one of those kind of commercials—I’m sorry that I’m going to ask you about this and not the many wonderful works of art that you’ve created in your long career, but I am excited to talk about Voltron for a second.

(She laughs.)

Was it one of those kind of television commercials where like there’s kids in kind of a featureless black box, and they’re like holding the toy, and the toy’s in the foreground, and the kids are in the background. And they’re going like, “Yeah! Shoot! Bah! Doo!” You know what I mean?

Chloë Sevigny: You got it. We must be in the same age bracket. And they’re like playing with them, and you know, yeah. Then you become them.

Jesse Thorn: Then there’s like a voiceover that says like, “You gotta do it in the crossfire!” Or whatever. That rules. I mean, I feel like that is a very—that’s pretty much the most prestigious thing you could do as a 10-year-old or 8-year-old. I’m trying to think of something more prestigious than that. I’m struggling. Major league baseball player, but that seems unlikely.

Chloë Sevigny: Yes, I’m pretty proud of my work in the Voltron commercial, I have to say.

Jesse Thorn: Did you—was there a time when you stopped doing that?

Chloë Sevigny: Yes. I think when I started like 13, kind of ugly duckling, losing my teeth. And I remember like we went to the dentist to get like a bridge to fill in some gaps for like the auditions. And my mom’s like, “This is getting out of hand!” And I think there was a lot of rejection, and I think, honestly, she was tired of like dragging me into the city and these big cattle call like environments. And she’s like, “No more of this. You know, you can go back to professional when you’re 18.”

Jesse Thorn: How did you feel about it at the time?

Chloë Sevigny: I think I was okay with it. I remember there was another girl in my school that was much more successful. She got a lot more commercials and modeling jobs, and she was much prettier. And so, I think at a young—too young—of an age, I was really comparing myself to specifically her and then, yeah, other girls.

Jesse Thorn: How did you feel about going on auditions for things that you didn’t get?

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Chloë Sevigny: I mean, I wasn’t really that gregarious. Like, I think that I was probably a pretty awkward kid. I think that I just like I knew I wanted to do it, and I was good at it, like at camp. (Laughs.) But like I wasn’t like turning it out. You know. So, it was awkward. I don’t know. I think I just like—I’d seen Annie on Broadway. I was obsessed with Little House. You know, Different Strokes. Like, I was seeing kids on TV doing this. And I was like, you know, Drew and E.T., all of this. Like, I was like, “I want to do what all these kids are doing!”

Jesse Thorn: We have so much more to get into. Stay with us. It’s Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

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Transition: Thumpy rock music.

Jesse Thorn: You’re listening to Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. I’m talking with Chloë Sevigny.

When did—at what point did you learn to sew?

Chloë Sevigny: I think I had like a Fisher Price sewing machine somewhere in grade school, and my mom taught me to use it, and I would make like dolls clothes.

Jesse Thorn: Did your mom make clothes?

Chloë Sevigny: She didn’t, but she could—you know, she was better at hand sewing than the machine. But she was very crafty, my mom, and we always did a lot of crafty things at home (chuckles) and a lot of like, you know, traditional like female-y things. Tropes-y, housewife-y things. Gardening, cooking, sewing. Yeah.

Jesse Thorn: I mean, all of those are pretty great things.

(She agrees.)

I’m not into crafting myself. Anytime I try and do that, it feels like I’m setting myself up for failure.

Chloë Sevigny: But we would like make donuts and ice cream and, you know, all kinds of Fun things as well. Yeah.

Jesse Thorn: What kind of donuts did you make?

Chloë Sevigny: (Laughs.) I don’t know. She had some sort of donut making device.

Jesse Thorn: Did you make clothes for yourself when you were—when you got good at it?

Chloë Sevigny: I did. Yeah, I made a lot. I was more like reworking stuff, and I’d make some stuff from scratch as well. Yeah, I started that kind of like—yeah, probably eighth grade. And then like, yeah, through high school. But I got really into—I had these like alternative years. ‘Cause my older brother was like alternative and punky, and I was into his scene in freshman year and very into like, you know, all the classic ’90s alternative and ’80s. And there was like a hardcore club near us in Connecticut that we used to go to. And then I think summer between like freshman and sophomore, we were at like an outdoor festival, and I might’ve done a hallucinogenic, and I met a boy there, and he had really long hair, and he was Argentinian and really beautiful, and he was really into the Grateful Dead. And so, I kind of like segued into a little bit of that scene for a while, and there was a lot of dressmaking involved in that.

Jesse Thorn: Were they like prairie dresses?

Chloë Sevigny: Yes. They’re called spinner dresses, specifically. Yes. They’re like an ampere-waist with like a bigger skirt, lots of patchwork involved. (Laughs.) For spinning, because you just kind of spin, you know. People think there’s like a lot of noodling, which is a really unfortunate word, but no. It was more of the spinning that I was into.

(Jesse laughs.)

So, I’d make the outfits that kind of go with that. Yeah, and you would sell them at the shows, you know.

[00:20:00]

It was a whole culture, still is.

Jesse Thorn: I love the entrepreneurial aspect of this.

Chloë Sevigny: Yeah, that’s like very much of the scene, you know. Like, “Shakedown Street” on the lot, like kids like, you know, paying their way or making their way through tour by selling stuff and ground scoring. You know, people just like run through the venues at the end and like pick up change or whatever they found that people had dropped, you know, and it was ground scoring. (Laughs.) This is a deep dive into a dead world.

Jesse Thorn: I’m loving learning about this. Absolutely. I’m from the inner city. I don’t know anything about this stuff. Even inner-city San Francisco, they don’t have this. (Laughs.)

Chloë Sevigny: Yes they do! Come on! Especially in San Francisco.

Jesse Thorn: So, like by the time you started wandering off by yourself, which seems to have been in your like mid-teens—that you were either like—that you were like going away for the weekend by yourself. Were you still in Hallucinogens and Calico Dresses mode?

Chloë Sevigny: Kind of both. I was kind of like dipping my toes in like all these different worlds. Like, I started working at Polo Ralph Lauren, and that was when like all the hip-hop kids were getting really into polo. They were called lowlifes, and they would like—and I saw that kind of— There was like also the d-light, kind of like raver, hippie, homegirl, alterna-girl, kind of like it all started churning into one.

And the kids used to come to the mall, and they’d be like, “Oh, Chloë, do you have any teddy bear sweaters?” And I would like bring them out from the back. Teddy bear sweaters were the big thing. But yeah, I was kind of like a jack of all. I was like—I was just into like youth culture, except surfing. That was like the one youth culture I had zero interest in.

Jesse Thorn: Did you think you were going to be an actor? Like, you started acting—it’s not like you started acting like by like going to theater school and then like showing up with headshots at agent’s offices, I don’t think. But like, was it your goal to be a working actor?

Chloë Sevigny: It was when I was younger and like through, you know, junior high. And then when I got into high school, I got into other things that teenagers get into that lead them astray, which unequivocally did. And I kind of lost interest in a lot of extracurricular and, you know, school in general. So, I think I auditioned for the drama club, and I just didn’t click with the teacher in high school. I remember senior year, I auditioned for West Side Story. I had a shaved head, so I auditioned to play a boy part—which was very ahead of its time. And I didn’t get the part, so I ended up working in costumes. And I think—

Jesse Thorn: You didn’t get any part?

Chloë Sevigny: No. (Laughs.) She held it against—she had a thing against me. She didn’t like me. But boy, did I prove her wrong! (Chuckles.)

Jesse Thorn: Can you sing and dance?

Chloë Sevigny: I can sing. Yeah. And I think around then I was very into like fashion, and I thought I wanted to go into costumes or maybe work in a magazine. I had interned at SassyMagazine and in the fashion department, and I was kind of unsure of what I wanted to do. But you know, I wanted to do—yeah, something in fashion or film. And you know, I started doing music videos. I did the Sonic Youth video. I had met Harmony Korine, who became like a very near and dear friend. And I was just surrounding myself and very attracted to people that were like doing stuff. So, yeah, I was just—I was driven, but I didn’t know to what end.

Jesse Thorn: But you were trying to figure out like, well, I have to work to eat. And work—just the meeting the bare standard of working as an actor is a hard standard to meet.

Chloë Sevigny: Yeah, I mean, I was definitely paycheck to paycheck until Big Love. And that’s, I think, when a lot of the fashion stuff entered the pictures. I was like, wow, look at this big money. You know? Like, one day “selling out”, quote/unquote, which people don’t really think of it as now. But then it was a serious, you know, thing for me. Like, yeah, I was really torn about doing that kind of stuff then. And I remember my brother being like, “Our dad would have to work a year to make that much money. Or, you know, “Take the money and run!” Thank god I followed his advice. Because now it doesn’t matter.

Jesse Thorn: Are you ready to play Spider-Man?

Chloë Sevigny: What is that?

Jesse Thorn: Spider-Man?

[00:25:00]

He’s like a guy that got bitten by a radioactive spider and he shoots webs.

(She laughs.)

They make a lot of movies about him.

Chloë Sevigny: Yes, I think my brother was him for Halloween once or twice in the ’70s.

Jesse Thorn: Were you not going out on auditions to be in Armageddon or whatever? Or were you going to those things and people were thinking that you were too cool for school or whatever?

Chloë Sevigny: I think a little of both. I was in New York, ’cause my mom was, you know, in Connecticut. And like I said, my father had passed. So, I never really—I never made the leap ’cause I wanted to be close to her. And you know, pre-9/11, there still were a lot of auditions in New York, but after that there was not. You had to go to LA. Yeah, so—yeah, I mean, I don’t think I was competing with like the Liv Tylers or Claire Danes of that day. I was, you know, I was like auditioning for like, you know, the sidekick of the funny girl.

(They laugh.)

Those kinds of things.

Jesse Thorn: A couple steps removed. You are moving your way from branch to branch down the tree of the call sheet.

(She confirms with a chuckle.)

I want to play a scene from one of the movies that you made in the relatively early days of your career. Not the very beginning, but the relatively early days of your career, The Last Days of Disco.

Chloë Sevigny: Oh yeah, great movie.

Jesse Thorn: It’s just such a great movie and—

Chloë Sevigny: I mean, how do you top that? I mean, one of your first movies is Last Days of Disco?! You’re like, excuse me, give me something better.

Jesse Thorn: I can’t even imagine what it would be like to just do any other thing once you had done a Whit Stillman thing—the most Whit Stillman-y of all Whit Stillman things.

Chloë Sevigny: I mean, I had a lot of heavy hitters early on. It was really hard to top that.

Jesse Thorn: So, the movie is about kind of the very beginning of the ’80s and a bunch of young adults, Ivy League young adults. And in this scene, the character Alice—who my guest Chloë plays—has just finished up a date with a guy named Jimmy. And they’re at his house, and Alice finds his Scrooge McDuck comic books.

Transition: Music swells then fades.

Clip:

Alice (The Last Days of Disco): What’s this?

Jimmy: Um, I collect original edition Scrooge McDuck comics. I know that sounds a little odd.

Alice: Not at all!

Jimmy: This is original artwork by Carl Barks, who created the Uncle Scrooge comics. He’s considered a bit of a genius.

Music: Upbeat, jazzy music starts suddenly.

Alice: There’s something really sexy about Scrooge McDuck.

Jimmy: You really think so?

Transition: Music swells then fades.

Jesse Thorn: Did you feel like you had a sense of what you were good at and weren’t good at as an actor? Like, did you feel like you were playing to your strengths, or was it like an ideological feeling?

Chloë Sevigny: I remember a lot of Last Days of Disco being like I have no idea what I’m saying. (Laughs.) What is this movie? What are we doing?

But I think I was good at like, yeah, just… keeping it grounded and nuanced. Like, I’m always trying to get back to the performance in The Last Days of Disco. (Chuckling.) I think it’s one of my best performances. I’m always trying to get back to that kind of acting.

Jesse Thorn: What about it do you like, retrospectively?

Chloë Sevigny: There’s just something unself-conscious in it, even though the dialogue is so self-conscious. Yeah, it’s just—it’s nuanced, it’s internal, it’s, you know, quiet. It’s—yeah.

Jesse Thorn: I mean, I think that’s one of your strongest qualities as an actor, that you are interesting to see do person stuff. You know what I mean?

Chloë Sevigny: Mm. Do person stuff? (Laughs.)

Jesse Thorn: Yeah, I mean, it’s—you don’t have to scream and yell to be interesting to watch do something onscreen.

Chloë Sevigny: I hate yelling. I’m really bad at yelling on screen. I just—like, I did Russian Doll in like season two, and there’s this one scene where I have to do a lot of yelling, and Natasha’s one of my oldest friends, and I remember her like cracking up and being like, “Alright, everybody, Chloë hates yelling.”

(They laugh.)

And you just notice, because whenever we go to the theater, I’m like, “Why is everybody yelling?!”

(They laugh.)

I think that comes from my mother.

Jesse Thorn: What about other what about other big things on screen?

[00:30:00]

Do you feel like you’re comfortable going through, you know, paroxysms of tears or whatever?

Chloë Sevigny: Yeah, tears. Tears are good for me. That’s a comfortable place. (Laughs.) It’s a—yeah, a strong suit. Yeah. Running, terrible.

Jesse Thorn: Why do you think yelling is hard and tears less so?

Chloë Sevigny: I think yelling, because I don’t like the texture of my voice when I yell, and I forget to like yell from my diaphragm. So, it’s something like cringy, you know? Tears are—yeah, I don’t know… something I do a lot of. (Laughs.) So, like it’s a comfort zone.

Jesse Thorn: We’ll wrap up with Chloë Sevigny in just a minute. Stay with us. It’s Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

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Transition: Thumpy rock music.

Jesse Thorn: Welcome back to Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. I’m talking with Chloë Sevigny. She is, of course, an actor and model. She starred in indie films like Kids, Dogville, and American Psycho. She received an Academy Award nomination for her part in the 1999 drama Boys Don’t Cry. These days you can see Sevigny the TV drama Feud: Capote vs.

the Swans, airing now on FX. She and I talked in 2022. Let’s get back into our conversation.

Do you feel like you could be happy and fulfilled if you had a job? The kind of acting job where your skill and talent is a vessel for a machine that makes something that people enjoy, but like you also just get to go there on Monday from nine—Monday to Friday, nine to five?

Chloë Sevigny: If we’re talking procedural, no. I have like—I always have a hard time doing procedural. I’ve tried over and over. And—

Jesse Thorn: Because you can’t do the exposition?

Chloë Sevigny: I can. And I’ve done some of that recently, but yeah. It’s not that fulfilling. Yeah, for me. But if it’s shooting in New York—and now that I have a son and when he gets into school, maybe! (Laughs.)

Jesse Thorn: Yeah, I mean like for real. Like, some people, I think, love that they just have a job. Like, some people want—like, a big part of the appeal of acting for them is that they’re doing a very different thing every time they get a job and that they’re always jumping off a cliff and learning something. But I think there are plenty of great actors who are just thrilled that they can like go and act every day, and that’s the part of it that’s important to them, so that’s a dream job.

Chloë Sevigny: Yeah, I guess it would depend on the job and like where I am in my life. I remember like Big Love, that character couldn’t have been more complicated. And I mean, to me, (chuckling) she was the best character on the show. But of course, I played her. But after a while, you’re like, “Really? This problem? This problem again? I have to deal with this again?” And I guess, well, that’s real life. You have the same problems over and over. So, even in that environment, I remember getting frustrated at like the repetition of it, but I might feel differently now.

Jesse Thorn: You are famously well dressed. And I think—I always think, ah, she looks great! What a great outfit!

Anytime I see a picture of you in an outfit.

(She thanks him.)

I mean it. I mean it. I will say though that like when I—I had a—still have, but I’m not super active in writing for it—but I had a menswear blog for a long time. And like the part of—

[00:35:00]

I loved writing about clothes. I love clothes. But the thing where me showing that I cared about it, people often felt like I was, in demonstrating that, judging them. And that also like they should definitely judge me, because I was interested in it. And I thought, gosh, you had to deal with that, but like in the New York Post or whatever. Not on Reddit. (Grumbles quietly.)

Chloë Sevigny: Yeah, I mean, it’s part of my job. I mean, you know, I’m a public person. There were the like wanting to wear things and knowing that I would just get ripped to shreds because of who I was. You know, people… I somehow got into that box where like, you know, say Rihanna was wearing it. People would be like, “Oh, it’s fabulous!” But I’m wearing it. Like, “What was she thinking?” Somehow, for a minute, I was that for like the US Weeklys. And I mean, it’s the same thing now like with Instagram. One bad comment, and that’s all you think about out of, you know, 5,000 great comments. You know? So, it was—so, there was that for a while, like in the early 2000s, when those magazines were, you know, ubiquitous and everybody looked at them.

Jesse Thorn: Did you find that that led you to be more or less invested in wearing something weird? Like, did it—was your reaction to that, “Oh, okay, well then I’m just gonna—”

Chloë Sevigny: There was always a big divide for me between red carpet and my personal. Like, I feel like I never knew how to be myself on the red carpet. Like, I was always playing the part. And I was like, I don’t—I still look at a red-carpet photo, I’m like who is that? What is that? Who is that person? Like, I was—?

You know. But in real life, I was having a blast when I was going out to clubs or on the street or whatever I was doing, traveling. Yeah, so—yeah, I’m still a little—the red carpet still evades me to a certain extent. It’s very hard to dress fancy, you know.

Jesse Thorn: Do you still make or alter your own clothes sometimes?

Chloë Sevigny: I do, yes. I really like working with denim. Yeah, I’m really into all the like Junya Watanabe denim stuff with the eyelets, and I’m always trying to make my own versions. (Chuckles.)

Jesse Thorn: That rules. What’s the last thing you made?

Chloë Sevigny: The last thing I made was like a denim and eyelet mini skirt. Yeah.

Jesse Thorn: What do you do to put the eyelets in? Do you like punch—? Is there a special punch of some kind?

Chloë Sevigny: No, like trimmings. Like, adding trimmings, yes, with a sewing machine.

Jesse Thorn: Got it. I love it. Where are you wearing that to? Whole Foods?

Chloë Sevigny: (Laughs.) Sure, yeah, wherever.

Jesse Thorn: Well, I sure appreciate you taking all this time to talk to me. It was really nice to get to talk to you. I so admire your work.

Chloë Sevigny: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Jesse Thorn: Chloë Savigny, catch her now on FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.

Transition: Upbeat, buzzy synth.

Jesse Thorn: That’s the end of another episode of Bullseye. Bullseye is created from the homes of me and the staff of Maximum Fun, in and around greater Los Angeles, California, where each and every one of us are finding out if there are any holes in our roofs. Because, boy, has it been raining.

Our show is produced by speaking into microphones. Our senior producer is Kevin Ferguson. Our producers are Jesus Ambrosio and Richard Robey. Our production fellow at Maximum Fun is Daniel Huecias. We get booking help from Mara Davis. Our interstitial music is by DJW, also known as Dan Wally. Our theme song is called “Huddle Formation”. It was written and recorded by The Go! Team. Thanks to The Go! Team. Thanks to their label, Memphis Industries.

Bullseye is on Instagram, @BullseyeWithJesseThorn, so follow us there. You can also find us on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. I think that’s about it. Just remember, all great radio hosts have a signature signoff.

Promo: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

(Music fades out.)

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[00:40:00]

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