Juliette Lewis, the return of a myth that burned too young

She made her film debut at the age of seven and was legally emancipated at 15. By 20 she had worked with Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Oliver Stone, had been nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe and starred on covers for her relationship with Brad Pitt. . In the early 1990s, Juliette Lewis (Los Angeles, 48) was ubiquitous because she fit, or was made to fit, into all the jellied fashions from trend magazines, from

to

riot

to

. “No one else looked or sounded like her. Whether he tried to appear vulnerable or volatile, he had a playful, uninhibited spontaneity," wrote Ryan Gilbey in

.

In the mid-nineties, after barely five years of reign, her addictions and her hardly accommodating personality separated her from the front row, like other generation companions such as Winona Ryder or Christina Ricci. With this last one, by the way, it has just coincided for the first time in

(Movistar +), revelation series of the month, a mixture of

,

and

that has returned it to the international spotlight.

For Juliette Lewis, dedicating herself to acting was a logical consequence within the family lifestyle.

Her father, actor Geoffrey Lewis, a regular in Clint Eastwood films with an unfathomable background as a secondary, saved the babysitter by leaving his daughter in the production trailer while he worked.

Until, during the filming of

(1980), when Juliette was seven years old, he took her out of the trailer and put her in front of the cameras for the first time.

He would not stop chaining appearances in comedies and family films such as

(1988) and

(1989).

A young Juliette Lewis in a promotional portrait for ABC in 1987. ABC Photo Archives (Disney General Entertainment Con)

At 14, after one of the sitcoms in which she participated forced her to take acting classes, she considered leaving it, but the test came for

(1991), where she beat 500 applicants and changed it everything. “In the comedy they were trying to make me into a robot, but when you have a Scorsese validating your natural instinct, you think, 'Maybe I'm doing something right after all,'” she recalled years later. Apart from her undoubted talent, he also helped her get the role that at that age was already emancipated from her parents. The reasons were not economic misunderstandings or mistreatment –like other child actors, see Edward Furlong or Macaulay Culkin–, but rather that the actress simply had the approval of her parents.

“I wanted to work, I hated when they said 'we lose the girl in five minutes!' and had to do the job in a hurry. And he also had to pay a legal guardian who sat around doing nothing for $600 a week. I didn't need those things,” he told

in 1991. “I know it sounds radical, but when you start acting and you talk to other child actors, it's the first thing they say to you: 'If you want to get a job, the industry likes you. on your resume say that you are emancipated because that way you can work more than eight hours.” It sounds like slavery but it is a formula to circumvent a law, dedicated precisely to protecting minors from exploitation, which was also used by other stars such as Alicia Silverstone.

Cape Fear

is not among the highlights of Scorsese's filmography, but the scene in which Robert De Niro seduces Lewis, a 15-year-old girl – even though Lewis was 17 – by a tough ex-convict 30 years older defined his career.

“In that little tango between our characters all I knew was that he was going to come up to me and say, 'Danielle, can I put my arm around you?' According to the script, he was kissing me at the time, but all Scorsese said was, 'Bob is going to do something. You let yourself go." What De Niro did was stick his thumb in Lewis's mouth and the actress, whose background was still pretty slim, had to improvise. "I'm sure they didn't know how he was going to react, whether he was going to stay on the scene or lose his mind." He stayed and responded how he thought his character would respond. After pulling his thumb away from the actor, he begins to suck on it, looks doubtfully into his eyes and asks, "Did I do it right?"

Cape Fear

brought her Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Hollywood went wild with her precocity and, unsurprisingly, continued to exploit her.

In his next film,

(1992), was the object of desire of the author, Woody Allen.

This time the man she was kissing was more than 40 years older.

The actress, one of the few in Hollywood who has not disowned Allen, remembers the fear she had of losing a job that came to her while she was overcoming a bad breakup.

“At the time, I was sad.

I was really depressed.

Woody took me aside and said: 'Listen, Juliette, your attitude has to change or you're going to end up in the unemployment line,' he confessed years later in a radio interview with Howard Stern.

"Woody just wanted him to be thankful that he was where he was."

In real life, his partner was more Apollonian than De Niro and Allen. An almost unknown handsome actor who began to make his way after a few minutes in

: Brad Pitt. Although today it is hard to believe, at the beginning of the nineties the star was her. Director Dominic Sena brought them together in

, a

about serial killers where they were seen as a couple of white trash Hollywood version, that is, greasy, stinky and hyperbolically attractive, just the opposite of what someone would really find in a deep america trailer park. The couple became one of the attractions of the press.

When Lewis premiered

(1994), a misunderstood work by Oliver Stone, the one that critics and audiences believed wholeheartedly that the violent psychopath Mallory Knox was a copy of the one who played her, Lewis herself. “The animosity I faced was due to being a woman. For a woman to play a savage, a sociopath, upsets people. Woody [Harrelson, his co-star] wasn't labeled crazy," he lamented in

.

“When I worked with George Clooney years later, he was surprised to meet me: 'Wow, you're not crazy.'

And it's a compliment, but it can also be a crippling accusation, made only because I played an extreme character."

The actress began to perceive the worst side of the industry.

"It was what they called the alternative or the weird one, because I didn't turn into a vampire as soon as they slapped me."

And the nineties went 'boom': Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis at the premiere of 'Johnny Suede' in Los Angeles in 1992. Kypros (Getty Images)

Then came Kathryn Bigelow's

(1995), an apocalyptic vision of the year 2000 that mixed racist riots and souvenir dealers. Lewis showed his facet as a singer performing two songs by his beloved PJ Harvey. He was still working but the relevance of his films was declining. After participating in the vampire comedy

(1996) he took a break to try to stop the drug addiction that had started at the age of 13. “Marijuana got boring. And I started using harder drugs. I was playing in the dark and didn't know how to handle it."

To overcome his addictions, he turned to Narconon, the rehabilitation program based on the principles of L. Ron Hubbard, the father of Scientology. She had been raised as a Scientologist and still defends that religion today. “A lot of nonsense is said on the subject. For me it is a philosophy that strengthens. A form of knowledge and I am very spiritual. In addition, it is perfectly compatible with rock”, he declared to EL PAÍS during one of his visits to Spain.

It did not return to recover the success of the first ninety.

His career came to a dead stop.

In 1999, Lewis married professional

Steve Berra and dropped off the radar.

His film career faded away and his musical career grew.

“Music has always been my first priority, so I finally thought, 'Fuck it, it's now or never.

I better get started on this while I can still pull off some

decent

Juliette Lewis during a performance by her group Juliette and the Licks at the Download Festival in England in 2016.Ollie Millington (Redferns)

In 2004 he formed Juliette and the Licks and released

, a punk rock album reminiscent of

's Courtney Love . Unlike other Hollywood stars, his was not a flirtation that dies after a single in comfortable recording studios. Lewis became involved with the group with the same energy that fueled his film career and spent the next two years touring with his group across Europe in a van. "Music doesn't make the money that movies do," he confessed to

. "But that's okay, I've never felt particularly financially driven." The reviews were mixed, but among them it was never highlighted that the actress was not taking it seriously. "Lewis is exactly the kind of iconic presence that boringly boy-saturated rock needs," praised David Peschek in

.

From then on, he combined his musical facet with his cinematographic one, but maintaining a much lower profile. He participated in good box office comedies such as

(2003) or

(2004), but it was the drama

(2013) where he shared the bill with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts that gave him his most relevant role in his last years. . “Six months earlier I had almost lost my father. My sisters and I had also bonded in that intense way. What I was bringing to the film was having to face the mortality of your parents, thinking about things that you don't consider in life."

In addition to cinema and music, he has not neglected television either. But in series that seemed destined to be the new great sensation like

endorsed by the production of M. Night Shyamalan, it passed unnoticed. Without so much hype and saucer came the one that has become the new obsession of the small screen,

, whose unpredictable success has caused many to put their eyes on it again and wonder where it has been all this time.

While basking in the attention, he's working on a new version of

, Russell T. Davies' groundbreaking play on the gay scene in Manchester, which has already had a lackluster American version and in which he will share the screen with Kim Cattrall.

She will also continue with her musical career and trying to figure out if she is a singer-actress or a singer-actress.

“The interpretation drives me crazy.

It's a horrible industry, but I don't know which is worse: music, fashion or movies.

They're all horrible, but they're all better than being an accountant or a sweeper."

You can follow ICON on