As a kid growing up in outer Los Angeles, Juliette Lake Lewis had a happy life. She spent hours riding her pony, playing with her many siblings and half-siblings, and was once spirited from school by her dad on the premise of seeing the dentist — only to end up at the cinema watching Star Wars. Her father, Geoffrey Lewis, was an actor, and her mother, Glenis Batley, was a graphic designer, and although the couple divorced when Lewis was 2, she lived with them both, on and off. Her parents helped cultivate “that sense of belief in one’s artistic abilities,” and before she had even hit her teens, she had narrowed down her career choices. When she grew up, she decided, she would either be a performance artist, a musician or an actor.
Now in her mid-30s, the all-singing, all-acting Lewis is two ambitions down — with one still to go. Sprawled before me in a London hotel, she has recently flown in from New York, and her body clock is out of whack; she has been up since 3am, and describes herself as “delirious.” Tired or not, she looks as she always has — both ordinary and extraordinary. She is only wearing light makeup, and her face is softer than on screen, but her eyes and lips pop with cartoon intensity.
She’s here to host the Vodafone Live Music Awards, and is vague about the prospect.
Her Valley-girl drawl makes every statement sound chewed-over and spat-out, and when I ask whether she was attracted by the chance to celebrate live acts, she looks at the PR women in the room, and says wide-eyed: “Is the event live?” A second later she understands the question, and talks excitedly about the Ting Tings and Primal Scream, who are both performing.
Over the past six years, Lewis has been establishing her band Juliette and the Licks; she says that music is “100 percent” her biggest love. The band has released two albums and an EP, and toured extensively, but the jury is still out on their work. There’s no doubting Lewis’ commitment. When she started, she wanted “to do everything that any young band would be doing”; her first UK gig was in a 100-capacity club. She kept coming back, “until I sold out the Astoria, and there’s something really gratifying about that, to work for it. Because the music had to stand on its own merit. I’m only good for about 100 tickets off the curiosity factor, and if you suck no one’s going to come back.” She is currently at work on the band’s third album, on which she plays keyboards “like a caveman.”
Lewis is certainly more respected for her music than actor-dilettantes such as Russell Crowe, but suspicions persist. Her songs are an angry mix of guitars and expletives (typical titles: Death of a Whore, Bullshit King), and the effect can seem like theatrical posturing. In many ways, this is unfair; if Lewis hadn’t started out as an actor, her musical career would probably be taken on face value, and judged pretty good. But she’s so strong on screen that people sometimes seem to feel cheated by her alternative career.
Lewis initially took up acting in her teens, and quickly realized that she was a natural. While “some people can’t connect with their own emotions,” she says, “that’s the thing that I started with from out of the womb. When I feel something, I feel it to the ninth power.” In her early TV roles, this skill wasn’t exactly appreciated. She was cast as a teenage daughter in the world’s most bizarre-sounding sitcom — the star was the ageing film-noir actor, Robert Mitchum — and the studio quickly “hired an acting teacher to essentially teach me how to act bad … Whether I was slouching, or putting my hair behind my ear, they’d have an acting teacher saying, ‘Don’t do that. Stand up straight. More energy. Smile.’”
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