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Blitz N°97, Janvier Février 1991
Ever get the feeling that America is completely fucked up?" asks Christian Slater in the auspicious opening line of Pump Up the Volume, a sort of Heathers/Talk Radio for 15-years-old. It stars Slater who, as a 'subversive' pirate talk-show host, corrupts his schoolmates with nightly doses of Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen and bouts of on-air masturbation.
"Christian's definitely got it, whatever 'it' is," confirms demure 20-year-old Samantha Mathis, who costars as his most ardent, assertive admirer, Nora, modelled by Mathis on Sinead O'Connor and played with admirable assurance and no little panache. Like Slater, Mathis has definite presence. Like a baby Hepburn – one minute plain and simple, the next dangerously, sexily, vampish – she stands out among a sea of shiny school kids as a face you watch. And, belying her baby-faced innocence and tender years, she is terrifyingly level-headed. "I grew up on film sets. I always wanted to act but my mum [actress Bibi Besch] was not very supportive about the idea initially. It's a crazy business, it really is. Very tense, pressurized. You have to have other things in your life. If you think about the rest of it too much, you go crazy."
Used to playing "younger, sweeter, softer" girls (blondes), Mathis has kept on Nora's hairstyle, hair colour and much of her wilful, audacious attitude. "I feel different and now I go up for intelligent girls, more mysterious and intriguing parts – darker personalities. I've become more confident and more outspoken." She concedes Volume was originally darker, "with more suicides", but still considers it "a miracle it got made at all. The United States is getting very puritanical, reverting back to the Fifties," she says. "A movie with more than three 'fuck's in it can't get a 15 certificate now. We have three 'fuck's in the first three sentences." Mathis's next project to show here could be 83 hours, the true story of a young girl kidnapped and buried alive in a box with just enough food and air to keep alive, by a "sick, brilliant kidnapper", purely to torture her family's 'perfect' lifestyle. "For parts of it, they really buried me and covered it up. It was terrifying – not glamorous at all."
Empire N°50, August 1993
I LOVED WORKING WITH DENNIS, BUT HE's definitely a crazy person," declares Samantha Mathis of her Super Mario Bros. co-star Dennis Hopper. "I remember our first day of shooting, we were sitting away from the set talking, and I got the sense he wasn't really listening to me. There was kind of a glazed look in his eyes, and I thought, 'Okay, maybe he's just a little crazy', and then I started to realise he wasn't even looking me in the eye. I looked down and my left breast was hanging out of my dress and he was staring at it."
Samantha Mathis shifts in her seat, giggles a delicate, appropriately girlish giggle, and continues her "telling" anecdote.
"I reassembled myself and said, 'Excuse me,' and he said, 'Oh no, that's quite all right.' And I realised that was the kind of man I was going to be working with."
It was as Christian Slater's love interest in Pump Up The Volume that Mathis first came to attention and consequently found herself labelled as The Next Winona Ryder on account of her (dyed) black hair and her breakthrough role opposite Slater - Ryder's, of course, being in Heathers. It's a tag she's successfully managed to shed, though, with a series of eclectic roles ranging from mousey daughter Dottie in This Is My Life to the part of the palaeontologist princess in Super Mario Bros. in which she stomps around in high heels and hangs out with a dinosaur and the evidently lecherous Hopper.
"I think I've carved out somewhat of a niche for myself," muses the 23-year-old. "I tend to play characters that have more of a brain, and although I've also played bimboesque types, generally speaking I don't get the bimbo roles."
Now back to her natural honey-blonde colouring, and with parts as a prostitute in The Music Of Chance and as a Nashville songwriter in The Thing Called Love in the bag, Mathis has just moved into a rented house in the Hollywood Hills, determined to take it easy for a while.
"I'm looking for things to develop," she says, "because it would really be nice to be not only at the mercy of what comes along but to seek out some ideas that interest me. I have a few ideas, but they're in the early stages, and if I talk about them, somebody would steal them . . ."