Looking back, Christina Ricci wished she handled teenage press a little less like a teenager
In her own words, Christina Ricci used to handle press like a "dickhead"
Speaking to Rolling Stone recently, Ricci reflects on some of her early time in the press. Her main takeaway? Her youth had a tendency to get the best of her.
“I was a bit of a dickhead,” Ricci tells RS’ Angie Martoccio in a new conversation. “I could have handled it in a way that was less teenage.”
Of course, the way she was presented in the media wasn’t exclusively in Ricci’s hands. As she transitioned from a surly child star to a disillusioned teen, the press delighted in covering Ricci through the “Anti It-Girl” angle; the fact that she was a young woman speaking candidly in the nineties about mental health, body image, and depression didn’t dissuade them. In a 1999 Rolling Stone cover story firmly rooted in the era (read: accompanied by a photo of Ricci posing in pink lingerie and written by an older white guy), the actor was described as a “hazardously sexy teen who will say anything.”
“It’s not how I would have chosen to be dressed, but it’s very much of its time,” Ricci says of the cover. “Not great.”
More than 20 years have passed since that story dropped, and Ricci has thoroughly retooled her approach to interviewing: how much she gives away, and who she gives it away to. These days, she’s more accustomed to rolling out television shows than movies: Ricci appeared in Netflix’s recent Jenna Ortega-led Wednesday, and the highly-anticipated second season of Ricci’s Showtime series Yellowjackets premieres on March 24.
Focusing on TV, however, presents its own challenges. As Ricci tells it, once a movie comes out, the onslaught of junket interviews and profile pieces dissipates—for television, the press cycle “never ends.” That means Ricci has had to learn not to go too far—or more accurately, she’s still learning how not to.
“I find myself starting to feel a little bit more devil-may-care about the things I say,” Ricci says of her comfortability in the press circuit for television. “And that’s not good for me. I always go too far. I never realize how awful a thing I’m saying is until someone else is like, ‘What the fuck?’”