True story, I’ve always found Chloe Sevigny sort of annoying and full of herself, but the general ‘90s nostalgia has made me reassess her. Like… maybe she genuinely is very cool and sort of misunderstood? She should get credit for her commitment to independent film and working with up-and-coming filmmakers. She should get credit for truly loving fashion and celebrating fashion. She should get credit for being an underrated – and even underappreciated – actress. Anyway, I’m here for the Sevigny Revival. She currently stars in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, where she plays CZ Guest, the famous style icon/designer and writer. To promote the show, Chloe recently chatted with Rolling Stone about style, reality television, late-motherhood and more. Some highlights:
She doesn’t watch the Real Housewife shows: “I have never watched a single episode of a single Housewife. I don’t know who any of them are or any of their things going on. Didn’t one of them do something for a college application? [she was thinking of Lori Loughlin of Full House] Oh, she wasn’t a Housewife? Shows how much I know. OK. I’m not really much of a TV person, period. I used to be really into Project Runway, but this was pre-baby, pre-husband, single life. I’ve never watched a Kardashian episode. It’s been a while.”
Whether she has gossip-heavy lunches with girlfriends: “I used to have these girls’ nights where I’d only have girlfriends over and we’d drink martinis and talk sh-t, but that hasn’t happened as much now that the small person is always around my house and never leaves. [Laughs] One of my New Year’s resolutions was to start carving out more time for friends.
Her infamous New Yorker profile by Jay McInerney turns 30 years old next year: “It was so odd to be written about before you were even famous for anything, you know? That was the hard part about it for me: I didn’t really understand why it was happening. In retrospect, I think it’s interesting to follow a girl who’s coming into her own, but at the time I didn’t feel it was justified. I was like, “Why do you even care?” I was like, “Why am I even doing this?” [Jay] promised to buy me this dress and my father read The New Yorker.”
Having a baby at 45, during the pandemic: “It’s amazing just to have a baby. I didn’t think it was going to happen to me, and then to have this thing… I can’t imagine life without him. And like I said, he just never leaves. He’s always around here. I had a doctor that specializes in these “high-risk” pregnancies, and there was a pressure to induce for the sake of the hospital staff because if you induced you could get a Covid test, and then the nurses and the hospital staff would feel more comfortable if you were negative, which is so crazy that that was something that was being encouraged. It’s such a complicated thing to talk about in the press because it’s such a personal thing. I hope people will be happy that it happened for me, but I also don’t want them to think it’s the be-all and end-all. I even have friends that were like, “I have a great career. If I didn’t have a kid, then it would have been fine.” I was like, “What?!” Like, wow. But I had tried other avenues and not had luck with them, so to naturally conceive at that age is kind of a miracle.
The best advice she’s ever received: “I don’t really have an answer for that. I think there are things you learn as you go along, like comparing and despairing and how unhealthy that is, and running your own race, and they’re all truisms but feel trite to say out loud, so I’m always kind of ugh.
Style advice: “Style is so personal. There are people that say, “Less is more,” but I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. I think whatever is true for you and makes you feel best.
Her friendship with Natasha Lyonne: “We carve out the time to see one another. She came away with me for my 49th birthday recently. We have a similar attitude toward certain things about life and the business. We met when we were both roommates with Mike Rapaport. She was his roommate in L.A. and I was his roommate in New York, where we were both living with him for free even more than being roommates. He introduced us and we were very like-minded.
Whether she was boxed into doing indie work or whether she made that choice: “I think it’s a little bit of both. Early on, it was by choice. And later, I’d kind of dug my own niche that I was then boxed into. I do like to think that I’ve maintained that across TV as well. I like working with, dare I say, auteurs — Ryan Murphy, Portlandia, Louis C.K., Russian Doll, and even Big Love, to an extent. Doing these TV projects with strong showrunners and writer-directors. But as far as studio pictures, I don’t know where those are. Most of my work has been incoming calls, and a lot of that has to do with living in New York and not L.A. My father died when I was 20 and I never wanted to be far from my mother.
The change in street style: “Now, everything is intermeshed. When I was younger, you could tell who was a punker, who was a hardcore kid, who was into hip hop. And now, everybody looks like they’re just into fashion. It’s hard to dress in a way that identifies you in a certain rebellious milieu. I imagine it’s harder for kids to feel like more of an individual, I would assume? I don’t know.”
Whether New York has become a city for the rich. “Yeah. The athleisure and the dogs are taking over, and that’s really unfortunate. Everybody’s in Lululemon and has a f–king dog and it’s driving me crazy. I’m sorry, dog lovers. There are too many of you. I’m not going out to clubs in Ridgewood so I’m sure it’s there somewhere, but I’m not experiencing it. I hope there are places for people to go when they want to. I miss the megaclubs and the accessibility. I would like to know that they were there [in Manhattan] and not in Ridgewood, which seems very far. At the same time, the city seems closer as far as going out to other boroughs with Uber. We would do car services and it was harder to access areas because of subways and buses not going to certain areas.
It’s kind of crazy to think that “New York is a city for the rich” complaint has been happening basically since Rudy Giuliani was mayor, so for 25 years, there’s been this constant argument of “everything is so expensive/unliveable/not cool/not artsy.” But yeah, I believe that “everybody’s in Lululemon and has a f–king dog” is the current thing. Her story about Michael Rapaport is completely wild too – Rapaport has a place in New York and a place in LA and he let two young actresses crash with him in each place? Then he introduced them, knowing that they would get along? As for her indie work… I think she probably was boxed in, but it’s weird that no big-name director was ever like “hey, I bet Chloe would be great in this big-budget movie.” I wonder if she was really never offered anything like that.
