THE MAKING OF ALICIA SILVERSTONE

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Alicia Silverstone

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Dressed in a banana-colored blouse, Silverstone gazes across the table at you, slowly turning her torso from side to side to loosen a kink in her back. She wraps the black wrist strap of your tape recorder around her finger. She insists that she is not beautiful. "This is very weird for me, that people would even think of me as being pretty," she says. "When I look in the mirror, sometimes it's very sad because I feel like this ugly, fat blimp, you know? And then I have to go be this beautiful girl." Talking to Silverstone's colleagues can be a maddening experience, as they will go to great lengths to stress that Alicia's rise has nothing to do with her body and everything to do with her body of work. Listen to Jeff Goldblum, who plays her back-from-the-dead father in Hideaway: "I was impressed with her authenticity and purity and sweetness. I focused on her spirit and soul. She's so rich inside." Or Shapiro: "She's not like the sex machine. That's what they're trying to tap into in the videos, but she's a very smart young woman. It would be really foolish to dismiss her as just limited to that thing." But talk to her armies of young male fans and you'll get no disquisitions on the contours of her spirit. They like her for one reason and one reason only: She's such a hot babe! In cyberspace, you can fairly hear the heavy breathing through your monitor as these real-life Beavises and Butt-heads share their collective fantasies: "I will die the day she and Drew Barrymore make a movie together. Awwwwwww yeahhhhhhh!" "She's the only reason I tune in to MTV." "You know where I can get naked pictures of Alicia Silverstone?" With that in mind, Silverstone's spin doctors have their work cut out for them. In a letter to Entertainment Weekly, her publicist, Elizabeth Much, wrote: "Though Alicia is thrilled that her Aerosmith videos were so popular, we hope that you can focus this interview on her upcoming films." Clearly, though, Silverstone plays much more than a cameo role in decision making. By all accounts, her parents act as cheering bystanders, while Kessler and Silverstone cut the deals. "She knows what she wants to do and she knows what she won't do," Liroff says. "She's not one of these little bimbettes that gets pointed in a direction and told what to do." Indeed, Silverstone often breaks through the teen babble and reveals a blunt bottom-liner. "The insider people who actually make the films-the producers and directors-they obviously know I'm a very talented actress," she says. "They wouldn't give you a lead in a studio film if you can't carry it. They're not gonna put their money into that." Even at 18, Silverstone has been on her own longer than many college grads. When The Crush beckoned in 1993, she skipped out of high school, took an equivalency test for her diploma, stood before a judge to win status as an emancipated minor so that she could work longer hours, and immediately moved into an apartment near the set in Vancouver. These days Silverstone has her own place in Los Angeles, which she shares with a dog named Samson, and denies reports that she's romancing a 28-year-old French hairdresser named Moize Chabbouh. And Silverstone is dead serious about building a reputation for her work alone. "Like, the way Shannen Doherty got famous," she offers in contrast. "She's famous because of all the bad things people read about her, right? I would die if that was me." (Coincidentally, Silverstone turned down a spot on , Beverly Hills, 90210, on the grounds that "there's no reason to get locked into a television show when you might be able to do a movie with somebody like Al Pacino.") Silverstone doesn't even watch MTV-"I don't have time! I've been working so hard"-and admits that her burgeoning career has left her removed from pals from the Bay Area. "I still talk to those people, but when I talk to them I realize we have nothing in common," she confesses. "It's so frustrating to have a conversation with them, because they really don't understand what I'm going through. They don't start working 'til they're like 24." Still, while her friends back home head off to college, Silverstone wouldn't mind a highbrow challenge herself-perhaps a Freaky Friday-style switcheroo with the moonfaced mainstay of the Merchant-Ivory flicks. "I want to do more classic things," she announces. "I would love to do period pieces. I would love to do Helena Bonham Carter's roles. I've heard her say in articles-and I don't know if they're real, because I don't believe articles anymore-but I've heard her say that she would like to do contemporary things. "So, maybe we could swap." *