Have you forgotten about Alicia Silverstone? As if! Anyone who was alive in the 90s knows that
she was the It girl of the decade, breaking out in Clueless and gracing the cover of
seemingly every magazine. But what's she been up to since then? Keep watching to find out!
1995's iconic high school comedy Clueless wasn't Alicia Silverstone's on-screen debut,
but it did turn her into a bona fide star. Seemingly overnight,
she went from an up-and-comer to Hollywood's number one gal,
which was unsurprisingly super intense for her. As she revealed to Vogue in 2020,
"I didn't expect any of the reaction that we got. It was a lot, and I think if anything
it all pushed me away from doing this job for a while and got me so much more into my activism."
Because of the scrutiny Silverstone found herself under in the wake of Clueless' success,
she decided to take a moment for herself to pause and breathe. As she told Vogue,
"I eventually found my love of acting again,
but at the time I didn't know anything about what I was stepping into."
Decades later, Silverstone is incredibly proud of the film and appreciates it for
all of its genius. She's also pleased as punch that people still love and appreciate it now
just as much as they did when it was first released. In 2015, she told The Guardian,
"If you look at what makes that movie so good, it’s because of the complexity of the character,
Cher. If you were watching a girl just run around and bounce around,
you wouldn’t like the movie so much."
"You look confused."
"Well, uh, I thought they declared peace in the Middle East."
On the heels of breaking big in Clueless, Alicia Silverstone was on top of the world.
She could do pretty much whatever she wanted, so it's no surprise then that
she accepted the role of Batgirl in the 1997 superhero sequel Batman & Robin. But alas,
as Silverstone tells it, working on that film wasn't all it was cracked up to be. For one thing,
she was body-shamed by the paparazzi. As she revealed to CinemaBlend in 2020,
"It came at a time in my life when people were being very unkind.
So I think it was just not the best experience, but it wasn't terrible."
The experience of making Batman & Robin helped Silverstone figure
out what she really wanted to do in her career. It could've broken her spirit,
but instead she kept things in perspective. As she noted to CinemaBlend,
"Luckily, I was fine. But it's not up there with my David Mamet or Kenneth Branagh !"
After working on Batman & Robin and putting up with cruel nicknames like "Fatgirl," Silverstone
decided that she'd had enough and chose to go her own way. As she recalled to Vanity Fair,
"I had no interest in being famous or maintaining any kind of fame. If you told me that acting
meant I was going to be called fat and have to do things a certain way, then I was like, 'F off.'"
Silverstone did appear in a few films soon after her meteoric rise, but she also said "no"
to plenty of offers for the sake of her own sanity. So instead, she turned to theater
after all but abandoning Hollywood. As she explained to The Guardian in 2015,
"I've had such amazing opportunities to do stage work. I did a play with David Mamet
where he directed me, a really killer role. That's why I do so much theatre,
because I haven't had an opportunity to do film roles as interesting."
In 2011, Silverstone kicked a major item off of her bucket list. After eight years of planning,
scheming, and strategizing, she published a vegan cookbook entitled The Kind Diet.
She was very excited to see the project finally come to fruition. As she told PETA ,
"It was just a dream that I had, and I just never actually thought that I could get it
together to do it, and finally someone nudged me [...] it's time to really write your book."
"I wrote a book called The Kind Diet, um,
you know, and that's sort of the basis for everything for me. It's my foundation."
As Silverstone discovered, when there's a deadline involved,
there's no shirking your responsibilities, which is what helped her manifest her vision.
Over the years, she's continued to adhere to a vegan lifestyle,
and she believes that it can not only heal people, but also save the planet. As she noted to PETA,
"My inspiration for it is I really just know deep, deep in my heart, I have absolutely no
doubt that when you eat this way, you will feel better than you've ever felt in your life."
In 2012, Silverstone was presented with an especially fun opportunity. Amy Heckerling,
who'd previously worked with her as the writer and director of Clueless, had written a new screenplay
called Vamps, and she wanted Silverstone to act in it alongside Krysten Ritter. As you could probably
guess by the title, she wouldn't be playing a shopaholic with a propensity for matchmaking
this time around. Instead, she would be playing a vampire. In an interview with Out, she confessed,
"I didn't long to be a vampire,
but I really should have. I guess I didn't have enough of an imagination."
As soon as Silverstone was asked to be a part of the film, she was stoked at the prospect of
sinking her teeth into such a fun and interesting role. She had faith in Heckerling's writing,
so she knew that she wouldn't be playing a fluffy character with no depth. As she noted to Out,
"My character is up against so much. It was just a very rich role for me to play. I’m a theater
actress in my heart, that’s what I love to do. And I felt like this was a great transition.
Because sometimes you go from theater to film, and you don’t get to do as much—it’s so frustrating.
It’s not as interesting, but this was so interesting and so complicated and layered.'
Silverstone hasn't done a ton of comedy work since Clueless, but that's not due to any lack of love
for yukking it up. So when she was offered a part in the 2017 family comedy Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
The Long Haul, she couldn't resist. As she noted to The Movie Times,
"I do a lot of theater, and so there's a part of me that just really enjoys
the sort of silly Lucille Ball kind of acting of it all, and I can do that here.
There's a lot of moments to really be ridiculous, and it's so fun!"
It sounds like the movie wasn't the only funny part of this experience, as the set was also
apparently a riot, with some of Silverstone's co-stars frequently leaving her in stitches.
"It's really funny. I mean, I laugh out loud at Charlie, who plays Roderick, a lot.
And I have a hard time not laughing."
Perhaps the most unexpected role of Alicia Silverstone's career thus far was a small part in
the hard-to-describe 2017 psychological thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The offbeat flick
stars Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman as a married couple, with Silverstone showing up for two brief
scenes. So just how did she end up on the set of this very unique film? As she revealed to Vulture,
"My agent called and said, 'You need to go on this
thing. It's worth it. You should start preparing immediately.'"
The film was directed by Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos , who
was very impressed with Silverstone's audition. As Silverstone tells it,
working with Lanthimos was a pretty magical experience. As she told Vulture,
"He's such an inspired artist. I was delighting in every word he said on set [...] Everyone that
was there was so happy to be there. You could feel that. I remember stepping off that set and going
to do another film and the hair and makeup people were so jealous that I was working with Yorgos."
One year after the wild one-two punch of Wimpy Kid and Sacred Deer,
Silverstone showed up in a period TV drama, proving just how flexible her acting muscles
are. The show in question was the 70s-set American Woman, and it gave the actress the
opportunity to draw on her own childhood for inspiration. As she revealed to Vanity Fair,
"My mom was a flight attendant for Pan Am and so beautiful — very feminine,
girly, glamorous type of woman. So it was fun to feel like her."
But unlike Silverstone's mother, her character of Bonnie does something truly wild by dumping
her husband and setting her house on fire. As Silverstone noted to Vanity Fair,
"She's reckless. She's not thinking, like,
'I don't have any skills. I don't know how to survive. I have no money. This
is 1975. I can't even get a loan.' She's just like, 'Rah!' But it's such a risk."
Silverstone also noted that she related to her character,
as can all women who need to liberate themselves and pave their own way.
"Am I the goddamn mother of the year? Is that what we're celebrating?"
Silverstone found herself returning to some spooky territory in 2019 when she
played a disturbed mother in The Lodge, which was set in a snowy, remote village.
And while this was the umpteenth time that she was cast as a mother,
she wasn't salty about it at all. As she explained to Entertainment Weekly,
"I don't think of them as mother roles, I think of them as women who
happen to be mothers who are dealing with whatever struggles they're dealing with."
Part of the reason it's possible for Silverstone to have that approach is that the archetypal
Hollywood mother role has changed drastically over the years. As she described it to EW,
"Long ago we used to think of the mom roles where she just comes in and she's
in the background [...] and that's all she's doing, just making food or doing laundry.
Not that that’s not hard, believe me. But it was nice playing the mom in this,
knowing I was going to have all these great, complicated, dramatic scenes."
Silverstone's next big role after The Lodge was, you guessed it,
another mother. This time around it was the 2020 rom-com Bad Therapy, in which a fairly
normal family goes in for therapy and ends up bursting apart at the seams. Silverstone was
stoked for the movie and really sank her teeth into the performance. As she told ComingSoon.net,
"I just love that my character is a really normal person and she just loses her mind,
she ends up pulling a knife on her husband. I think that it's
really funny, and really exciting and interesting to see a woman losing it."
Silverstone also noted,
"She just completely unravels because she starts to believe that her husband
is potentially cheating on her, and also looking at her daughter wrong."
What a wild ride that must've been!
In 2020, the Alicia Silverstone Renaissance really kicked into high gear. In addition
to Bad Therapy and a musical remake of the 80s teen flick Valley Girl,
as well as the indie comedy Sister of the Groom, the actress also showed up in a big way in the
Netflix adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club. Based on the beloved series of young adult books by Ann
L. Martin, the show made Silverstone feel warm and fuzzy inside. As she told Good Housekeeping,
"I think what I love about the show is that these kids are all growing
and learning. And so are the parents and everybody. We all are, right?"
Silverstone was struck by just how modern it turned out,
which was a far cry from her own junior high experience. As she noted to Good Housekeeping,
"It's okay for these girls to be feisty,
strong beings, to have purpose and ideas. I mean, sometimes they have a crush on a boy,
I'm sure, but that's not the focus at all.They are dreaming up big ideas, and they're working things
out inside of themselves. I think this is content that a parent could feel really good about."
"Oh, your social studies teacher called me, and you owe him some paper about decorum?"
"They would never make a boy write that essay."
"No, they wouldn't."
And as for Silverstone herself, it sounds like she's gotten to
a point in her career that she can also feel really good about.
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