Any girl who’s been through an angsty phase has likely found herself watching Girl, Interrupted, the 1999 movie based on a memoir of the same name, about life in a psychiatric hospital in the ’60s, particularly the wing that treats young women with severe mental and emotional disorders. The cast is stacked with a roster of A-listers: Whoopi Goldberg, Winona Ryder, Clea Duvall, the late Brittany Murphy, and Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar for her role. Also in the cast was a young Elisabeth Moss as Polly “Torch” Clark, recognizable from her feathery voice, as her character’s face was disfigured in a fire. Now, she’s spilling a little tea on the behind-the-scenes tensions, and, yeah, there were cliques.
“There were two kinds of camps. There was the Winona Ryder camp and the Angelina Jolie camp,” she told Kelly Ripa on a recent episode of the host’s Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, per NBC News. She explained that the “camps” were “Off camera, but based on what was on camera, based on the script,” and that, “I was in the Winona Ryder camp. The Angelina Jolie camp was really cool. I was intimidated by the Angelina Jolie camp. I had no thoughts of ever being able to be in that camp.”
“I’ve spoken to Angelina since then and she’s lovely, but at the time it was just incredibly intimidating,” Moss added. “I never brought it up. I’m sure she would have no idea what I was talking about anyway. I was just definitely not cool enough to be in her camp.”
Though we can’t imagine anyone cooler than Winona Ryder, Jolie did have a “bad girl” image at the time and came from a Hollywood family, while Ryder was a little more quirky, having starred in fun projects like Little Women and Beetlejuice, so maybe she was just easier to approach? Jolie was also keeping herself separated from Ryder to better play her character, the volatile, self-destructive Lisa. As Ryder recalled to the Sydney Morning Herald, “I remember thinking, ‘Oh we’re going to turn out to be great friends…But I think she needed to be able to look at me just as the character Susanna, not as Winona, so in a very respectful way she just kind of kept her distance.”
Wonder what it’s like to watch the movie now knowing this info from Elisabeth Moss. Hmm, should we put Girl, Interrupted on real quick and find out? Yes?
