Jason Roeder

I’ve been reading atrocious celebrity profiles at work. They provoked the following: 

Interview with an Actress

I’m sitting in Bistro Max eyeing the basketed focaccia covetously. It’s official: Chloe Pomeroy is late for our lunch date. I’m wondering how much time we’ll have to chat because she’s got a plane to catch. I’m wondering if, in the presence of such beauty, I’ll reach my first question mark before melting into a puddle of adoration. I’m wo—two of the most luminous green eyes I have ever seen are fixed upon me from across the table. Who needs daydreaming when there’s an actual dream suddenly right in front of you?

“My cab driver was a little slow,” Chloe tells me, with smooth blonde hair that could have been poured from a bottle of chardonnay, “and by slow I mean retarded.” She pokes her tongue through her lips and crosses her eyes. “Of course, it’s hard to tell with foreigners,” she concedes.

You know Chloe best as—well, maybe she’s not someone you can know, a sensual shape-shifter. After all, the 23-year-old bombshell has taken on roles as diverse as an agoraphobic lifeguard, a lovelorn dog walker (in the Luke Perry vehicle Heart on a Leash), and a spitfire saloon dancer who battles the walking dead in How the West Ate Brains. Action suits her, it seems: When our bill is settled this afternoon, Chloe is off to Canada, where she’ll be co-starring with Dolph Lundgren in the environmental shoot-em-up Leave No Trace.

“I always need a challenge,” she says to me, with perhaps a mote of flirtation in the upturned corner of her mouth. “If I’m not pushing myself, I’m bored, and if I’m bored—well, that’s when the really deep hate comes out.”

Chloe admonishes our waiter to avoid eye contact with her at all costs and orders the arugula salad with orange-rosemary vinaigrette. She vouchsafes me a few words concerning the tabloids (”the next hack who trashes me gets his pets stomped”), her recent charity efforts (”none”), and her week in New York (”just read over my lines, wrote the word Satan over every appearance of God in the Bible”), but I sense that she’s heard these questions before—yet another script to contend with. Something tells me that this stunner wants to go off the page.

“Who are you?” I ask her. “Or, if you’d rather: What does Chloe Pomeroy want—and you can’t say ‘to direct,’ dear.”

“Well, if that’s off the table, then I guess I’d go with oblivion,” she informs me. “Like, to be quadriplegic, but from the neck up, if that makes any sense. I suppose actual connection with life would be nice, too. But odds are, I won’t be leaving a pretty corpse, and you’d better believe I won’t be leaving just one.”

A sphinx without a riddle? Hardly. Miss Pomeroy is an enigma wrapped in sphinx’s clothing. I wait for her to vacuum up some cocaine residue she discovers on the side of her thumb, and I try a different tack.

“Soon you’ll be on a plane headed north of the border,” I say, “but if you could take the controls and go wherever you liked…”

“Go? Who wants to go anywhere?” she says to me. “But I do have kind of a silly recurring dream about flying. I’m circling the whole world in a crop duster, except it’s not insects I’m poisoning, it’s people. The insects are spared. For everything else, it’s death from above.”

The clock strikes one-thirty, and this Cinderella has a 767 to catch. She walks—no, she positively flows-through the dining room, pausing just long enough to demand that the manager fire our waiter for no particular reason. Then she is gone, and it occurs to me, anguishingly, that when I next see her, she will be caged in a DVD case.

Death from above? Perhaps. Oh, but truly an angel of death.

Posted June 28th, 2008 | Comments are open