When last you saw Christina Ricci on the screen, she was either sporting a pig snout (Penelope) or chained to a radiator in her panties (Black Snake Moan). She’s made a career of playing “dark, damaged young women,” but as Robert Downey, Jr. might say, she’s about to have her first opportunity to appear on a Slurpee cup. “What's really funny is that people for years had been saying to me, ‘You know, they're going to make a Speed Racer movie and you should totally play Trixie’,” Ricci says in a revealing interview with The Telegraph. “And I do look a little bit anime when I have dark hair with my white skin.”
Like Downey, she has put some personal darkness behind her as well. “Today she looks fighting fit - her skin is clear, her huge hazel eyes are bright, and she is slender but not scarily so. It's a far cry from the well-publicised extremes of her troubled youth when she cut herself and battled with anorexia. At one point she shrank to six stone and so disliked her appearance that she covered all the mirrors in her house.”
Not that Ricci is entirely without worries. As the interview begins, she frets that the paparazzi may have caught her in a compromising position. “I stopped at the pharmacy on the way here and I wasn't very careful getting out of my car. I just didn't think. But this dress is so short… I'm pretty certain there's going to be some crotch shots. At least,” she sighs, “I was wearing underwear.”
At Least I Was Wearing Underwear – it sounds like the perfect name for Ricci’s autobiography. She wore underwear and not much else for her role in Black Snake Moan, which she considers to be her best work to date, even if she wasn’t crazy about the ad campaign. “I thought I was getting into a part where I could really show the gritty reality of someone who had post-traumatic stress syndrome - what we call rape trauma syndrome…then it's sold in this exploitative, objectifying manner, so that I look like I'm part of some 1970s porn, when I'm making a movie about what happens to a f-ing rape victim.”
Ricci can at least be thankful that the image never appeared on a Slurpee cup.