GHOST OF A CHANCE Addams Family Irregular Christina Ricci Makes the Jump to Leading Lady with "Casper"

by Christine James

Typecast at 15? It happens all the time on the small screen when you watch a child grow up in a role and then can't separate the person from the persona. In film, however, the audience usually gets to see different facets of an actor with every part. But with Christina Ricci's dark hair, pale skin, that unsettling wisdom-beyond-her-years aura and an affinity for projects with connections to the macabre, it does seem as though a pattern is emerging.

Ricci's credits include The Addams Family, Addams Family Values and The Cemetery Club. She laments that she missed out on the Kirsten Dunst role in Interview With the Vampire because she was too old for the part, and she's currently starring in the upcoming Amblin Entertainment film adaptation of Casper, the friendly ghost of Harvey Comics fame.

The whole macabre thing is, I like to do stuff that's interesting, explains Ricci. Now, if that's going to make it interesting, I'd rather take that than something really happy-nicey-nice. I just want to do stuff that I feel something for. I have faith that people aren't going to typecast me, and if they do, I can break out of it. Though Casper continues the death/paranormal motif so curiously recurring in her films, Ricci says that her character is not at all morbid. I'm just like the average angst-ridden pre-teen in a very unaverage situation. Ricci plays Kat, the daughter of a ghost psychiatrist (Bill Pullman), hired to investigate a house haunted by Casper and his three evil uncles, the Ghostly Trio. Kat is kind of ... angst-ish. She's never stayed in one place long enough to make friends, and everyone thinks she's weird because her father is a ghost psychiatrist. I become friends with Casper, because he's so lonely, and I'm lonely.

Ricci never read the Harvey Comics as a child, though she confirms Casper's physical appearance has not changed, describing him as bulbous. In the movie, they use that a lot. They call him, like, bulb-head and stuff.

Casper is the second Harvey Comic to be made into a movie within the last year. The Macaulay Culkin-starrer, Richie Rich, was released in the fall (and met with lukewarm boxoffice success). Casper and Richie Rich share another connection that long pre-dates both films: For years, Harvey fans have speculated that Casper was actually the ghost of Richie Rich after an untimely demise. Due to her unfamiliarity with either comic, Ricci was not able to comment on this theory. She did, however, take it under advisement that if you put the two side by side, the resemblance is quite uncanny.

Since Casper and the Ghostly Trio had to be animated (compliments of Industrial Light and Magic), for much of the movie, Ricci had to react to something that wasn't there. I actually like it a lot better, she says, because it's better than having a really bad actor saying lines, you know? I can pretend they're giving a line reading that I'll respond really well to. Or they're giving me the right kind of look. I'm a big control freak, and pretending that they're somewhere, I can kind of control where I have to look.

Ricci had heard about Casper when she was shooting Addams Family Values. [`Addams Family' director] Barry Sonnenfeld got the script and was thinking about directing it. And I was like, `Wow, they're making `Casper,' you know? And then I heard about it again a long time later, and I went to meet the director and the casting director, and then I just kind of got it.


Despite her resume, Ricci still sometimes has to read for roles. I don't have to audition as much as I used to, but I still audition.

Ricci had the word `precocious' attached to her immediately after her debut in the film Mermaids, in which she co-starred with Cher and Winona Ryder (in, admittedly, a perfectly unsupernatural film). But she has never felt any more mature or insightful than her peers. If you really sit down and talk to a kid, you realize that they're a lot smarter than adults give them credit for. It's just I have more of a voice.

Ricci did, however, find out very early on that letting celebrity go to her head tended to alienate her from others her age. Basically, when you're a kid on a movie, and you're the only kid, everybody's going, `Oh, you're so cute, oh, you're so good, oh that was wonderful!!' like, every second. And if you believe it, and if you really allow yourself to just revel in it, and you try to go back to school, all of a sudden, people aren't telling you you're wonderful anymore. And you've still got this air like, `Wait! Aren't I wonderful?!' Then there's a problem. And I kind of went back to school after my first movie and did that for about a month, and realized, `Hey! Everyone hates me! What's up?' So I had to fix that.

Now, Ricci says she feels pretty much like every other kid, except that she's really bored. I just finished working on a film [`Gaslight Addition'] and I'm at a regular high school. I've been here like a week, and I'm going out of my mind. I mean, I love working so much more.

Ricci says her classmates don't make much of a fuss over her. It's not like Michael Jackson walks in every day or anything, she says modestly.

In interviews years ago, Ricci said that when she was six, she wanted to be a football player, and when she was 11, she was quoted as saying that she wanted to go to Harvard and get a degree in business. God, how cheesy, she says, almost audibly cringing in reaction to hearing her previous sentiments. I want to go to college, but I don't want to go and say, `Okay, I'm going to get this degree and be this person.' I just want to go and hang out and have fun, and take all the benefits I can from it. But I think I want to be in showbusiness, maybe like a producer or something.

Working with a crew, working in another aspect of filmmaking and looking and judging someone's abilities as a producer, you really see where a crew needs a producer and what makes a good producer. As I said, I'm a control freak. I would love to come in and run a set, and deal with people and fix problems, because I think I'm pretty good at that, fixing things.

Being a self-professed control freak has not resulted in any sort of conflict on the set, according to Ricci. I just sort of accept it, that the director is going to tell me to do things, and no matter if I like it or not, I have to do it. I might want to do something differently, but that's their job. So that doesn't cause a problem for me. I mean, sometimes it's hard to accept someone else's point of view, but, you know, that's what I'm paid to do.

Ricci is disgusted by tales of young upstart actors who act obnoxiously. That's the stupidest thing, she says. I mean, I've seen people who I can predict will turn out like that. And I can't believe how someone could act that way and not see other people's reactions to it. I mean, I just think that is the dumbest thing in the world to do to yourself and other people.

Ricci is quite the opposite, her amiable and professional air particularly refreshing considering that rebelliousness is typical even in girls her age who aren't movie stars. She has repented from being fresh, as she put it, recanting with embarrassment an innocent if somewhat presumptuous statement she made years ago that `adults are just big kids.' I can't believe I ever said that! It's the most obnoxious thing I've ever heard, she admits. It's crazy, you say things, and then you grow up a few years and your opinions totally change, and yet it's still written somewhere! I don't know if I think that anymore. Your problems are pretty similar when you get older, but they get bigger and more complex. But I don't think grown ups are just big kids. "Some are, she allows.

For the next couple of months, Ricci will be kept busy doing publicity for Casper, Gaslight Addition, and a film she completed over the summer, Gold Diggers. She doesn't know what her next project will be, but says there are numerous people she'd love to work with "including one prominent filmmaker who isn't exactly associated with kids' stuff. Because `Pulp Fiction' has become one of my favorite movies, I'd love to work with Quentin Tarantino, Ricci says. But that probably won't happen for a very, very long time. But I just love him. But there are so many talented people. I don't know. Anyone. I just love working.