Posted on 02/17/2007 6:32:13 PM PST by 1066AD
The human computer Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 18/02/2007
She's strange on screen; almost as strange off it. Mary Lynn Rajskub - Chloe in '24' - talks to William Leith about her dark line in stand-up comedy portrait
You might know Chloe. She's the character played by Mary Lynn Rajskub in the drama series 24, and she's very strange.
'I used to practice having no expression so people didn't know what I was feeling'
Like every character on 24, she might be about to save the world, but she might equally well be a dangerous lunatic. Chloe is the one who sits in the office, telling Jack Bauer, the secret agent played by Kiefer Sutherland, what to do.
Chloe knows everything. She is a strong, powerful woman. She is super-bright. She is a computer expert. But sometimes you think she might actually be a computer.
'I think she's caught up in her own head,' says Rajskub. 'She's very smart, but very smart in a particular way, so that she tends to miss a lot of things that come easy to other people. Like social skills.'
Mary Lynn Rajskub (pronounced rice-cub) is also pretty unusual. She's not what you'd expect from an actress in a slick, big-budget series.
advertisementThat's because she's not exactly a slick television actress, but a comedian who did acting on the side until the acting took off. Before that, she was a performance artist who did comedy on the side, until the comedy took off.
And before that, she was a cutting-edge painter. And then she started to do performance art on the side - which, by the way, was strange stuff. Brilliant, but strange. And then the performance art took off.
Rajskub still thinks of herself as a comedian, and loves being on stage, even though it terrifies her. 'When you have a terrible time on stage, it's the worst feeling ever,' she says. 'You want to kill yourself.'
She is slightly over average height, with the slender, perfect figure of an actress, and the comedian's air of intensity and edginess.
Her face has the quality of looking different from every angle. She seems knowing, possibly cynical, rather dark - you can imagine her being into the punk scene or the grunge scene.
She once acted in a video for the arty band Weezer. She is 35, but looks much younger. She is unmarried, but when I ask about her boyfriends, she says, 'There's been a lot' - notably Jon Brion, the composer who wrote the music for the film Magnolia, and the ventriloquist Duncan Trussell.
Recently, the talk-show host Rush Limbaugh appeared to kiss her on camera, sparking tabloid rumours of a relationship. The rumours have now fizzled out.
'My ex-fiancé's dad told him that he thought Rush Limbaugh and I made a better couple than he and I did,' says Rajskub.
What she loves about performing is the element of risk. 'I suppose it's a little bit addictive in a way - real highs and real lows,' she tells me.
'But there's something else. When I do comedy, I tend not to really know what I'm going to say, which is exciting. You're taking a chance. I tend to really enjoy the danger of being stuck out in front of a bunch of people, not knowing what's going to happen next.'
Her comedy is kooky and surreal; on stage, she plays at being dysfunctional. This, I'm sure, is Freudian. Sometimes, things go horribly wrong. Once, Rajskub thought it would be funny to pretend she didn't want to go on stage. When her name was announced, she yelled 'No! No!'
She had arranged for a friend to push her onto the stage as she squirmed and resisted. 'I thought it was funny,' she says, 'but people just felt bad because they thought I really didn't want to get on stage. I had a feeling that might happen. So my big rescue was to change the microphone cover, which was black, and replace it with a red one.' But the ploy didn't work. 'They were just like, oh, this is sad. Oh, poor girl.'
Rajskub grew up in Trenton, a suburb of Detroit, the third daughter of a pipe-fitter and a pharmacist. 'My dad was almost a cop, but then we moved to the suburbs instead,' she says. She is fond of non-sequiturs.
Her childhood, she explains, was: 'Pretty solid. Taken care of. Food, shelter, clothing.' She describes Trenton as 'very suburban - a lot of Kmarts, Dunkin' Donuts, White Castle hamburgers.'
She tells me about being an unusual child: 'I practised not having any expression. Because I didn't want people to know what I was thinking or feeling.
'It's pretty wise, because you can't trust people. Kindergarten is dangerous. All the people trying to get into your biz.Getting in your space, trying to poke things at you. You've got to keep a tight ship.' It's interesting that she did this, and equally interesting that she remembers it so clearly.
And school? 'Pretty OK, yeah, but not great.' Rajskub was clever, but her brand of cleverness was not quite the ticket. Frustrations developed, which she mostly suppressed.
'I kept to myself,' she says, 'and then I'd explode every once in a while. In a silly way, I guess. I just bottled up energy and then would let it out in a fit of, you know - dancing or talking.'
Rajskub speaks about herself with an ironic tone, and laughs a lot. When she moves her mouth, even a tiny bit, a dimple appears around her cheekbone.
This is the dimple you see during tense moments in 24; a great deal of her performance as Chloe is the act of thinking. When I ask her how she does it, she says: 'The challenge for me is to make sure there's always something internal going on.'
Sometimes, when she needs to act a highly charged scene, 'I really just think of my family members, like if they're being hurt.'
When she left school, she wanted to be a painter. 'The only reason is that I didn't want to get a job, and I didn't want to go to college.' So she went to art school at the Centre for Creative Studies in Detroit. 'It was incredibly eye-opening,' she says. 'I loved it. My favourite.'
Rajskub describes her life as 'a series of going along with things that seem interesting, following things that stimulate me, that I didn't plan for'.
At art school she loved the work of post-modernists such as Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She painted flags, a la Jasper Johns, and created a structure that looked like a carnival ride.
'There was also one of a lot of fish,' she says, and then shrugs. 'Don't ask me. I had big ideas about it at the time.' The art she likes, she says, is 'modernism, when any sort of formality fell apart. I like imperfections. I like that in performers as well'.
The turning point, one of several over the next few years, came when she found herself explaining her work. 'It pissed me off because people were critiquing my painting,' she says.
'I didn't think they knew what they were talking about so I started getting up and explaining the paintings to them.' The seed had been sown. 'And then I started taking performance art classes. But I thought it was dumb just to sit in the classroom.'
And so began the years of performance. 'I didn't set out to be funny,' she says. 'And then somebody reviewed my show in the paper, and she said 'this is one of the strangest, funniest performances I've ever seen.' And then I went: 'Aha! Funny! So I started pointing in that direction a little bit more.'
She would rush on stage 'as if I had just got out of the shower'.There was a routine about a banana, and ditzy, brilliant monologues.
Superbly, she somehow explained the history of the world using a set of combs. Her stage persona was dumb-smart. Then she started attracting the attention of casting agents and got a part as the talent booker in The Larry Sanders Show.
Throughout this time, Rajskub wore her hair in a fringe - this was before she discovered the much more fetching look, with a parting, that she wears now.
In Dude, Where's My Car? she played 'an alien from outer space who wears a bubble suit'. Later, in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, she played the part of Adam Sandler's sister.
She was brilliant as a hassled, fretful, snippy woman. Joel Surnow, the producer of 24, liked something in this character, and asked Rajskub to audition.
'I hadn't watched 24, and I didn't really audition for dramas,' she says. In the end, there was no audition: Surnow simply offered her the part.
Now, 24 is a big part of her life, just as she is a big part of 24; she gives it texture. The show has also made her real life slightly more surreal, such as the day she spent sitting on a counter-terrorism panel in Washington called '24 and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction or Does it Matter?'
Of Kiefer Sutherland, she says: 'I get nervous to do scenes with him, because he's very intense. I don't know how he does all the stuff he does. I don't actually see him that much; a lot of our scenes are on the phone. So far, we've done 15 or 16 episodes, and I've only done one-and-a-half scenes with him.'
Of Chloe, Rajskub says: 'She's very impatient, because her mind is doing other things. She is quicker than other people in lots of ways, and slower in others.'
Does she identify with Chloe? Rajskub ponders. Then she partly agrees. 'I can relate to sort of having tunnel vision. Being in my own world, feeling awkward.'
The thing is, Rajskub thrives on awkwardness. Recently, she tells me, she watched herself being interviewed by David Letterman. 'That was the smoothest I've ever been,' she says. 'That was the most comfortable I've ever felt on a talk show. And do you know how that felt? Really odd.'
'24', Sky One, 9pm, Sundays
Missing this season as well, oh well, will have to buy box set I guess.
Plus he has time to chase one arms dealer (and flooozie), dozens of terrorists from two different organizations AND torture his own brother along the way.
Great article. Mary Lynn may be "weird" in the sense that she's goofy and unique, but she is actually one of the most normal, down-to-Earth, unaffected people in Hollyweird.
I've seen some of her stand up. She's hilarious.
reminder to read when I get back
All this time I've been pronouncing it "rajjj-scub".
She's cute. I have always liked both the character and the actress.
Well, I guess that's not true. In season 3 I really hated Chloe because it seemed as if she got in the way a lot and disrupted things. But she has since become the most useful and important member of CTU (not counting Jack).
There's a young woman at the bagel shop nearby that is a dead ringer for Chole's sourpuss face and has a similar attitude also.
....I still miss Edgar.....
She is a strong, powerful woman. She is super-bright. She is a computer expert.
----
She also is a pretty good shot.
The smile behind the scowl
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