But she did the rounds of publicity interviews, even if, she says, it felt contradictory “to be all made-up and beautiful on camera. I felt like that was what I was trying to have conversations about.” For much of her life, Suvari, who is now 43, believed her worth was not just how she looked, but how sexy she was. The film roles that made her a star – as virginal Heather in American Pie and Angela, the focus of middle-aged lust in American Beauty – firmly positioned her as a teenage sex object, although her brutal sexualization had begun much earlier. When we speak on Zoom – Suvari in her home office in Los Angeles – her hair is pulled back from her makeup-free face, looking defiantly anti-Hollywood. Suvari had been worried about how her book would be received, but the response was positive. People messaged her on Instagram, reporting their own experiences of sexual abuse and thanking her for writing it. “It was bittersweet because it felt beautiful to see and hear, but it was heartbreaking to hear that others had identified in similar ways. I didn’t want this for them, but overall I feel very proud. We live in the craziest time, the world is on fire, but at the same time things are much more open. That’s what I always hoped for [the book] it could help create some kind of change and start further discussion.” Me Suvari in the American Pie. Photo: Landmark Media/Alamy The youngest of four children and the only girl, Suvari grew up in Rhode Island in a large house with a ballroom where her psychiatrist father (already in his 60s when she was born) saw patients. Her early childhood was happy, but it became unstable – first she moved with her mother and one of her brothers to the Virgin Islands, and then the whole family moved to South Carolina. Her parents were distant. “I fought to be seen and heard, to be engaged,” he says. “But I didn’t feel such a loss of my sense of self until I was 12. When they raped me.” A friend of one of her older brothers showered her with a lot of attention, wrote her love letters, encouraged her to engage in sexual activity, and then raped her several times in his home. She then told other people at school that she was a “whore”. He was so ashamed that he denied it had happened. “That took my life. I think it was just too much confirmation that no one was going to save me, no one was going to do anything for me.” When she was treated for a bladder infection as a result of the rape, the doctor put her on birth control instead of asking her about what was happening to her. What were the adults around her – her parents, the doctor – thinking? “I feel like we should be talking about this forever.” She smiles sadly. Times were different, he says. She was only 13 years old, but she acted like an adult. I didn’t have anyone tell me, “It’s not right, this person shouldn’t be doing this to you.” Around the time of the rape, she was signed by a major modeling agency in their children’s division. The following summer, she went to castings in New York, and the following year, she spent her summer vacation in Los Angeles. When she was cast in a commercial, the agency suggested Suvari move to the city permanently to pursue her career, so her parents moved in with her in a small apartment. She found that modeling and acting gave her a way to express her feelings, but it also taught her that all that mattered was how she looked, and that if she looked “sexy,” that was even better. At her first modeling shoot, she says, “everyone was raving about how 18-year-old I looked. But I was 12.” Her voice rises in anger. “What was communicated to me was that I was an adult, so I can act like an adult.” There was a pattern of attracting older men who, from her perspective today, feel used: the 20-year-old photographer who photographed Suvari naked, alone in his house, when he was 15; One of her business advisors, in his 30s, who started had sex with her when she was 16. “I didn’t have anyone tell me, ‘It’s not right, this person shouldn’t be doing this to you.’ Suvari was smart and her grades were good. she would go to auditions and do well, and there was no outward sign that anything was wrong. “So to my detriment, no one noticed.” By this time, her mother was gone, tensions with Suvari’s father were too much, and Suvari was left to care for her elderly father. Money was tight and he took a lot of drugs, sometimes at school, including meth (crystal meth). “And that doesn’t make you look good. I think I was desperate. I felt completely helpless and hopeless.” Kevin Spacey and Mena Suvari in American Beauty. Photo: Dreamworks Skg/Allstar Life would get worse. Soon after, Suvari met a lighting engineer. Their relationship was miserable and abusive, she claims. He was telling her how stupid she was, calling her name. She felt trapped – she was desperate for his affection and felt like she had nowhere else to go. He took more medication to deal with it. Then there was the sexual abuse. In her book, her account is horrific and harrowing, including being forced to use uncomfortable sex toys and needing medical treatment after repeated, rough anal sex. “They didn’t love me. I was just a body, a vessel for his desires,” she writes. He says he would ask her to pick up other women for threesomes, including those he met on set. She ran into one much later at a Whole Foods store, after she had become famous, and felt let down. Another time, he ran into one of the women and went to her. “I said, ‘I want you to know that I never wanted to do any of these things.’ She was surprised. He said, “Oh, he told me you wanted to do that.” It was a huge eye opener for me, how I was being manipulated and I had no idea. Circumstances were created for me and it swallowed me up.” I identified with Angela (in American Beauty). I knew how to play that role because I was so trained in it Suvari is sensitive to criticism of her for threesomes or sex toys, which she has faced over the past year: “I never wanted to talk negatively about things that might be very healthy for other people. I wasn’t given the choice or permission to do that, and that’s what was so devastating to me. It’s very confusing when you experience sexual abuse, because part of it is…” She pauses to think of the right word. “Like, satisfying. But then the other part is an absolute nightmare, so you’re confused, you don’t know what’s right. All of this still weighs on me because I never had the opportunity to discover myself in this way.” She can’t imagine, she says, what it would be like to “date all through high school and then decide to consensually lose your virginity to each other. It sounds so beautiful to me. All that was lost to me.” Her work became a refuge. She had appeared in several TV shows, then in Gregg Araki’s 1998 cult indie film Nowhere, before landing roles in American Pie and American Beauty. Both were huge hits, the latter winning critical acclaim, including several Academy Awards, for its depiction of the miseries of middle-class suburban life. But American Beauty has not aged particularly well. Kevin Spacey’s character develops an obsession with Suvari’s Angela, his daughter’s friend, an insecure but sexually precocious young woman. His fictional image of Suvari naked and covered in rose petals, which was also used in the film’s posters, became ubiquitous. “I identified with Angela,” Suvari says. “I knew how to play that role because I was so trained in it. “Oh, you want me to be sexually attractive?” Done. I felt unavailable in a million other ways, but I knew how to play that card.” She was coming home from the set, where she felt adored, to “the worst relationship of my life, where I was being extremely abused. It was very dark for me at that time, [and the film] it felt like a break, because I could go to work and be important there. I wasn’t called “retarded” and “stupid”. Michael C Hall, Lauren Ambrose and Mena Suvari in Six Feet Under. Photo: Channel 4 It’s hard to remember now what life was like in the early 2000s for young, famous women – the intense scrutiny and pressure on women like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Suvari’s one-time co-stars Tara Reid and Brittany Murphy. After American Beauty, despite widespread acclaim and a Bafta nomination, Suvari still didn’t have much power. In a magazine shoot, she claims she was encouraged to take off her clothes, a giant medal covering her pubic area. The photographer – who was a woman, she points out – asked her to move her hair to show a nipple. “I just don’t know what the goal is. Just sell as much of yourself, while you’re young, for as long as you can?’ He laughs, a bitterness about it. “I don’t know what this message is. But, yeah, I was very much like: how sexy can you be?’ After American Beauty, he did Sugar & Spice, a teen comedy. Shooting in a different situation, she finally managed to escape her abusive relationship, except…
