I am always suspicious of people who can clearly and succinctly define their personal style,” says Christina Ricci, before offering up just such a description. “I like things that are fairly simple,” she says. “Even if it’s silly or girly, it still has to be streamlined in a way.” Ricci has a few designers she’ll swear by (Azzedine Alaïa is one favorite). But the 24-year-old veteran of Monster, Casper, Prozac Nation, and her newest, Wes Craven’s werewolf thriller Cursed (not to mention lots of seminal indies in between), makes two things clear. First, she almost always buys her clothes, rather than requisitioning the freebies that could easily come her way. And second, “I have a very different way of being when I’m waiting to be photographed. For an actress, there’s an imaginary life and there’s a real life.” Actress Ricci has been embracing an ever-expanding variety of roles—a comic shrew in Woody Allen’s Anything Else, a troubled lesbian in Monster, and now, a woman beset by werewolves in Cursed—most of them channeling a solid core of hysteria. “Any of the scenes where I had to run around and scream, I had a great time,” says Ricci of Craven’s campy scarefest. “I’m sort of not a very serious actor sometimes. That’s why I like the horror films.” (The role has Ricci sinking her enormous fangs into Joshua Jackson’s neck.)
And yet time seems to have mellowed the off-duty Ricci, and made her a little less impetuous. She’s eased up her schedule, given up dreams of directing after realizing she wanted it “for the wrong reasons,” and settled into a Chelsea apartment with her boyfriend, alpha-Jew Adam Goldberg. The couple plans to spend lots of time here when they aren’t filming I Love Your Work—directed by Goldberg, co-starring Ricci, and featuring Giovanni Ribisi as a dissolute movie star succumbing to the pressures of fame. Bicoastal from birth—she was born in Santa Monica but educated at New York’s Professional Children’s School—Ricci exhibits a local’s proprietary tendencies. “It is very different here now. You meet a lot of people pretending to be New Yorkers,” she says. “Then you find out they’re from Vermont.” Ricci maintains that she and Goldberg are homebodies, watching old episodes of The X-Files before bed. So she’s moved to Chelsea for some peace and quiet? It’s possible that the seasoned, press-savvy pro is being a bit coy. “I’m not into the whole nightlife thing,” she says. “But then every once in a while, we wind up in some trendy club and we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, how did we get here?!’ ”