Jeffrey Deitch: I’ve noticed that many of your best roles involve characters in impossible situations. In Big Love, you play a woman who is a shopaholic but is the product of a frugal, conservative upbringing.

Chloe Sevigny: I think that’s part of what makes Big Love so appealing to people. The other wives and I have conservative values, and yet we are living alternative lifestyles.

JD: That sort of conflict is one of the fundamental structures involved in modern art. Now, when I’m reading stories about artists, one of the things I’m most fascinated with is their biographies. Your upbringing in Darien probably wasn’t conventional.

CS: My father was very unconventional. He was quite an intellectual and really into art and music. I remember listening to Parallel Lines by Blondie when I was four or five years old, and the Flying Lizards and Elvis Costello, too. He’s passed away now, but he was a painter. His parents really repressed that. That’s why I think he was very supportive of my brother and me. I was lucky to have an older brother who was into skateboarding and punk rock. He’s had a big influence on my life. There was this big hardcore scene in Connecticut. He was really into that. All his friends and girlfriends had blue hair. They were different than the field hockey girls.

JD: When was this?

CS: I was in junior high. My parents didn’t have a lot of friends in town. We never had as much money as everybody else, so we were never members of any of the clubs or anything like that. I didn’t have many girlfriends, either. In elementary school the girls were really nasty. They would say, “Your mom shops at Stop & Shop because you’re poor,” or “Your dad drives a Volkswagen, you’re poor.” I remember from day one not buying that and not being part of the clique.

JD: So the story of your hanging out in Washington Square and being discovered, that’s all true?

CS: That is true. That’s where I met Harmony [Korine] and Harold Hunter. Harold was the first person to ever come up to me. I was very thin, hadn’t really developed yet and wore these geeky outfits. Harold brought a lot of people together because he was the least pretentious person you’d ever meet in your life. Harmony really struck me. He was so driven and so confident. He would tell stories about how he was going to be a moviemaker. I remember him showing me Ken Park. He got this horrible grade in school. They basically failed him for writing that screenplay. But I knew that he was driven and I was very attracted to that.

JD: You also worked at X-Girl around then. What’s the chronology?

CS: I interned for Sassy in their fashion department. The woman I was working for was friends with this stylist named Daisy Von Furth, who went on to do X-Girl. She was also Sonic Youth’s stylist. They were trying to find a girl to be in one of their videos, so she suggested me, and I was in the video for “Sugar Kane.” Then, after I graduated from high school, I moved into an apartment in Brooklyn with five other kids who all worked for Peter Gatien, who ran nightclubs like Club USA, the Tunnel and Limelight. I was also very heavy on the rave scene, so I knew all the rave kids and I worked at this store Liquid Sky that was kind of like the rave headquarters downtown. That’s why I did Party Monster, actually, because I knew everybody. I knew Michael Alig, but he never really liked me because young boys on the rave scene really liked me. He was very envious of that — I was androgynous and I dressed kind of boyish and that threatened him. I thought the book James St. James wrote was fantastic. Unfortunately the movie didn’t turn out as well as it could have, but I just wanted to be a part of its telling since I had been there.

chloe sevigny interview with PAPER.