By Andrew Corsello

October '85, Harvard dorm party. Must be a hundred freshmen wriggling in the tepid, rebreathed air, screaming for refills. A guy named Richie Barth -- bespectacled, controlled -- works the tap. "Super Freak" comes on: a pyroclastic eruption of buttons as somebody named Jon Shaw tears the shirt from his chest, leaps up onto a table and begins a rhythmic pelvic thumping of such force and dexterity that the Harvard womyn start cheering.
     Harvard womyn: Eghh. 'Cept for that number in the black leather jacket with the cat eyes and the great teeth -- like a walking Ultra Brite commercial. She's navigating the room -- the men in the room -- with alarming ferocity, leaping like ball lightning from one to the other. Whether or not she knows them, whether or not they want to play. There's something laughingly ruthless about her, the way she grabs each by the wrist, fixes him with a stare, strokes his palm and tells him ...something -- just enough to gain acknowledgment, by look or word, that she's the best-lookin' broad in the room. The fortune-telling: a new twist on the old "you know you want it/you know you can't have it" routine. Cutesy, annoying.
     But here's the thing: She's glamorizing the boys right and left. Richie Barth (spectacles, control) is going to become a senator; Jon Shaw (pushing the edges of the pelvic envelope) is going to become an astronaut; and so on. Eventually, she takes my wrist, asks my name and skates a fingernail along the crease of my palm. The finger -- flattish and abrupt in shape, a little girl's finger. The cuticle -- red, tender, nibbled to the nub.
     "See this line?" she says. "It means [memory lapse]. And this line means [memory lapse]. And then there's [memory lapse]..."
     "All right, all right," I say, meaning, "Enough." But she makes immediately clear that she is a willfull person and that she will own this moment.
     "...which means -- are you ready? -- that you are going to become...a cook."
     She splits the word in two for emphasis, the k crystallizing into a second syllable -- almsot an independent thought, really -- that somehow indicates this isn't about truffles and pâté; it's about a paper hat and a hair net.
     "Say what?"
     She answers the harsh tone with a look of mock reassureance and a withering voice: "Oh...I mean a good cook."
     Enough. I take her hand, ask her name.
     "Mira."
     "OK, Meeee-ra," I offer, pressing a thumb into her palm. "It looks like you're going to become...a housewife!"
     Mira sees no humor whatsoever in this.
     "Oh," I say mock-helpfully, "a dutiful housewife."
     A little pffffft sound comes out of her, and then she's off to hang with all the future gene therapists and professional basketball players and Pulitzer winners in the room.
     Eleven years pass.

I chop and sauté for forty-five minutes before Mira -- who since our last face-to-face has graduated from fortune-teller to Mira Sorvino, movie star, sex symbol and Oscar winner -- shows up. (An assistant has admitted me to Mira's house and kitchen in the Hollywood Hills, though it seems to me somehow that a real "cook" ought to have broken in.) Despite her prophecy, she seems to find this whole business of my cooking her dinner rather unnerving.
     Dinner begins with a tomatillo-and-avocado dip. It is disastrous. It tastes of tree bark. "It's tangy," Mira says encouragingly. The shrimp paella is but half-completed when we have to run to a cast-and-crew screening of Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, which several weeks hence (it's now mid-April) will briefly be the country's number-two movie. On the way, Mira deconstructs her character, Romy, in astonishing detail. Romy's delusions of intelligence, Romy's walk, the way Romy holds her mouth, the way Romy enunciates, the male TV icons of the '70s who inform Romy's personality. Mira approaches all her roles, on- and offscreen, this cerebrally. She brooks no unintended consequences, no aspects that haven't been willed into place. Listening to her blueprint for Romy (or for Linda Ash in Mighty Aphrodite or Marilyn Monroe in the HBO production Norma Jean and Marilyn), one half expects the character to resemble a Boccioni painting, all of its surfaces churning with exactitude, all of its psychological architecture displayed like an exoskeleton.
     Which makes it a bit curious when the lights go down and it becomes clear that Romy is ... just another Valley girl, a shtick -- static and simple -- with only one surface and no psychological architecture to speak of. Which isn't to say that Mira's not cute in the role. She is. Like the nasal, ditsy hooker from Mighty Aphrodite that won Mira the Oscar, Romy is awkward, benign, possessed of the kind of sweet dumbness that, like a cow's, elicits affection. (Romy, like Mira, often strikes a distinctive standing posture that conveys a curling-in wariness, a subtle recoiling.) Still, one wonders: Where did all that thinking go?
     It is possible to believe that the members of the cast and crew are silently posing the same question. None of them (except Mira) laugh. Their eerie silence leaves her skittish and insistent. "This was simply one of those instances where people were too self-conscious to laugh," she explains afterward. "I suppose they were all looking to me to shee how I'd react, you know? Don't you thing? Yes, they were simply afraid to laugh." Perhaps, though surely they were aware, too, that if their hard work has produced a pleasant diversion of a movie, it is also derivative and strained, a pale tracing of Clueless.
     Back at the homestead, the paella achieves completion. We begin to talk about our initial 1985 encounter -- the senators, the astronauts, the cancer-curing scientists and then the lowly, lowly cook, with his metal spatula and his deep-fat fryer. But Mira derives no amusement from the memory.
     "I wasn't talking about some hash slinger in a greasy spoon," she says.
     "Oh, but it was implied."
     "I was using 'cook' interchangeably with 'chef.'" A beat. "Either way, this is delicious."
     It certainly is, though I'm not exactly sure what, if anything, has been resolved.
     "So who wins?" I ask. "Me or you?"
     Mira seems not to hear the question.
     "This cooking thing is a writerly premise, an original angle on the celebrity profile, right?" she says, turning the conversation back into an interview, and a meta-interview at that. She's right, of course, so from then on we leave good enough alone with the cook business.
     Hours pass. As I've been warned she would, Mira spends most of them itemizing her accomplishments. Her fluency in Chinese (and sundry other languages) and her East Asian travels. The East Asian Languages and Civilization honors thesis ("Anti-Africanism in China") she wrote at Harvard. The professor who, years after her graduation in 1989, declared, "You are a good actress, Mira, I'm sure, but you would have been a great professor!" Et cetera, et cetera. She does not eat or hold her fork as she speaks, nor does she gesture or lean or aim her face anywhere but straight ahead, across the table -- nothing to draw energy or attention away from the act of transmitting. She is exuberantly verbal, Mira, in a disembodied, Max Headroom way that belies her status as a sex symbol; in her company, one often feels like a CEO interviewing a very qualified candidate for a senior executive position. And in that capacity one is surely impressed.

Mira's now in her trailer on the set of The Replacement Killers, a kung fu thriller with Hong Kong martial-arts phenom Chow Yun-Fat, which is due for release early next year. An assistant pops her head in to announce that Mira's on in five minutes. The door closes. Mira continues where she left off.
     "I'm always looking to play roles in which I can be Harrison Ford," she says, explaining why she took the lead role in this month's sci-fi thriller Mimic, where she plays a kind of female Dr. Frankenstein. By Harrison Ford, she means "a character who acts as a pure representative of the audience, as the conduit through which the audience experiences the drama. Harrison Ford, I feel, has always embodied his viewers, regardless of gender. When he runs or shoots or fights, we become him, as if we're running along in his paces, experiencing his adrenaline. That's what I want -- to be able to carry the whole drama within my skin, to be the one who contains all tension and action and proactiveness. I don't know if you've read Carol Clover's book about feminism in horror films, Men, Women and Chainsaws?"
     Not yet.
     "Well, it's all about how the horror genre fosters woman protagonists who can do all sorts of things they're not allowed to do in other films. Which has a lot to say about why I took the Mimic role, and why I fought so hard for the right ending. The script was constantly changing throughout the shoot. The creature kept getting more invincible, until the original ending no longer made any sense. But what started to emerge was an ending that was all about flight, rather than stand and fight. Whereas I agreed to do the movie with certain conditions, one of which was that my character had to fight mano a mano at the end. I agreed to play a high-stakes person who goes through hell and emerges as a hero -- and who, like Harrison Ford, could represent both genders in the audience. Susan Tyler, my character, could not be the traditional woman who merely escapes, who coaxes no reaction from the audience beyond Oh, please don't die!
     "So I sat down with my ThinkPad and did the first fictional writing I've done since I got rejected from that beginning fiction class at Harvard." A seam, at last, in her thought process, after which her tone grows suddenly venomous. "I cannot believe I had to compete to get into a fiction class! That is not fair! That is so stupid!" She switches back into her original gear. "So I gave myself the heroism I wanted. I made my character willing to lay down her life. And they ended up using three plot points from my scene."
     It's kind of an awesome spectacle, this thing Mira does when she thinks out loud in prose -- and in paragraphs, in pages, five, ten minutes at a time. (Which prompts the question: Given the famous logorhea of her boyfriend, Quentin Tarantino, do the two of them have to use a chess clock to carry on a conversation?) She's a serial interrupter, Mira, who often takes on a correcting tone and seems to object when other people -- friends, assistants, whoever, -- demonstrate any personality in her presence, as if their becoming anything more than the mere Q in Q. and A. will diminish her shine. At other times, she goes into an odd, nonresponsive shutdown mode when others speak, as if someone has stopped time with a "pause" button. When she reanimates, the words just spill from her, small speedy bubbles sliding under and around each other, sometimes merging, sometimes colliding, until the barometric pressure -- in her living room, in her car, in her trailer on a movie set at one in the morning -- seems altered.
     Usually, the air gets a little heavier, as when I mention that I date a seminarian.
     "Well," she begins, "my mother's into that. Not of the hellfire variety, mind you, but she believes that she knows what God wants and that we're all in trouble if we don't admit it, like, 'I'm telling you what he feels about this.' This, basically, is my only problem with extremism. When you are a Christian, your law is laid out for you in codified form. You can have some kind of Talmudic debate about this or that, but basically you're supposed to accept God's will. There is no argument about whether there is a definitive right and wrong. And once you know his law, nobody else can be right unless they agree with you. And so you wind up with, 'You are wrong. You are mistaken. You are sinning. You are in error.' I find that extremely restrictive and impossible.... Think, just think, about how every last man and woman and child of the Pharisees was killed for their blasphemy and infidelity when their greatest crime was that they were mistaken. So they believed in the wrong God -- they should be killed for this? Is this justice? Is it?"
     Hey, Jesus is Lord, baby.
     "No, this is not what a fair God would do. And why does it not say anywhere in the Bible that slavery is wrong? It only says that you should treat your slaves well. How is it possible that it is not immoral to own another person? Why isn't that one of the Ten Commandments? 'Thou shalt not own another person.' You want to sit here and tell me that fornication is worse than owning someone? And then all this stuff in the Bible about women being weak and unadorned..."
     Indeed, Mira's is a racing, willful mind that devours. She is, like the most eager of those comp.-lit majors you knew in college, a semiotic Terminator, deconstructing and dissecting every topic in sight before shrink-wrapping it in an opinion. Mercilessly intelligent, profoundly unrelaxed. It is an energy-inefficient, high-maintenance way of being that, in its attempts to control all aspects, can lead to bizarre incidents of spontaneous combustion. (Call them "Mirashimas," if you will.) Orchestrating photo shoots -- demanding Cristal Champagne; explaining to stylists and photographers in detail what they're doing "wrong"; insisting beforehand in writing that makeup artists are to sculpt her lips "vertically," though none of them really know what that means; and so on -- to the point where support staff have been bribed into not walking off the set. Verbally assaulting a makeup artist because of "dirty brushes" ("You whore! I'll fucking kill you!"). Publicly yelling down a prominent director at the Golden Globe Awards ("How dare you treat me this way! Don't you know I have a fucking Oscar?"). It is a way of being with a powerful, built-in sensse of entitlement; Mira, in fact, rejected her first few after-Harvard acting offers -- one of them a three-year contract with The Guiding Light -- on the presumption that better things were in store. She was right: For better or worse, Mira Sorvino does know best.
     And it is a way of being, incidentally, that tends to vaporize any kind of humor upon contact.
     "You saw me as Romy in high school," she says. "Does that look like how you remembered me?"
     "Actually," I say, "I remember very clearly what you looked like in college. It wasn't like Romy. The hair or anything else."
     "Oh?"
     "You're awfully fit now."
     Mira concurs, then patiently explains that she was awfully fit in college, too. But it was a different kind of fit, you know? A brawny kind of fit, from rowing crew. She speaks about the business of her body at length -- in the coming days, we will spend literally hours dealing with it -- which eventually brings us to the subject of a woman we both know.
     "You should know," I tell Mira, "that she steadfastly maintains that you have robbed her of her life. Meaning she's the one whom the Fates slated to become the starlet, to win the Oscar and get the glam. She claims that you cast some kind of voodoo spell and stole it all from her."
     Mira gives a blank stare. She sees no humor whatsoever in this.
     "Er, don't worry about it," I assure her. "She was saying the same thing about Julia Roberts a few years back."
     "Oh."
     "The point of all this -- and you will appreciate this, 'cause this is hilarious -- is that a few months back, she had this dream in which she decided to quit lawyering and become an actress."
     "Mmmm-hmmm."
     "And then she came to ask you for career advice."
     "OK."
     "OK? And in the dream, you rolled your eyes and in a really condescending voice said, 'Well, missy, the one thing you have to ask yourself is this: Do you actually believe you have what it takes to become really, really, really skinny?'"
     Mira sees no humor whatsoever in this either.
     "No," she says sternly. "Absolutely not. I would never say anything like that."
     "But--"
     "Because I do know how women in this society are made to be self-conscious about their bodies, and how disempowering that is. I am self-conscious about my own body. I know the pressures, and I would never say that."
     And there -- in the sterile tone of voice, in the transformation of an instance of storytelling into a point of analysis -- lies the explanation of why Mira Sorvino absolutely aces The Charlie Rose Show when she's on it and absolutely flunks Letterman.

But then, but then ... after dinner Mira says, "Let's go into the living room," and we do. Now, it is late, late -- past midnight. She turns the lights out, then, one by one, lights dozens of candles. She's talking, talking, at her normal breakneck speed, about something I later fail to remember, her voice seemingly an entity separate from her moving silhouette. But as she slides silently in her socks from wick to wick, stooping, lighting, moving on through the dark, she slows, becomes more considered. (Is it something about the light? Something about my shrimp?)
     She reposes on her couch under an enormous white blanket, easing slowly into a floating nether state somewhere between consciousness and sleep. There, in the soft flickering dark, with that rather magnificent curve of her -- apparent here and there beneath the rumplings of the blanket -- spread out on the couch, her arm resting soft side up against her forehead in a kind of surrender, she is moved to speak (for reasons unclear) about her parents' divorce, when she was a college sophomore.
     "The divorce reshuffled everything. It made me a person of absolutes -- you're either with me or against," she begins, speaking not to me, sitting across from her, but straight up into the dark. "No one had any idea how upset I was. No one. I had to stop going to large lecture classes, because I would get completely distracted, to the point where my mind would drift toward these rather suicidal thoughts"
     She holds an uncharacteristic silence.
     "It wasn't as if such things were actually happening to me. Not like I was doing it to myself. But, for instance, take this table corner." Without removing her gaze from the ceiling, she unfurls her arm and brings her hand to the corner of the coffee table beside her. "I'd see a corner like this and all of a sudden imagine my wrist impaled on it. Or I'd look at the temple of somebody sitting next to me, and instantly "id have a mental picture of a gun shooting a bullet through my own temple. I felt like I was going crazy. Do you ever feel like you're going crazy?"
     I do, I tell her. She responds with another silence, then continues.
     "What I grew up knowing no longer existed. Think of that sentiment: Love doesn't exist anymore. It's dead. I couldn't fathom it emotionally. Have you ever read the children's book The World in the Candy Egg? Such a beautiful little children's book. Where the shepherd and shepherdess never grow old in the world of the candy egg ... where everything is perfect and nobody dies."
     "A beautiful little lie."
     "Yes," Mira says to the air, her eyes still set in deep focus on some point off in the dark. "I know."
     She goes on for another hour or so, at one point about her habit, when shooting at various locations around the world, of walking through neighborhoods.
     "I see people in their homes, all glowy and warm," she says. "These people look happy, and I ... miss them. This life of mine is exciting, yes -- I love doing. But then I walk around these neighborhoods and see people setting tables and sitting down to dinner or pulling up a chair and reading a book. It is ... a dream of happiness."
     Mira goes silent for a long while, sinking into her sentiment. It occurs to me then that if someone were to pass by her livingroom window, here in the wee hours with the candlelight and the wine and the quiet conversation, they, too, might come away thinking that they had witnessed a picture of intimacy and peacefulness.
     In the coming days, I will see Mira in all kinds of motion. I will watch her act, walk, drive, roller-skate. (The way she speaks has its own kind of crazy motion.) Only much later will it occur to me that Mira is not one of those people who, when you recall them visually, you recall in motion. In fact, the only truly distinct physical image of Mira that I will retain is the picture of her here, in the dark, when she is half-asleep, gentle, open, soft, real and ... somewhat mysterious. It is the only time she will manage not to utterly demystify herself with overexplanation.
     In the daylight hours, you see, there is a kind of psychic glare coming off Mira Sorvino, as if off some Plexiglas bubble separating her from the world. It's that churning, hyperverbal intelligence of hers -- unearthing all subtext, making all things explicit, leaving nothing unsaid -- that produces the effect. Nothing wrong with brains, of course. But in the end, the power of screen stardom is the power of mystery, of suggestion; it's the stranger in icons that makes them sexy and keeps them that way, that element kept just out of sight and around the corner, where we can sense but neither see nor understand it. The young starlet who insists on explaining how she's got her craft all figured out runs the risk of revealing the magic behind the trick -- of surrendering her essential mystery.

Much later, in daylight again, I swing by the house to take Mira roller-skating. She has something to show me, and outtake from a photo shoot the day before, where she test-drove a John Galliano outfit. Now she's deliberating over whether to run with the photo.
     "I'd like to get your opinion," she says, handling me a Polaroid. "You know, as a guy."
     I take a look and offer up the only plausible response.
     "God-damn, baby!"
     "What does that mean?"
     "Suh-weet!"
     In the pic, she's clad in this badass heavy metal-ish thang made of beaded chain mail -- 95 percent flesh exposure, easy. Metallic hissing asps spring from the nipples. Mira's workin' it, too, staring down the camera with a screaming On your knees, slave! look.
     "Do you think it's too much?" she asks.
     "Of what?"
     "Well, do you think it's exploitive? I mean, is this an empowering or disempowering image?"
     "..."
     "The answer to that question depends on who's answering it," she says, answering the question. "I could just decide that I'm wresting control of my own sexual image. But then again, look at the setting."
     The background of the photo -- a wooden staircase that could be the back way into a bar or to some remote cabin -- doesn't explain itself. What does it mean? Mira snatches the Polaroid from the table and holds it up for inspection.
     "The first thing that comes to mind when I look at this is that I'm some 'ho' escaping from the remote cabin in which my pimp, Billy Bob Something, is holding me captive," she says, now taking on the subject matter with an almost predatory confidence. "This looks like something's happening to me, that I don't have control. There's no sense of me playacting and being costumey, nothing forcing you to ask yourself what I'm thinking. Which means I'm surrendering control."
     "Uh, it's still totally hot," I say, stupidly.
     "Do you think?"
     We spend hours, hours, playing Hamlet over the photo, bringing the talk of body, sex, image to Santa Monica Beach. There, while continuing the thread on roller skates, Mira broaches the subject of Quentin. (Who she says has decided to "politely decline" my interview request because he feels he "has nothing to gain and everything to lose" by talking. In the same breath, Mira announces that Quentin helped himself to the leftover shrimp paella for breakfast and "loved" it. To Quentin: Excuse me? You go lapping up my sloppy seconds, the fruit of my hard labor, then "politely decline" to talk? Kiss my ass, pal!)
     "You know," she says, wheeling about, "you haven't asked me any of those 'titillating' questions I always get asked for magazine profiles."
     "Like what?"
     "Oh, you know," she says, "those ... questions."
     "Is there a problem here?"
     "It's just kind of weird, that's all."
     Mira taks a call on her cellular -- her younger sister. The sight of a woman in flowered overalls barking into a portable phone while whizzing by on skates is an odd one, even in L.A. People stare. The call ends.
     "Mira?"
     "Yes?"
     "Would you like me to ask you some titillating celebrity-profile sex questions?"
     "God, I don't know!"
     "Then why don't you pose some titillating celebrity-profile sex questions yourself and then answer them, and then I'll publish all of it like a Q. and A.?"
     Mira sees no humor whatsoever in this.
     "I couldn't possibly do that," she says, staring.
     "Then I'll give it a shot. Ready? 'How is Quentin Tarantino in bed?'"
     Mira perks right up.
     "Actually, she says, "I don't think he would mind me answering that question at all: We have a fantastic sex life. He's fantastic!"
     Of course he is, I think: Any guy with the kind of brain that could devise the Gimp (the mute, leather-bound anal sex slave from Pulp Fiction whose redneck masters stored him in a basement trunk) could be nothing less.
     "I'll print that," I tell Mira.
     "I mean, what this is really about -- and this is going to sound kind of funny -- is the fact that over the past few days I've been very, well .. desexualized with you."
     Now, this is startling. During the time we've spent together, I have repeatedly been moved to scribble the word "desexualized" in my notes. It's not the kind of thing I'd expect Mira -- or anyone, really -- to recognize in herself. I demand an explanation.
     "It's just that normally I slip into this flirt/sex mode with single male reporters," she says. "There's almost a script, you know, where I playact this sex-symbol personal, or whatever, and the reporter feeds me all those obligatory titillating questions we were talking about.
     "I should be sexier," I offer.
     "It's just that this whole business of you knowing me way back when has made me pretty self-conscious. Because I am a person who sometimes seems to suffer from Tourette's syndrome our something, and just say whatever's on my mind, which is everything.
     "Whoop! Oh boy!"
     "Exactly. I'm probably going to read this article and be, like Oh, my God."
     "Probably."
     "I'll read it and think, What was I thinking? Why wasn't I cautious? Why can't I be like Tom Cruise, who's so gentlemanly and tactful? I hope I'm not going to feel betrayed by this article. Have I said anything that could really hurt me here?"
     "SHUT UP, WOMAN!!"
     This is a joke, and Mira, thank God, takes it as one, bursting into laughter and then trying the line on for size.
     "SHUT UP, WOMAN! JUST SHUT UP!!" she yells, seeking the optimum delivery. And then, "God, I really ought to be more careful, oughtn't I? I guess I get too tired."
     It's a genuinely interesting concept: too tired to be quiet.

Andrew Corsello is a GQ senior writer.