Selma Blair: Something to get her teeth into

On the morning that I met Selma Blair for breakfast in a fashionable café in West Hollywood, Britney Spears had just been committed to hospital against her will for a mental health evaluation, with a small army of paparazzi and television helicopters in hot pursuit.

That might not have had any bearing on our conversation except that, even as I was on my way to our appointment, I was being chased by my editors to do a completely different, Britney-related interview. (That came later.) And Blair, for her part, had just picked up on the strangest of internet rumours – that she had supposedly offered to go and live with Britney to ease the self-destructing pop idol through her pain.Blair mentioned the rumour, paused for a moment, looked bemused, then distracted, then incredulous, then remarked: "That wouldn't work out well for anybody."

The paparazzi pack somehow loomed large over everything we discussed. Blair was by turns wry, detached, hilarious, and just a little bit vexed on the question. The circus around Britney Spears – consuming the sort of resources usually associated with grand Hollywood epics or small foreign wars – spared us any intrusions of our own. Stranger things, though, have happened. Selma Blair is one of those actresses who isn't world famous exactly, but is well enough known, and certainly pretty enough, to make a fine catch for a passing celebrity photographer, especially if she happens to be doing something embarrassing like cleaning up after her dog's poop, or something saucy like lacing her arm around the man who's keeping her company.

Naturally, she has mixed feelings about all that, particularly since her talents as an actress don't ever really enter into the equation. "It's weird here," she said of her life in Los Angeles. "I'm always happy to get away."

The conversation drifted naturally towards Belfast and Budapest, two cities where she's filmed recently and felt very happy. But more on that in a moment.

It's not that she resents the cameras pointing at her. On the contrary. "If I was looking good and someone happened to take a picture," she said, "I'd probably be quite pleased anyone was paying attention to me at all."

In fact, she has a theory about why the cameras like to seek her out: she looks like Tom Cruise. "I look like Tom Cruise, don't I?" she says with a big grin. When I express some doubt, she comes right back at me. "You're right, I don't look like Tom Cruise. I look like Katie Holmes. Katie Holmes with Tom Cruise's haircut."

Over the past two years, the frenzy of celebrity photography – much of it done by non-professionals taking advantage of the ease and quality of digital equipment to earn themselves a fast buck or two – has reached new heights and given pause even to lesser-stalked actresses like her.

"There's something very sniperish about what they do," she said. "Now, I don't look especially good in paparazzi shots. A lot of the really young people they snap, they're kids. They look good just the way they are, without make-up or anything. But I'm a woman. Please! I need a little Photoshop.

"Inevitably, I'll turn away and have a horrible, startled look on my face. I don't imagine that helps the Selma Blair product very much ... All I can think is that this is going to break my mother's heart, because she's going to have to see her baby with a double chin and people writing rude comments."

Now I've only met Selma Blair the one time, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that no conversation with her goes very far without mention of her mother. She's a retired magistrate who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is, by all accounts, quite a character.

"She thinks I'm awful in most things," Blair says, like she's at least half-inclined to believe her (and half-inclined to laugh in her face). "She asks me when I'm going to come home and work in Dunkin Donuts." (Dunkin Donuts, it must be noted, is held in surprisingly high esteem in the Blair family – especially its coffee.)

As the conversation goes on, it becomes clear that her mother is not unsupportive so much as a little uncomprehending and, mostly, discerning and ambitious for her daughter. She liked Storytelling, Todd Solondz's follow-up to his much more successful (and controversial) take on suburban anomie, Happiness. And she liked Hellboy, Guillermo del Toro's wild and oddly affecting comic-book adaptation about a devil-child who, paradoxically, sets out to save the world.

Not coincidentally, these are the films of Blair's with perhaps the most prestigious director names attached. And just in case one was tempted to think Molly Ann Blair wanted her daughter cast only in the best possible light, it's worth pointing out that in Storytelling she plays a creative writing student who allows herself to be sexually humiliated, if not actually raped, by her monstrous instructor. It's not a huge role, but her scenes are very startling, and very graphic. "My mother laughed off the idea that it was any big deal," Blair recounted. "'Rape?' she'd say, 'that's just a Saturday night for me. When I was in college ...'"

Rape, and mothers, as it happens, are also at the heart of Blair's latest role, in the gothic horror movie WAZ, which is set in a dingy, unnamed American city but was shot in Belfast under the direction of Tom Shankland.

Courtesy of Vertigo Films

Blair plays what might politely be called a deeply disturbed woman whose trauma (all preceding the main action of the film) consists in having been raped and tortured for four hours straight, including a particularly unspeakable form of mutilation with a broken bottle, before being told that she can choose to end her torment by authorising her attackers to kill her mother.

I won't give away her decision, but suffice to say the philosophical underpinning of the film – what would it take for you to agree to kill someone you love? – is merely an excuse to drench the screen in blood and mutilated corpses and put some surprisingly fine actors (Stellan Skarsgard, as well as Blair) through both physical and metaphysical hell. Tellingly, Blair's character, Jean Learner, exclaims at one point: "I'm not enjoying any of this!" I hear you, girl, I hear you.

In fact, as I was watching, my heart went out to Mrs Blair back in Michigan. If I had ambitions for my actress daughter, this is exactly the sort of stomach-churning shlock I would much prefer she didn't waste her time with. Selma showed a pre-release version of the film to her mum, and she couldn't bear to watch more than the first two minutes of it. "She said: 'Oh god, Selma,'" (this as the lugubrious, dimly lit opening scene unspooled), "'I can't see a thing!' Then she made me turn it off."

To be fair, Mrs Blair missed a certain something about her daughter's performance. To the extent that I could bring myself to watch the film, I certainly appreciated how wonderfully unhinged and troubled Blair was on screen. But I had to spy her performance through clenched fingers. Watching people hammering metal screws into other people's fingernails is not exactly my idea of fun.

Turns out, I'm not alone. Blair herself was so revolted by the gore before her eyes – fake though it all was – she had real difficulty staying in character. "They kept having to cut away from my face," she said. "I couldn't be disgusted in the movie ... This was a difficult movie to shoot. You're talking to someone who couldn't even dissect a little pig in seventh grade, and that was after all the blood had been drained out of it."

She took another sip from her cup. "I just need to appear in a period piece really soon. A lavish, beautiful, non-gory period piece."

Blair is one of those slightly indefinable Hollywood actresses who has never quite broken through to the top rank of performers but almost certainly deserves to be better known. She cut her teeth playing the young ingenue Cecile in Cruel Intentions (1999), the modern-day adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in which Blair infamously shared a kiss with Sarah Michelle Gellar. (That, incidentally, led to yet more internet rumours that she is gay. Little do the rumour-mongers realise that Hollywood never casts gay people to do anything remotely homosexual on screen.)

She and Gellar became part of a cadre of young actors identified with the youth-oriented television station, the WB – responsible for shows such as Felicity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and one that Blair herself appeared in, Zoe, Duncan, Jack and Jane. The whole point of those WB shows was to have performers in their early twenties play teenagers. It was also Blair's first experience of being typecast.

She didn't set out to be an actress. In high school, she thought of being a photographer or a writer. In fact, she had a crush on her English teacher and was anxious to impress him. When she appeared in a school production of TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral ("it was so unbelievably boring to watch!"), he suggested she might want to consider a career in acting. At the time she took it as a back-handed compliment – was this his way of telling her she would never make it as a writer? But he put the proverbial bug in her ear, and by the time she graduated from the University of Michigan and moved to New York several years later, acting turned out to be the interest of hers she found easiest to turn into a viable living.

Fifteen years on (she is now 35), the frustration of reviewing Blair's career is in realising that she has been both noteworthy in just about everything she's done and also refreshingly varied. She can be funny, she can be desperate, she can be depressive, she can be downright scary – yet she has never had the sort of status or security to do more than just gratefully accept the jobs that have come her way.

Plenty of well-respected directors have sought her out. Aside from Solondz and Del Toro, she also donned an outrageously huge pair of fake breasts for John Waters in his 2004 off-kilter homage to Russ Meyer, A Dirty Shame. (She had been a fan of Waters' ever since she was six, when she and her older sister sneaked off to watch trash classics like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble.) But her career hasn't had the kind of coherence to earn her a real following – something she herself keenly appreciates.

"Even people who have seen me in several things, I can't think they realise it's the same person," she said. "I have no set fan base. If you think of Storytelling, or Legally Blonde [she played opposite Reese Witherspoon], or Hellboy – I get totally different audiences."

These days, she seems to be getting a lot of horror parts, a trend that began with Hellboy and her role as a mentally unstable psychic woman with blue flames shooting out of her hands. WAZ fits that pattern, and so does the sequel to Hellboy, also directed by Del Toro, which is due out this summer.

I asked her whether, in retrospect, she might have been smarter about the parts she accepted and the parts she turned down, but she made clear that rejecting things had nothing to do with the shape of her career. As she put it, with admirable succinctness: "There are plenty of things I don't get that I'd happily never say 'no' to."

Blair has a startling propensity to say one thing about herself one minute, and then state almost the diametric opposite the next. Like many actors, she is clearly plagued by self-doubt as much as she is buoyed by self-belief. She can be both dark and light, sometimes simultaneously, with both shades leavened by a gloriously dry sense of humour. That makes her a lot of fun to talk to, but I'm not sure whether it always makes her happy.

Dark Selma will tell you that her career is a mess, that she can't escape the horror genre, that she really really wishes some of Keira Knightley's luck would rub off on her, that she even wonders whether she's a particularly accomplished actress in the first place. "I'm at a crossroads," she said. "I'm not that well trained. So many of us younger actors are just flying by the seat of our pants."

She said she'd love to do theatre – she fancies Pinter, perhaps The Birthday Party. "I want to do a play so desperately I'm terrified," she confided. "I just don't know if I have the basics to do a show eight times a week."

Light Selma, on the other hand, tells a very different story. "I've had an amazing year," she said, "and got to play roles I wanted."

She was in Budapest for six months on Hellboy II, an experience enhanced not only by her admiration for Del Toro (working for him and seeing his imagination at work was, she said, "one of the great honours of my life") but also by a happy visit from her mother, who finally got to see and understand better what she did for a living. "She thought Budapest was the most beautiful city she had ever seen," Blair said. "And she loved sitting in my trailer, thinking up ways to decorate it."

She may not have liked the WAZ shoot, but she did enjoy Belfast, spending her free time taking photographs and feeling "strangely at home". (Detroit and Belfast are, indeed, not so different.) She also enjoyed working on Feast of Love, written and directed by Robert Benton (best known for Kramer vs Kramer), and on The Poker House, a film directed by Lori Petty.

Now a big break appears to be in the offing in the form of Kath & Kim, the American version of the hit Australian television sitcom about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. Molly Shannon has been cast as the mother, Blair as the daughter, and the show will start shooting as soon as the Hollywood writers' strike is over. It's Blair's chance to prove herself as a comic actress, cultivate a mass audience and put herself on the map. Assuming the show does not – in the way of American TV shows – get pulled after the first few episodes.

One thing her experiences have taught her is that actors, even celebrated actors, never really earn respect in her industry. "Marlon Brando once gave an interview in which he said actors were like lipstick, or diapers," she said. "We're a product, and you have to sell the product."

The paparazzi circus, in the end, is just one more aspect of the vulgar machinery of Hollywood promotion, in which actors are judged by their ability to sell magazines rather than their professional skill. "It's almost off-topic to talk about acting," she said. "What people want to know is how you made some great mistake, or that you're dating someone really gorgeous."

Yes, she admitted, she's dated her share of gorgeous guys and made what she calls "every mistake there is". But that's not really the point: "People would much rather see you fall apart than see you talk about something with any dignity."

'Waz' is released on 22 February

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