In a new interview, the actress talks about the beloved 1999 comedy and how it was like to work with Chris Klein while she was was in an abusive relationship.
- Jul 29, 2021
AceShowbiz - For Mena Suvari, starring on "American Pie" served as an incredible experience amid her troubled personal life. In a new interview, she talked about the beloved 1999 comedy and working with Chris Klein.
When she was starring as Heather, a choir girl who becomes the love interest of Chris' Oz, in the movie, Mena was in an abusive relationship. Recalling the first time she met Chris, Mena shared that he was one of the first nice guys she had ever met. "Meeting someone like Chris Klein, and he was just so sweet and gentle and present. Non-threatening, all of that," she told Entertainment Tonight.
"I looked at it as Heather and Oz, they, you know, had probably known each other for many years and dated and decided and kind of chosen to lose their virginity to one another," she continued.
Mena added, "It was the perfect, beautiful couple wrapped up in a bow and the way that, you know, he inspired her and challenged her and waited. He stuck up for her, and yeah, I did not have any of that. I went to two different high schools, I didn't go to prom. I got to wear the corsage and got to wear the dress and I always say that 'American Pie' gave me my high school experience."
Whule Heather and Oz had a beautiful love story, it was the opposite for Mena's in real life. "Literally not far and I would go there and experience this amazing, exciting, beautiful world full of possibility and just, like, potential and then it was just like everything on the flip side I would go back to," she said. "So, I would turn it on there, you know, that's what I learned -- go there and, like, I could, you know, I put in the book like a photo of me sitting in the back of a convertible in Charleston when I first started modeling, you know, waving at everyone, like, that was my role."
"I was sort of just catapulted and I just had to be perfect and shiny and cute when I was promoting it," she continued. "So, that was just like extra work for me because that is how people wanted to perceive me. And so they wanted all of that and they wanted to hear more about how my life was like that but it wasn't. It wasn't even close. ... I just acted. I just, like, played a long. I just did what I had been doing. I just did the work intellectually to figure out what was required of me and I gave it."
Mena also said that she never told her "American Pie" co-stars, including Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Tara Reid and Seann William Scott, about the abuse. "I didn't know how to share those things and I didn't think anyone would care," she recounted. "I didn't know how to say those things I talk about in the book, like, you know, how was I gonna offer up my weekend adventures as being taken to the strip club on amateur night and being pushed to get up there and why not get up there on stage?"
"I didn't know how to have those conversations on a movie set with people who I thought had it together and were cool and were normal. ... I was anything but [normal]. I would look for any way that I could short change myself, you know, it was all about that," she divulged.
