Juliette Lewis arrives in a blaze of clashing colours and textures — vivid blues and reds and blacks, ruffles and spandex — like a child who's just had a rummage through a rock 'n' roll dressing-up box.
Dark black liner makes her eyes stand out, and the effect is emphasised by the way she holds direct, unwavering eye contact, as she talks fast and loud and expressively with a ripe LA street accent.
Lewis is not, and possibly never has been, conventionally pretty. But, boy, does she make an impression.
"I equate fame with being a blue alien," she declares, cackling at the idea. "Some people are like [animated whisper], ‘Look at the blue alien, she's so cute!' And other people are like [disgusted sneer], ‘Oh my God, don't talk to the blue alien!' And, however they treat you, at the end of the day you're still a blue alien."
A film star since her teens and latterly a flamboyant, wild rocker, at 36 Lewis claims to have come to terms with her inner alien.
"Wherever I go, I'm like a rock 'n' roll freak show. I'm a bit goofy, maybe rough around the edges. But, if people are intelligent, they'll get to know you as a person in the present moment."
Lewis made a huge impact in 1991 with her extraordinary performance of nascent teenage sexuality in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear.
Her air of kooky independence and roles in such cult films as What's Eating Gilbert Grape (with Johnny Depp), Kalifornia (opposite Brad Pitt, briefly her partner), Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn has given her counter-culture cachet.
She had long harboured musical ambitions (she even played a singer in Kathryn Bigelow's sci-fi thriller Strange Days) and, in 2004, formed Juliette Lewis & the Licks, releasing two albums of high-energy, punky rock that she toured heavily.
Feeling incomplete
There have been many singing actors before Lewis, but, perhaps uniquely, she has made music her prime focus, with acting taking a back seat.
"I'm really moved by music itself — the bass, the kick drum and crash cymbals. It's a visceral, almost psychedelic connection. In film, I'm helping a filmmaker tell their story. It's collaborative, and I have actor friends who find that incredibly fulfilling, but I felt a little bit incomplete."
She always used music as an acting tool to define characters, and gravitated towards rock to define herself, because it helped channel "all that energy, too much exuberance, living too hard, loving too hard, too much of everything. That was always my problem as a kid. Music just gives me a beautiful outlet."
Lewis recently released her third album, Terra Incognita, with a new band, the New Romantiques.
Produced by Omar Rodríguez-López of alt-prog rockers the Mars Volta, it is a huge leap forward for Lewis, richer in tone, wider in style, more melodic, more dynamic, a modern rock epic with poetically compelling lyrics and bravura vocals that (on the bluesy Hard Loving Woman) hint at the spirit of Janis Joplin.
The closing track, Suicide Dive Bombers, is a strange anthem for misfits ("Poets and entertainers, bathed in devil's blood") and the sense of belonging generated at "the great rock-and-roll show".
It has become a big set piece in Lewis's live show, in which, apparently completely lost to the moment, the movie star will frequently crowd surf, borne aloft on the hands of her audience.
"When I first came out in music, I knew I was good for a hundred tickets pretty much anywhere. But I didn't know if they'd keep coming back, so it was a really terrifying time. Suicide Dive Bombers is really a love letter to all these audiences all over the world that show up. I'm sharing my own sense of alienation and putting my hands up in surrender and expressing that for everybody, and then you find this sense of togetherness."
Untouchable medium
When Lewis is on stage it's where she really comes into her own, delivering a raw, psychedelic, bluesy and emotional head trip with a superb band.
"Live is the untouchable medium. Even in this digital download era, you can still cultivate something magical and new that lives and breathes in that moment only. What I aim for is what I aimed for in my acting: I approach it with a sense of make-believe, much like a kid. I love creating an alternate universe, whether it's through a character or sounds or emotion.
"I'm dramatic by nature. I want a heightened reality, a sense of theatre. I'm not just getting up and singing songs; I commit to each song and what it requires. I really want to open people's hearts. My goal is to get everyone to turn into their 10-year-old selves."
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