A Suitable Change for Chloë Sevigny

As she enters the deserted tea shop in Soho, Chloë Sevigny is carrying a large cardboard box containing vintage Margiela boots from the RealReal, a giant pink neoprene tote, and a boxy black Loewe purse. Her long beachy-yellow hair is down under a CANNES ’69 ball cap, and her crisp sky-blue oxford is buttoned all the way up over black hot pants so short you can’t see them under the shirt. She’s wearing really, truly, absolutely no makeup. She’d be camera-ready except her eyes — red-rimmed with incipient tears — are a dead giveaway that something isn’t right.

“I dropped the kid at camp, crying, screaming he didn’t want to go in,” she says as she settles onto the stool next to mine at the counter. “So it was very challenging, part of why I’m crying.” Then she had walked back the ten or so blocks to her under-renovation apartment (she’s combining it with the unit next door) to drop off some checks for the contractors and pick up the package she’s now carrying, then back to this café, which is near where she started. Her husband, the gallerist Siniša Mackovic, is currently out of town at an art fair, so she’s been solo parenting. She orders a matcha with extra hot water, and when it comes, she seems immediately restored by the tea the way characters in old British novels are. She cradles the cup in her palms and sits with her endless legs primly crossed. “Okay,” she says. “So what are the questions?” The morning up till now disappears. Chloë Sevigny has arrived at work.

For more than 30 years, Sevigny has represented the height of downtown cool, but since Vanja was born in 2020, she’s also become a working mom who gets emotional when her toddler clings to her leg at drop-off. It’s somewhat surreal to see her struggle with the same things that I and every mom I know have been working through. But as she tells me about life with Vanja and the next stage she’s envisioning for her career, she sounds just like herself. Her fall schedule is packed. “I have a film, Bonjour Tristesse, going to Toronto, so I go to the Toronto Film Festival for a couple of days, and then Monsters” — the new installment of the Ryan Murphy series, in which she plays Kitty Menendez — “comes out, so we do some promotion for that. There’s a premiere in L.A. and then press in New York and then Charli XCX is playing at Madison Square Garden. And then I think I have a fashion requirement — going to a show in Paris.” After that, in November, she’ll turn 50. “And hopefully nothing big comes along and I can start really focusing on one of the features” — three films she wants to direct — “really full-tilt boogie.” Her hope is that by the time her birthday rolls around, a new era in her career will open up, one in which she’ll get to spend more time behind the camera than in front of it. She has directed short films but never a full-length feature. She’s been conceptualizing these three films since the pre-pandemic, pre-baby era of her life. It’ll be a huge change to work on a project where she’s the boss.

The day after our interview, she’s planning to fly to London with Vanja to shoot Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, in which she stars with Andrew Garfield, Julia Roberts, and Ayo Edebiri. She tells me the film is set at Yale and centers on a student’s accusations of inappropriate behavior by a professor. Sevigny plays a psychologist. She arranged for her babysitter, who’s currently in London stocking a hotel room with Vanja’s favorite snacks from Whole Foods, to have a small role in the movie, so she’ll have her child with her on set for some scenes.

The daily drop-offs during this clingy phase have been so wrenching that sometimes Sevigny just gives up and lets Vanja tag along to wherever she’s going, which this week included a photo shoot for this magazine. “He’s a good set baby,” she says. “He is very quiet — he realizes that if he wants to make noise, he has to go outside.” And for Sevigny, emotionally, it’s easier just to bring him. “I almost like it better having him there and then I feel less guilty about being at work.”

Sevigny describes her parenting style as “still skin-to-skin.” She feels bad when she’s doing something that isn’t work or being with her kid, even getting her nails done. “I like having him close by. Maybe I spoil him or baby him too much, but I feel more at ease,” she says. “All our faults, we’ve made them ourselves. We’re in our bed, and we have to lie in it. But now, it’s like I can sleep better when he’s there.” She shows me pictures on her phone, which, since she tries to keep him off her Instagram, is the first time I’ve seen Vanja’s face. He has a halo of golden hair and a radiant smile, and she scrolls with delight, showing me snaps of him playing outside and smiling for the camera. Vanja is not always an angel, she hastens to say. At his age, everything is a struggle, like brushing teeth and hair and taking a bath. From his Montessori school, he’s learned to say, “I don’t want to do that with my body right now, Mama,” which is cute except when it’s time to cut his nails or wash his hands. “Everything is a negotiation,” she says.

Sevigny is aware that she and Mackovic can be pushovers. It comes, she says, from being an older parent, and Vanja’s being an only child, and maybe a bit from the dramatic experience of his birth at a time when COVID protocols trumped Sevigny’s idyllic birth plan. “Everybody was so terrified that they were asking you to do insane things,” she says. “I can’t imagine they would ever ask anybody to do that in their right minds.” Instead of going into labor naturally, she had to be induced so she could be tested for COVID before the birth, and things went downhill from there. Complications landed Vanja in the NICU. “I’m still dealing with all the PTSD of that,” she says.

Family time is now the highest priority for Sevigny. She and Mackovic were introduced by a mutual friend at an art-gallery party in 2018, when she was 44 and he was 31. The two were married a couple months before Vanja’s birth. They walk him to school as a family whenever they can. When they drive (which is rare since they don’t own a car), Sevigny will usually sit in the back seat holding Vanja’s hand. The soundtrack to these journeys is pure Encanto. “I have friends that are very cool, and their kids listen to the music they listen to, and somehow we don’t. We just fall back on Disney.”

While some couples find that their child’s earliest years can put a strain on their marriage, for Sevigny and Mackovic, the opposite has proved true. “I value my relationship with my husband so much more. I value him and how much he participates and what he does for our household so much more than I ever could imagine. I’ll do anything not to lose him,” she says. “I don’t want to do this by myself.” Mackovic handles all the logistical aspects of family life; Sevigny hates contending with emails and jokes that as a “coddled actress,” she doesn’t even know how to buy a plane ticket. He also helps Sevigny deal with her uneasiness about being away from Vanja for work. “When I’m having one of my anxiety spirals, he’ll always talk me down,” she says. “What’s so nice about my husband is he’s so competent. I can trust he can take care of everything, so I don’t have to, and that’s really relaxing.”

The rigors of parenting have made it harder for her to connect with the people who were once her “real core friend group,” mostly because she goes to bed at nine, when their nights are just beginning. “I’m trying to figure out how to spend more time with them, but there’s no babysitter at 6:30 in the morning,” she says with a shrug, throwing up her hands.

On the flip side, she’s been surprised by how strong her bonds with fellow mothers have become — people who were formerly acquaintances are now closer friends, and she describes the “mom group” of people she met at parks and playgrounds as a “support system.” Julia Trotta knew Mackovic and Sevigny in passing via art-world friends (she’s an art consultant), but they started to hang out more when their children hit it off. “I think one of the first times we hung out was to take the kids to see the PAW Patrol movie, and Chloë was laughing out loud at all the kid jokes,” she says. “It was really sweet and disarming.”

Multiple friends use the word traditional to describe Sevigny’s parenting, pointing out her emphasis on manners and being kind to others. “If there’s three kids playing, like Vanja, my son, and somebody else, she’s very concerned that the third person doesn’t feel left out,” Trotta says. She’s also noticed what an effort Sevigny makes to spend time with Vanja. “If she has a break from shooting for literally 36 hours, she’ll fly back from wherever she is to just be with her kid for one day and then fly back.”

Work is still a big part of her identity. “I started working when I was in fifth grade,” she says. “My first job was sweeping the clay tennis courts at the yacht club where we weren’t members. And then I stocked shelves at a local grocery store. And then it was like nannying after school, doing laundry, cooking dinners. And I was a busgirl at my friend’s father’s restaurant, and I worked at Polo in the mall. And I was just always hustling. I was also acting.” She was 20 when she was in Kids and 24 when The Last Days of Disco cemented her cult fandom. She went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for Boys Don’t Cry at 25. Between independent films and prestige-TV dramas, she has worked steadily, most recently appearing as high-Wasp socialite C. Z. Guest in Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, alongside Naomi Watts and Diane Lane. In her natural demeanor, there’s something of the proper presence she brought to her portrayal of Guest: her voice demurely low-pitched, words carefully chosen.

It’s clear that Sevigny is sincere about directing as she describes the three projects she’s envisioning. She’s cautious — she doesn’t want anyone stealing her ideas — but tells me that one is an adaptation of a Flaubert novella, another based on dark fairy tales, and the third inspired by a real-life mass-hysteria event among teenage girls that took place in upstate New York. Sevigny’s working on that one with Michelle Dean, who was a co-creator and co-showrunner on The Act, in which Sevigny played a neighbor of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mother, Dee Dee. “I’m obsessed with her,” Sevigny says of Dean. “She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life.” Of Sevigny, Dean says, “she’s so wonderful that it’s actually intimidating to work with her. Not because she is intimidating but because she brings such a seriousness to it that everybody wants to do their best. They want her to be in their best work, they want to do their best work around her, and she just creates that atmosphere around herself without being at all overbearing or difficult.”

Sevigny describes the four short films she’s already made as some of the most fulfilling work of her life. “Building the teams, building the look, the casting, the editing, everything,” she says. “Even going out and promoting it and talking about it.” In the first film, Kitty, which screened at Cannes in 2016, a little girl transforms into a beautiful gray cat. In another, White Echo, a group of young women playfully summons spirits in an upstate house with unfortunate success. Both have a dreamy quality on the border between entrancing and unnerving. Delicate, perfectly modulated sound design; repeated shots of blurred motion. It’s a tightly controlled aesthetic.

Part of her interest in directing goes back to her new role as a mom. Like most working mothers, Sevigny craves more control over her schedule. Monsters, the Ryan Murphy show, took over six months of going from New York to L.A. for filming, an experience that left her exhausted.

She’s also tired of dragging around her legendary “coolest girl in the world” persona — a label Jay McInerney saddled her with in a 1994 profile — to every acting gig or promotional tour. And she’s not enthusiastic about the way she looks onscreen anymore. “The aging process is very challenging. I think my ego is just very fragile,” she says. “It’s been pretty daunting since the baby and then hitting this area where it’s harder to lose weight. And I’m just not back to where I was before. That’s been pretty frustrating for me. I just want to feel good. You want to feel good in your body, right?” When the obvious is pointed out to her — that she’s superhumanly beautiful — she says she’s never thought so. “Probably because my mother never told me that.” She was raised to believe that pride is a sin. “The hour and a half in the makeup chair is one of the hardest periods of my day. And so I feel like avoiding that chair would be really nice.”

Sevigny knows what she’s supposed to say about aging — that it’s a wild ride into uncharted territory, that older women and the natural changes that come with the passage of time deserve to be represented onscreen. But honestly, she’s annoyed by the whole thing: “The second adolescence or something? There’s some term. But it seems more difficult than adolescence because I’m menopausal and all that. Hormonal changes.” (And in case you’re wondering, no, she has not read All Fours, Miranda July’s perimenopausal novel. “Sounds intolerable,” she says when I describe the plot.)

Remaining an “It” girl in middle age is clearly something Sevigny goes back and forth about, sometimes in the same breath. “Does anybody need another photo of me? I’ve been doing this since I was 18,” she says, moments before admitting that the previous day’s shoot, for this article, was “exciting!” She also says her recent appearance with a passel of current-day “It” girls in Charli XCX’s “360” video, defiantly posing as she lights and tosses a rebellious cigarette, was a blast. It didn’t bother her that she was decades older than most of her co-stars. “Honestly, I didn’t know very much about Charli, but they told me everybody else who was going to be in the video,” she says. “I thought it was a cool group and that it would be fun to find myself in that and be twice everybody’s age.”

Acting still has its appeal beyond its reliable paychecks. “Sometimes it’s really nice just to be like, ‘Okay, tell me where to stand and what to say and how you want me to say it.’ And that can be very relaxing. One of my favorite things is relinquishing control because I’ve also supported my mom since I was 21 years old” — when her father died — “and had a role reversal with her. It’s just been a lot of pressure since then.”

Sometimes when she craves a break, Sevigny indulges in an outré but somewhat plausible fantasy. “What I would really like to do is buy a house in Provincetown, open a vintage store, and just be like the crazy old lady that people come and visit.” She’s obsessed with collecting specific pieces of old designer clothing, so much so that she recently had a remarkably well attended closet sale and confesses that she soon needs to have another. She’s on a hiatus from buying anything, which will no doubt be brief. “I don’t buy that much new stuff at all,” she says. “I get the thrill of a hunt, this one thing that nobody else has. I always think of it as part of my job and my business, so it’s okay, but I really just want less stuff. Why do I always want something new? What’s missing in me?”

There’s no bathroom in the precious little teahouse, but we’re right next door to a playground where Sevigny often brings her son, and she happens to know that the restroom there is pretty clean. After I use it, I pronounce it pristine, and she laughs. “They just chased a rat out of the pool,” she says, gesturing at the miniature public swimming pool fenced off nearby. She leaves her cardboard box, big pink tote, and Loewe bag on the bench as she goes in next, and for some reason I impulsively photograph them. When she emerges, I ask to carry part of her piles of stuff as we dash to Tribeca — she’s doing a hotel-room shoot to promote her fragrance, Little Flower, which she put out with her longtime friend’s indie perfume brand, Régime des Fleurs — but she scoffs at my offer. “I’m a schlepper,” she says, and I have to take two steps for every one of hers to keep up as she marches us the several long blocks to Fouquet’s.

On the way there, we talk about TV and pass John Slattery but don’t have time to stop to chat (they know each other, of course, but we’re all in a hurry). For a moment, I feel like New York is just full of celebrities walking around, but of course the ones who do are a breed apart from the ones who live behind gates in mansions. The paparazzi tend to snap Sevigny as she’s walking Vanja to school, which she treats as a minor annoyance, like mosquitoes. “I think it’s only the Daily Mail that buys them,” she says, “but I guess they pay them enough that they still keep taking our pictures.” She tries to avoid looking “schlumpy” but ultimately doesn’t care that much, and even schlumpy Sevigny still manages to be aspirational in vintage UGGs or Birkenstocks and socks paired with tiny shorts. As far as Vanja is concerned, she doesn’t love that his image is out there because of the paparazzi but accepts that there’s nothing much she can do about it. She has an Instagram just for friends where she posts photos of him. “There’s like 100 people on it; it’s very small. I guess it’s like a baby Finsta.” If fans approach when she’s with her kid, she’s understandably not thrilled, but she’s (Connecticut) polite about it. It confuses Vanja, though. “The other day he’s like, ‘Are those our friends, Mama?’ I’m like, ‘Kind of … Mama’s an actress.’”

Schlepping, baseball-cap-wearing Sevigny begins her transformation into movie-star Sevigny as soon as we reach the lobby of Fouquet’s, where the staff treats her like royalty. We’re ushered upstairs, where her longtime stylist, Haley Wollens, and a photographer await to do a shoot featuring the perfume in a jewel-like suite that goes for more than $2,600 a night but that they’re using for free in exchange for some Instagram posts from Sevigny. She says she’s done more press for this fragrance than she’s ever done for a movie or an acting role but finds the work worthwhile. “I try to fill my life with other things I can do that help keep those juices flowing and engaged — to satisfy my urges and also just to be busy.”

As soon as we get into the suite, Sevigny starts pulling a shocking amount of clothing out of her big pink tote, including a lacy bra, a skimpy blue one-piece bathing suit, a similar suit “maybe for under something” in white with ruffled shoulders, and a patchwork bolero from a brand called HAG. What look to me like long, dirty socks turn out to be vintage Vivienne Westwood thigh-highs. Other various items of clothing and lingerie litter the sectional sofa that delineates the lounge area from the dining area of the suite, where we sit as Sevigny prepares to have her makeup done.

As much as she’s protested that this is her least favorite part of her day on a set, Sevigny seems perfectly at ease as the makeup artist begins to apply foundation and I watch her emerge into focus as the familiar face every New York girl of my vintage has been emulating since our teens. As the artist artfully obscures a small pimple I hadn’t even noticed to the right of Sevigny’s sculptural nose, I ask her about the controversy around her recent comments about New York being too full of people walking their dogs in athleisure. She wants to clarify that she was really talking about dog feces. “I was being Connecticut and saying ‘dogs’ instead of ‘dog poo.’ I stand by those remarks. I mean, almost every restaurant I go into, or bodega, or whatever, there’s a dog. Don’t you think that’s unnecessary?”

“Well, people are hurting and they need their emotional-support dogs,” Wollens chides her, but now Sevigny is relaxed, sprawling comfortably as she gets spackled, and she continues for another few minutes about why it mystifies her that people who look “quote together” in their workout outfits (“Are they coming from class? Or do they just want to look like a Kardashian?”) can’t be bothered to pick up after their pets. As long as we’re complaining about the death of downtown, Sevigny has another bone to pick: “You know what else? I don’t like the faux flowers on the establishments. Is this Los Angeles? Really, bougainvillea?”

The question of what Sevigny will do to celebrate her 50th birthday comes up, and she is roundly chastised for saying she wants to do a quiet dinner date someplace luxurious with her husband. Her excuse is that she “went hard” for her last birthday, specifically to avoid having to make a big deal of 50. In the past, she’s had bacchanals: Her 40th entailed a girls’ trip to Tulum, “before it was so Tulum’d out,” and her 49th was a group trip to the Cayman Islands, “an excuse to have a vacation.” Under peer pressure, she concedes that she might have people over to the apartment for her 50th, if it’s complete enough. She and Wollens reminisce about how much Sevigny used to entertain, having people over to watch the presidential debates or the Emmys or for a girls’ night. Once, they christened her then-new apartment with a pagan ceremony. “We had a whole witchy burning of some sage and candles, some cigarettes,” said Sevigny. “But now with the baby in the house, it’s hard to do stuff there because he’s always there.” Still, he goes to bed eventually, and maybe once the renovation has doubled the apartment’s size, it’ll become easier to entertain again — Sevigny with her friends in the living room, her son in the bedroom just nearby.

She turns her face over completely to the attentions of the makeup artist, and Wollens and the photographer huddle over the pile of clothes, and I find myself the only one in the room without a job to do. I slip out the door, out of the adventure of Sevigny’s day, and back into a regular person’s New York.