Lizzy Caplan, A Girl’s Best Friend

Creative Direction By Jackie Duval
Produced By Bao Chau
Styled By Julie Weiss for Margaret Maldonado
Hair By John Blaine at Rouge Artists
Makeup By Dean Bryant at abt-la.com
Retouching By plastipore.com
Photographer’s Assistant: Daisy Romero
 
Asometime brunette who is virtually unrecognizable from one project to the next, actress Lizzy Caplan does not lack classic leading lady beauty. She does, however, appear to lack the patience and perhaps the interest in pursuing full-fledged starlet-dom. “I can take a lot more risks than if I were more successful and had to wonder how the public would react to my roles,” Caplan says of her career standing. Though she later reflects that rather than a lack of success, she means “a lack of great fame.” Throughout her career Caplan has struggled against a tendency to try to cast her in one of two lights: as the quirky sidekick in mainstream movies, or as the next dark indie darling.
            An L.A.-bred actress who launched her career in 1999 on the NBC series Freaks and Geeks, Caplan, 26, first gained national attention when she played Lindsay Lohan’s best friend Janis Ian in 2004’s Mean Girls. Shortly after the film’s release, Caplan told an interviewer that she wanted to avoid a role reprisal. “Mean Girls was fantastic, but I want to step it up. I don’t want to be the best friend. I want to be the girl,” she said at the time. Caplan, who followed Mean Girls with parts in the offbeat CBS sitcom The Class and J.J. Abrams’ monster flick Cloverfield, now admits that perhaps the declaration was premature. “I think it was a little naïve to say things like, ‘I don’t want to play the best friend anymore,’ because I’m not in a powerful enough position to make those kinds of statements—especially not right after Mean Girls,” she says.
            Indeed, this fall Caplan is appearing on the big screen as the best friend again, this time in My Best Friend’s Girl, which hit theatres September 19. The movie centers around a relationship that develops between Dane Cook and Kate Hudson’s characters after Cook is hired to take Hudson on a date horrible enough to send her running back to her ex-boyfriend. “I am Kate Hudson’s best friend, who just kind of encourages her to date more and have more sex and more fun,” Caplan says of her role. Though Caplan has made her ambivalence for such parts clear—last year, in Janis Ian-like fashion (which perhaps explains why she keeps getting offered these roles) she described the project to BlackBook magazine in a single word: “ugh”—the actress points out, “I had some reasons for wanting to do this movie. Right after Cloverfield, I thought it would be kind of cool to do something so completely different.”
            Caplan is decidedly less torn about her recent part in HBO’s buzzy new series True Blood. “It was really amazing, a very incredible experience,” enthuses Caplan, who was featured on half the season. “The show is about how they created this synthetic blood so now vampires can walk among regular humans, and they’re not relegated to lurking in the shadows and biting people anymore. It takes place in this southern town, and it’s about all the bigotry that happens with vampires now being allowed to exist in regular society. And also if humans drink vampire blood, they get really high, so that’s my character. I’m into vampire blood.”
            Caplan has also branched out on her own, producing and starring in a short film called Successful Alcoholics with Cloverfield costar T.J. Miller. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with it yet,” she says of its distribution. “Hopefully somebody will decide to make it into a real full-length feature, because it’s already going to be like half an hour long when it’s all said and done, and we’re kind of trying to decide what to do with it when it’s all put together.”
            Initially, Caplan had planned to release Successful Alcoholics on the Internet, but its length complicates that possibility. “It’s so long that we’d have to break it up into multiple installments,” Caplan explains. She remains, however, excited about the Internet as a distribution medium. “It’s such an attractive option for us because so many people would see it on these comedy sites. One of my roommates is in an Internet video group called The Baby Eaters, and the amount that you can produce and the audience you can build online is so much more specific,” she says.
            As for what is next? All Caplan can say for sure is that audiences shouldn’t expect more of the same. “One of the greatest things about choosing this as a profession is that you can completely change who you are and what you look like with every role that you take, and I think taking advantage of that is definitely one of the things that’s appealing to me about this whole thing,” she says.