vanessa marcil - Jezebel Magazine

 

It’s all about Kash

Story by Elina Fuhrman

(to read the full article click on the scans above, below is just the partial interview)

Sitting on a sofa in her small one-room trailer on the set of NBC’s Las Vegas, Vanessa Marcil lovingly glances at her 4-year-old son, Kassius, who is playing with toys at her feet. “Kash,” whose voice greets callers to his mom’s cell phone, is a cute jackpot full of love and the center of her life. “I’m grateful to be able to get paid to do what I love doing...and also [be able] to take him to Disneyland,” Marcil says. “It’s a good life,” she adds with a smile, “a good life for both of us. We have more than we need.”

A small curtain of dark hair that came undone from Marcil’s loose ponytail brushes against her cheek. Then she confides, “I don’t think I’m the best actress I can be since I had Kassius, and I don’t think I’m the best mom that I can be...I know we all think we can do it all. All I know is I really want to do a good job.”

Vulnerable, introspective and every bit as beautiful inside as out, Marcil plays an open-handed game. At 36 and a single mom (she and Kassius’s father, Brian Austin Green, never wed), Marcil doesn’t avoid sharing her difficult upbringing in Indio, Calif., where her mother held the family together while her father struggled with alcoholism. “My mom always was sewing something, cleaning something, cooking something, making dough out of flour. She also worked all the time,” she says. Marcil pauses, then shows yet another card, “That’s where I got my complex that I’m not good enough.”

With credits that include playing Nicolas Cage’s fiancée in the action blockbuster The Rock, three Daytime Emmy Award nominations and a Daytime Emmy Award from her six seasons on General Hospital, two years on Beverly Hills, 90210, guest star roles on NYPD Blue, and now her alluring and popular role in Las Vegas, feelings of inadequacy seem out of place.

“I was a late bloomer. I think I’m still waiting to bloom,” Marcil insists, recalling the turning point she reached when her son was born. “I used to be very committed to being in shape. I was a vegan and a vegetarian my whole life, and I worked out,” she says. “After I had Kassius, I was like, ‘I’ve had it.’ I started eating things that I’ve never eaten before. I had a glass of wine; I rebelled against working out; I started eating meats; and I stopped doing yoga. Before I was extremely fit and then my body got really curvy. I realized, ‘Oh, I still like myself.’ I was still good enough. I didn’t have to work out, be perfect and have the perfect body.”

Now Marcil confronts her self-prescribed shortcomings with particular zest. “I have a phobia of anything new that I haven’t tried, but I’ll be damned if I don’t do it,” she says. “I’m really into sports...I like to sky dive, I like to snowboard. I do things that scare me.” Her most recent extreme sport? Motorcycling. “My boyfriend (writer/director Benjamin Younger) is fanatical about motorcycles. He’s gotten me into it,” she says.
“I want my character to start riding a motorcycle on the show,” Marcil adds, explaining how she has been working with a stunt trainer. “I love my character...she is basically a boy,” Marcil says of the sexy, determined and meticulous casino hostess Samantha Jane “Sam” Marques she portrays on Las Vegas. “She doesn’t care about love–she’s determined to never let it get the best of her. She’s obsessed with work and with making it to the top. But what’s most interesting about her is that she’ll never take anything from anybody; she doesn’t want any money that she didn’t earn, and she doesn’t want anyone to take care of her. She’s really obsessed with becoming what her definition of success is.”

That is, as long as “Sam” can get her boss, security chief and streetwise tough-guy Ed Deline, played by James Caan, to do her bidding once in awhile. “What goes on in Vegas is insanity,” she laughs. “Things that you would never believe can happen, they do happen in Vegas.”

Marcil calls her famous co-star “incredible” and says she can hardly believe she gets to work with him on a daily basis. “Six years ago when I watched The Godfather, he was my favorite character. I always had the biggest crush on him and I still have a crush on him. He is just really great to work with,” she says.

And Molly Sims, who plays Caan’s daughter? “She’s a super-model who can actually act,” Marcil says, noting she feels lucky to share the set with such “amazing” stars. “Our set is the second-largest set ever built for television. It’s the real size of a casino...it’s incredible. And the slot machines actually work.”

Marcil’s road to Las Vegas was neither short nor expected. Career steps always happened by chance encounters, Marcil recalls, chalking her lucky breaks up to good timing or perhaps lady luck throwing her weight around. When she arrived in Los Angeles after high school, she had no plans to be an actress. “We were growing up so poor that I didn’t even think I could do something like this. It was unrealistic,” she says. “I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, because I like to debate.”

So it was by complete accident that Marcil got into acting. “I was giving my friend a ride to an audition and the director asked if I was auditioning,” she recalls. “I said ‘no’ but he wanted me to anyway.” Marcil did and got the part in a one-act show. It was during this performance that a woman from the audience asked to be her manager. “I’d already heard all these stories so I was wary. I said, ‘If it’s going to cost me any money, then forget it, because I have no money,’” Marcil says.

But the woman came back every night to see Marcil perform, and on the last night she took some Polaroids of her and stapled them to a “fake” resume. “I’d done nothing and she started sending me on auditions,” Marcil explains. “I got a pilot and a short film, and while I was shooting the short film, I auditioned for General Hospital.”

Marcil giggles remembering that audition. “I sat in the waiting room and there were literally these 6-feet-tall, gorgeous super-models, and I’m 5-foot-4, little Mexican kind of nerdy girl who wears glasses,” she reminisces. “I was in ripped jeans and Converse tennies and thought I had to be at the wrong audition–there is no way this is the right place for me! So I called my agent on a pay phone. I was extremely nervous, borderline anxiety attack. I was terrified and said I was leaving. Then, I was almost at the elevator when the casting director called my name. I thought, ‘Please, let it go away.’ I told him I was at the wrong audition but he said, ‘No, you’re at the right [one].’

“I was on [General Hospital] for four years, then I was off the show for four more and then I came back for six months, right after I had him,” Marcil finishes her tale, gesturing toward Kassius, her leading miniature man. “Are you cold? Do you want some water? You want to put your sweatshirt on?”

It was cooling down at Century Studios in Culver City, Calif., and on the set of Las Vegas. The show’s assistant director was knocking on the door and waiting for Marcil to get back on set so the shoot for the day could wind up, but Kassius was still a bundle of energy, his laces untied.

“When we were kids, my mom didn’t have a car so we walked everywhere. If I wanted to have candy other kids had, I would steal it from the corner store and would be very ashamed. I didn’t have the cool shoes,” she remembers, drawing again from her deck of memories. “I still walk backwards away from my car (a ’74 Ferrari Dino). I still can’t believe things are happening for me.”

But for Marcil, it’s all human connection. “I do believe that if people believe in themselves, they can get other people to believe in them,” she says. Marcil speaks passionately about her charity work with kids who have been affected by drug and alcohol abuse. “[I know] first-hand what kids go through and how much it can affect you and kill your spirit,” she says. “I just want to help or even connect with kids that are going through that and tell them that they can get out and have a successful life. Everyone can help other people just by acknowledging and validating someone else. It doesn’t have to be in any profound way.” Even if it is.