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What Hollywood took away from Mena Suvari

New memoir details her harrowing past, including surviving sexual abuse

AMY KAUFMAN

There are so many things Mena Suvari never wanted you to know. And there were ghosts of her past all over this town, willing to keep her secrets. Like the woman she ran into once at Whole Foods — a woman with whom she’d had a threesome.

“I was mortified, because I was famous then and she knew me when I wasn’t,” recalls Suvari. “Our paths crossing again was uncomfortable and weird, and I found myself in a situation where I had to apologize.”

It wasn’t that she felt bad about sleeping with women or doing it freely. It was that she’d spent so much of her life sacrificing her own desires to please men. In one particularly toxic relationship, a boyfriend had pushed her to solicit women — including this one at the grocery store — to participate in a porn-inspired menage à trois featuring painful sex toys.

That sort of behaviour didn’t jibe with the actress’s public image. In the two 1999 movies that made her famous — the teen comedy “American Pie” and the suburban drama “American Beauty” — the central narrative revolved around her characters’ virginity.

But it’s been two decades and Suvari, now 42, says she is tired of pretending. So she’s written a memoir, “The Great Peace,” that will not only shatter her saccharine reputation but also, she hopes, free her from shame.

She tells a story that is harrowing from the outset: at age 12, she writes, she was raped by her brother’s friend. After she moved to L.A. as a teenager, a photographer took naked underage snapshots of her. She writes that when she was 16, one of her representatives — 20 years her senior — would have sex with her and then remind her to learn her lines or brush her hair before an audition. She contracted herpes, she says.

She got married and divorced twice: first, when she was 21, to Robert Brinkmann, a 37-year old cinematographer she met during a movie shoot. Ten years later, she married Simone Sestito, an Italian concert promoter who, she claims, bled her financially and got physical with her during heated arguments. (In a statement, Sestito denied Suvari’s allegations.)

Suvari says she numbed her problems with marijuana and, at one point, meth. She grew critical of her body, getting breast implants only to have them surgically removed years later because they embarrassed her.

It was in 2018, when she was redecorating her home with third husband Mike Hope, a set decorator and prop master she met five years ago, that Suvari made a discovery that would lead to “The Great Peace.” She stumbled across some artifacts from her adolescence, including a 50-page poetry binder, old photographs and a diary containing a suicide note she didn’t remember writing.

After Suvari toyed with various ideas she was persuaded by a friend to go the memoir route.

In “American Pie,” Suvari was cast as a guileless choir girl who dates the football jock with a heart of gold.

“I had to figure out what people wanted from me and, with ‘American Pie,’ I could play into that image,” says Suvari, who was living with that threesome obsessed boyfriend at the time. “I couldn’t say, ‘My life is a nightmare right now,’ because they wanted to hear what my experience was like in high school when I went to prom.”

She got better at faking it only after she landed the role in Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty.” Suvari was to play Angela, an alluring high school cheerleader whose best friend’s father, Lester (Kevin Spacey), develops a strong attraction to her.

Suvari recalls what she describes as an “odd” encounter with Spacey on the set of the Oscar-winning picture. Before the two actors were set to film an intimate scene, “Kevin took me into a small room with a bed and we laid next to each other, me facing toward him while he held me lightly,” she writes.

“Lying there with Kevin was strange and eerie but also calm and peaceful, and as for his gentle caresses, I was so used to being open and eager for affection that it felt good to just be touched … I didn’t know how far he was going to take it or how I was going to react if he did go there. But he didn’t.”

Suvari is still very much a working actress. Opening up about her past has allowed her to feel “more present” in her acting, she says.

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2021-07-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

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