2003. The movie Old School. Early on in the film, Juliette Lewis has just been found by her husband. She is in trouble, but you can tell she doesn’t really care. As she smokes a cigarette in front of the refrigerator, she looks at him and says, “I’m really sorry…” It’s her voice. Her eyes. Her expression. Layers of expression—comedy, tragedy, a caduceus of personality.

You always remember your first Juliette moment. Smoking a cigarette, wielding a gun. Bat out of heaven or hell. What can we say? Words can get drab when you talk about comets, meteors, and the likes of Lewis.

She’s had a career spanning over 30 years. She’s worked with directors that the silver screen salivates for—Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), which she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. She was in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992). Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994). Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, (1995). Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). That’s just her early work.

Enter Lewis in the present, in A24’s OPUS (2025), directed by Mark Anthony Green. OPUS follows young journalist Ariel [Ayo Edebiri] as she chases a story to the compound of a mysterious pop star [John Malkovich] who has been missing from the public eye for 30 years. “Some things just call you,” Lewis tells me. “Mark Anthony Green has a really strong voice, and he wrote the piece and there were interesting themes in it I hadn’t seen. I’m always looking to do what I’ve never done before, so this offered me something totally new.”

Lewis grew up with chickens and horses in the valley towns around Los Angeles, daughter to Geoffrey Lewis, an actor with an illustrious career himself, and Glenis Batley, a graphic designer. Her upbringing, in between the farmlands outside of the city, still informs the way she thinks of home—and her career—in the present.

“Am I living the way I want to be? Rather than [with] automaticity?” Lewis asks the sky, remembering from whence she came, “What I mean by that is, when I was younger I was in constant motion. I moved every year, for whatever reason I romanticized being nomadic or in constant movement. I wasn’t in search of home, but over time, because my job takes me elsewhere often, I had to start creating home. It’s taken me this long to find it and create it truly. I say this often: I’m never leaving where I am now.”

She continues, “As one ages, certain sensitivities become more enlivened. For me, [I don’t want] traffic, noise, congestion, all that stuff. But it’s weird because I work with emotions and my band is rock and roll, full-on noise, for lack of a better word. So, I need my real life to be quiet and simple.”

The aforementioned band? Juliette and the Licks. Music and movies are her trip, which she is still on to this day. The nerves. The rattle and hum.

“Recently I did a musical volunteer charity show for fire victims and I had so much terror in my body that I had to leave my quiet place, my home, to drive two hours and perform two songs without a band. I’m used to having a band—because if my voice is a little rough it doesn’t matter because my drummer’s amazing—but I didn’t have that. It was just me and my guitar, and I was like, ‘What is happening?’ I had so much terror in my body. I was like, ‘Am I done?’ But you force yourself to just rise to the occasion, and I went there and it was a beautiful and incredible experience.”

What is she talking about? Standing in front of people, saying “take me.” This taking is what makes Lewis so interesting to behold on screen. Why? She is true; nonpareil. 

Some might call Lewis a character actor. Calling her such would be doing a disservice by A) putting her in a box, and B) discrediting the purity of her work, the humanity that she always brings to the table. How did she find that transcendent nature?

“I have no idea,” she says, “and that is better answered by people who hold that flame for me. But it’s really remarkable that in this midlife experience, after I did Yellowjackets, the response was so positive. I was so shocked by that, because I was so critical of my work.”

She pauses. “[Yellowjackets] changed me. Now I can’t deny one’s knowledge of one’s value. I’m just saying that a few years ago I could still deny my value [as an artist]. I’m always trying to reach a kind of transcendence or shapeshifting. I want to fully transform. When I do character work, I want to lose myself to the point that I don’t recognize myself, but that’s impossible, so I hope to do that for others in my work. I don’t judge myself in a crippling manner, one that is just defeatist and self-sabotaging. I’m over that hump as a creative person—when you’re younger you can propel yourself by this mild masochism, but as you’re older it doesn’t serve. For me it’s always about having a positive and challenging experience and not so much about the outcome.”

In a world of simulacrums, an approach like Lewis’ is refreshing. It’s like living on an island of art made of tree ripened fruit. Nowadays, people pull off apples, mangoes, and coconuts made of plastic. “I love when people are trying to do something different. Break genres or meld genres. I feel OPUS does that. I like when people try new things in movie making beside being safe or cool.”

Safe or cool is a principle Lewis seems to resent. “There’s a documentary from when we did From Dusk Till Dawn, if you ever want to see my younger self. I’m like, ‘Yeah all acting is just lying.’ And then they interviewed Harvey Keitel, who could actually articulate the process. He was saying kind of the polar opposite, yet we were actually just saying the same thing—but I was a flippant 22-year-old who didn’t understand her gift or how to articulate herself.”

But now, Lewis says, “When I was younger I may have thought that recklessness might achieve a thing of beauty. When I did my band full on for six years, and [I was] whipping the audience up into a reverie with rock and roll or punk music particularly. It seemed like chaos, but it actually wasn’t,” she contemplates. “It’s totally a release and expression. There’s a harmony to it and a unity that’s profound. How that relates to acting is that in my creative spirit I’m always wanting a lift off, and what’s changed for me is that I value helping others and being of sane mind in myself, to help people that don’t feel that way.”

The conversation turns, more broadly, to craft. Lewis is forthcoming: “I don’t believe in torturing or harming myself on a physical or mental level for the sake of art.” It’s a principle she’s become decisive about after decades in the business, but she still hasn’t lost her taste for adventure. “I was one of those young, daredevilly people. Like, risk your body. I still have a daredevil quality that I never want to lose but once you’ve experienced death and lose the value of living [changes].” For instance, on her 50th birthday she wanted to learn to drift cars.

“Psychologically it’s about how to fully be in control of what seems to be uncontrollable…I almost didn’t do it cause we had to wake up at like six in the morning, but I fucking did it.  learned how to drive a stick that day and I got the feeling of it. It’s also about how to harness the adrenaline in your body. It was very metaphorical and very therapeutic for me.”

How does Lewis maintain the dance—this lust for life, and for the new? She upholds a unique sense of—and respect for—her artistry. She knows when to go, and when to take a pause. “I thought I could stop acting, but it was the saddest time in my life. It was a deep swell of melancholia…I always felt like I had one foot out the door of my own success with show business, so it was important to take breaks. I took breaks over time. I’m used to the discomfort, before it was hard to feel uncomfortable. It’s a gift and a curse—my gift and curse was being able to feel things like they’re electric. Like they’re on high. Now they have a language for such things. Empath or whatever,” she laughs.

Generally, we bow at the altar of evolution but cower at the risk of being purely one’s self. “I heard Rick Rubin get asked something: ‘Do you ever think of the audience?’ And he replied, ‘Oh, no.’ His answer was really that if you do something strong enough for you, or in your own interest, you will find other people that have those interests, that are wowed by them, or excited by them, but you have to truly commit to cultivating your point of view.”

Such reminds us of Juliette’s performance in The Thicket (2024), where she played Cut Throat Bill, a ruthless killer with a voice like gravel, a film that mixes masculine with feminine, like a 90s grunge band on icy fire.

“They gave me the ingredients that said this woman everyone mistakes for a man. She’s a savage killer. I wanted to give [the audience] a reality, but it’s because the writing gave me the ingredients. The first thing that came was the voice because she was called Cut Throat, and I felt like she was a callous soul. So I absorbed the knowledge and then I started playing with it physically and vocally, but…the whole time I was doing it, I was going: ‘Is anyone buying this?’”

We bought it, certainly. Paid for it in cash. Throughout the interview, Juliette’s words are echoes—of the scripts she has brought to life, of the music she’s put out in the world. The beauty of her speech comes from the pauses between movements. “I quit acting when I was 22. I had romanticized normalcy. ‘I’m going to be a waitress and I’ll meet some nice person in a small town,’ and I did meet a nice person in a small town who has nothing to do with show business, but…” she stops, pausing again to let the words reverberate. “Now more than ever I hunger for the wild, the weird, and the strange in the medium I love, which is movie making.”

The weird and the strange—but by her definition—not anyone else’s. The actor will continue on her own, heedless of the audience, as she’s done her entire career, finding rests between rhythm and making them glorious.

Photographed by Amar Daved at Defacto Inc

Stylist: Christopher Campbell

Written by Augustus Britton

Hair: Paul Norton at Tracey Mattingly

Makeup: Rachel Goodwin at A-Frame Agency

Flaunt Film: Isaac Dektor and Ethan Schlesinger

Photo Assistants: Jeffrey Robins and Nikko Peach