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This site was created February 16, 1997
It was last updated June 1, 2001 

These are some online articles about Rachael that I have found. Some include interviews and articles on some of the films she has done. Enjoy!  
 

"Out of the Frying Pan..."
Brent Simon
 

ERachael Leigh Cook entered the public consciousness with a bang—literally—smashing the bejesus out of a kitchen with a frying pan in one of the more memorable anti-drug commercials ever filmed. A few years of small film roles lead to the successful teen comedy She’s All That, and this spring she appears in a troika of films, the new thriller Antitrust with Ryan Phillippe, the long-in-the-hopper Miramax frontier pic Texas Rangers (with James Van Der Beek and Dylan McDermott) and the high profile adaptation of Josie and the Pussycats, as well as having just wrapped up her first producing venture, a film with Lorraine Bracco, Shawn Hatosy and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (“I like to call it by its original name, A Conspiracy of Weeds. They’re calling it Tangled, which sounds like some ‘USA Up All Night’ thing.”) The 21-year-old sat down with Entertainment Today recently to talk about her new film and career to date.

Entertainment Today: Antitrust trades pretty deeply in technology. How plugged in to all that stuff are you?

Rachael Leigh Cook: I have a two-way pager and you can write to people on e-mail and you can receive mail from people with e-mail, so that seems to be all I need. If I need information I’ll get my brother to help me or something. I don’t like lugging a computer around. As far as reading goes, I prefer books.

ET: What was it like going on Leno recently?

RLC: [I was] scared out of my mind. You’re OK and everything’s going fine. And you’ve gone over the show with Jay and he’s been really nice and everything. And I’ve done this before [so] I’m thinking this isn’t going to be a problem. And then you can hear them say your name offstage and someone says go and everything stops and you lose all sense of direction and there’s all these people and you feel like you’re in a dream or you’ve been zapped into your TV set. It’s a very surreal thing. I mean, I watch The Tonight Show and all of a sudden I’m like, “You’re Jay Leno… oh, oh, oh!” It doesn’t seem real.

ET: What did you enjoy most about Antitrust?

RLC: To be completely honest with you, the workload was a lot lighter than any other movie I’ve had to do. I was up there for maybe two months in Vancouver and I only had to work maybe a month out of that total. So I had friends come up and visit me, took time out to read and take walks. It was great.

ET: There probably wasn’t much time to hang out with Josie [and the Pussycats].

RLC: It’s gonna be great. It’s so weird, I can’t even tell you. It’s very campy, it’s almost like a musical at times. It just goes there and back, it’s completely without fear. I hope they really go for it in the cut that they’ve got, because it’s interesting.

ET: Were you familiar with the cartoon before starting?

RLC: I hadn’t seen the cartoon until after I was completely signed on to do the movie. I had no idea the following it had. I mean, I was an Archie fan, but that’s sort of where that ended. The script was just so funny that I didn’t care about any of that stuff. If it stands on its own, that was enough for me.

ET: What kind of material do you get sent?

RLC: Honestly, right now, nothing good. People are scrambling to make things before this strike happens and it’s making people very stupid. I’m a little worried that we’re in for a year of bad movies.

ET: How did you first become interested in acting?

RLC: I did print work when I was a kid, really young. Like kid stuff and I somehow got a part in an independent short film shot on 16 mm, black and white. I was 15 at the time, local writer-director just needed a girl to be in his movie, and it came out really nicely.… A manager who works in L.A. was looking for kids because there’s a great theater scene in Minneapolis. So she was recruiting and came across some of my stuff and even though I wasn’t pursuing it, I was going to school, asked if I wanted to try acting in Los Angeles. This thing called The Baby Sitter’s Club was my first big audition and I got it…. It was hectic for quite a while there. I knew when we were shooting in Minneapolis when something just felt right. Because my whole life I had never felt like I was really good at anything in particular. I’m OK at this, OK at that, pretty good at this, really bad at that, and something just clicked. I felt fulfilled. And it’s all downhill from there! (laughs) But it’s great because you’re fighting all the way.

ET: Antitrust afforded you the opportunity to work with Ryan Phillippe and Tim Robbins. What was that like?

RLC: It was great. Ryan’s great to work with, they worked him into the ground on this movie. I mean, he worked the longest hours and he had one day off, or maybe half a day off over the entire shoot, so he just dedicated. He just gives his all all the time. He’s great to work with that way, a young actor who has everything in perspective and understands how lucky he is. Tim Robbins is amazing, can we just sort of agree on that right now? I’ve seen Bob Roberts an obscene amount of times. I was like ohmigod I’m in a movie with Tim Robbins. I don’t get freaked out by people easily—I’ve worked with Sly and some people that are kind of big—but pretty much no one has freaked me out, in terms of, “Wow you’re amazing, I can’t speak right now because you’re so good and I’m awful,” as much as Tim. He’s just amazing. He must think I’m the biggest idiot. It’s hard when you meet someone who’s so good at what they do, and it’s what you do too.

ET: Peter [Howitt, the director] mentioned some of the research he put you guys through, some of these tech-heads where he said you just keep nodding to give the impression that you have the slightest inkling of what the hell they’re talking about. What was that like?

RLC: I wanted little to do with it, to be honest with you. I mean, I’m all for doing my homework but when we went to these computer companies—in El Segundo, and one that was attached to Universal, the people who did Stuart Little—and I remember the life draining out of me as soon as I walked in the door. And I just couldn’t handle it. I grew up with my father, his voice always in my ear, “It’s a beautiful day, go outside.” And all of a sudden it was resonating a hundred times and the walls are coming in and it’s dark and there’s this guy who’s like, “Wanna meet my snake?” And I just wanted to leave. I hated media in school and it’s just carried over…. I wanted to do studies of the people, maybe: how did you know you always wanted to work with computers? Or don’t you miss things like sunlight or people or stuff like that? But they wanted to say things like, “So in this program when you click over here and it brings that up, does this code correspond to what was here earlier?”

ET: You’re originally from Minnesota, have a place in Los Angeles but have spent loads of time in Canada on three of your last four films. Do you feel like you have any roots?

RLC: L.A.’s nice in the way that it sort of understands why people are here. It’s not novelty for someone whose in a movie to walk into a restaurant. They’re not going to get mobbed or anything. It’s nice that way. But at the same time, I miss living in a place where a pilot is someone who flies a plane. I think it was Montgomery Clift who said, when people were saying, “Monty, why do you live in New York? You need to live in Hollywood, everyone lives in Hollywood,” he said, “Does the factory worker live in the factory?” And I think that’s very fitting. But, you can’t beat the weather, I’ll tell you that right now. I’m never going to dig my car out of the snow again.

--Brent Simon

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