“Boogie Nights” changed Heather Graham’s life.
It made her a movie star. Paul Thomas Anderson taught her directing strategies, by example, that would come in handy two decades later. And she learned to roller skate – boy, did she ever get good at roller skating.
Currently appearing on NBC’s limited series “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders,” Graham – who’d go on to major roles in “The Hangover,” “Bowfinger,” “From Hell,” “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” and many others – could not believe her luck when she got a chance to read Anderson’s script about an ad hoc family of pornographers in the San Fernando Valley.
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“I was an actress who was, I don’t know if the right word is ‘struggling,’ but wanted to get bigger jobs,” says Graham, who had already impressed a small but devoted following (if not a lot of Hollywood decision-makers) by the mid-1990s with her work in “License to Drive,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and the first iteration of “Twin Peaks.” “I was basically going on auditions, and to read a script that good, you usually thought, ‘Oh, they’re probably going to cast someone famous.’ I thought I didn’t have a shot.”
While the likes of Drew Barrymore and Tatum O’Neal had been considered for the teenage adult performer known as Rollergirl, it finally fell to the closest thing to a real Val in the entire, impressive cast.
“To get that job at that point in my career was huge,” Agoura-raised Graham points out. “It was really hard to book something great if you weren’t famous, so getting that job really was a massive breakthrough for me. And when you read a character and it’s named Rollergirl, you just think this is cool. She’s such a cool character, never takes off her roller skates! I mean, it’s so original and unique. When has anyone ever written a part like that? I just loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s brain that came up with that idea. I just knew when I read it that this was super special.”
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Indeed, the porn starlet was never not on wheels, even when she took off everything else. While Graham admits doing her first nude scenes for “Boogie Nights” was nerve-wracking, she really got into the Rollergirl footwear ethos.
“I tried to wear them all the time except when I was, like, endangering my life,” she says of shooting days. “I was taking classes and I was prepared and I was skating around all the time. But I had a stand-in and she, basically, wiped out immediately because there were all these cables everywhere. It is kind of dangerous.”
As was the life Rollergirl lead, filled with drugs and skeezy, disrespectful guys. While Graham has played a number of lost souls in her career, she didn’t personally relate to the character on that level. But as a (mostly) cheerfully adventurous, ambitious gal from the So Cal suburbs, the actress embodied what could have been a Valley Girl stereotype with layered, seemingly effortless authenticity.
“I did grow up in Agoura, but I still felt like I was a Valley Girl with all the Moon Zappa ‘like, ohmigod’,” Graham admits. “I still really make an effort not to say ‘like’ too much because it reveals my Valley Girl roots. But I love California and the Valley, and I think Paul did a great job of capturing it. Yeah, with a lot of strip malls.”
Graham fondly remembers the “Boogie Nights” company reflecting, in a much more wholesome way, the movie’s clan of fictional dysfunctional filmmakers.
“It was just a very fun time,” she recalls. “They were such a big, cool cast that it definitely felt like a family in some ways. I mean, that was sort of the story, these people that form this weird family. And we felt like a family, really supportive to each other and so excited about what we were doing. Paul created that family atmosphere on the set.”
Law & Order
But now, Graham’s embroiled in recreating one of the worst family tragedies in L.A. history, the 1989 murders of Carlos and Kitty Menendez by their sons, Lyle and Erik. Like “Boogie,” the “Law & Order” anthology series boasts an impressive cast (Edie Falco, Anthony Edwards, Josh Charles), and Graham plays Judalon Smyth, the woman who essentially blew the whistle that nailed the brothers for their crime.
“Basically, Erik Menendez was seeing a therapist, and the therapist was married and he had a mistress,” the actress explains. “That’s my character, and when their relationship broke up, she went to the police and told them that the Menendez brothers had killed their parents and there were tapes of them confessing to the therapist. The police suspected them, but they really didn’t have a lot of evidence until she came forward about the tapes.”
Terrible stuff. But guess what?
“Actually, people are very supportive on that set, too,” Graham happily reports. “It’s very sweet. It’s weird how you can make these movies about this dark subject matter but all the people that you’re working with are incredibly nice.”
And that, more than even rollerskating, is the ethos Graham cherishes most from her mid-’90s experience with Anderson and the likes of Mark Wahlberg and Julianne Moore. Graham recently wrote and directed her first feature, “Half Magic.” She also co-stars in what she describes as a sex comedy inspired by a bad breakup, and talks about her set as more than a little influenced by how she saw “Boogie” work.
“In a way, you do feel like you’re a parent,” she says of directing. “You want to be this loving, supportive person that just helps everyone feel comfortable enough to do their jobs. When Paul directs, he’s very supportive, so I tried to also be very supportive. He’s just very passionate about what he’s doing and it rubs off, and he makes you feel really great about yourself. So you feel like you’re already coming from a charmed place, and that gives you lots of confidence.”
Dirty and devastating as its subject matter often was, Graham can only view “Boogie Nights” as, like, totally a blessing.
“It made me someone who got offered big movies, which was great,” she enthuses. “I didn’t have to audition for parts, just got offered leads in studio movies. So that was really awesome!”
