CraveOnline: Is AJ Michalka where you were in the ‘90s?
Alicia Silverstone: Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t know. Who knows? AJ is so sweet and so loving. AJ has an amazing mom. It appears that she and her mom have this amazing relationship. They’re very, very grounded and she really can trust her. It just seems like when I watch her, she’s really got her stuff together. She seems very content and happy. Her sister is also a very strong part of her so she seems like she has a very rooted family. I just loved working with her. She was very, very sweet and very lovely.
Same with Adam [Taylor], the boy who played my son. I just wanted to kiss him all the time. It’s like unbelievable the kisses that were happening around there. He was just delicious and so sweet, little sweet muffin. So it was so happy to have two people that I could just love on.
Have you had a sort of second life to your career as a Broadway star?
Oh, I love doing theater so much. It’s absolutely so deeply fulfilling, so inspiring and exciting. Every time I do it I feel like I’m absolutely where I belong and I want to do more and more and more. It’s wonderful.
I re-watched Clueless as preparation for this interview and it struck me how the happiness in that movie is contagious. Was that a very happy time?
It’s so funny, I was working such crazy hours and I worked so hard on that movie. It came after a series of many, many films that I had done so me in my personal life at that time was not at all a reflection of what you saw on camera. But, playing Cher was amazing. When I was doing that character, I also had that feeling of ooh, I’m channeling something. Something really interesting is happening here. I was just really in the moment playing and felt very free and very creative.
The circumstances that Amy Heckerling wrote were just so brilliant. There was so much there for me to do and Amy just let me fly. She did what all great directors do. They cast the right person for the role. They’re working with wonderful material and they then let the actors do their business and just go, and fine tune whatever they need to fine tune. It was just really wonderful. It was such a good experience as an actress. I felt so satisfied and stimulated and turned on, but as a human being I was very, very tired.
Remember when those cell phones were rare and only wealthy people had them?
You know, my life feels like it was a whole other life ago. I almost don’t even remember. I did a movie with Amy Heckerling not too long ago called Vamps and I remember the whole movie there was all these themes about the past. There’s one line, it was so clever, where somebody says, “But what will we do?” because they can’t use their iPhones. Then my character says, “We’ll do what we used to do. You’ll make an appointment and you’ll remember.” I remember thinking I don’t even remember that. I can’t even remember life before a computer. It’s hard to remember.
The one aspect of Clueless that people might still have trouble with is falling in love with your stepbrother. Have you heard over the years or people come up to you over the years and said something about that?
Never once.
Really?
[Laughs] Isn’t that bizarre? No, never.
I figured anyone who’s grown up with a stepbrother or stepsister would say, “don’t go there,” and that’s not even me. I don’t have stepsiblings.
I guess that is weird but I think she makes it pretty clear in the movie that he was barely her stepbrother. It wasn’t like they grew up together since they were babies and they spent the last 14 years together. It was more like who knows how long my dad was married to that woman. It could’ve been a year and then he just hangs out.
