Chloë Sevigny Tells Harper’s Bazaar: “I Never Felt Pretty My Whole Life”

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Style icon, indie film goddess, and all around queen of cool Chloë Sevigny is busy promoting her latest project: The Five-Star Weekend, an eight-part drama costarring Jennifer Garner and Regina Hall, which drops on Peacock this July. To that end, she sat down with Harper’s Bazaar to talk about life, acting, beauty, and aging in Hollywood. “I never felt pretty my whole life,” she told writer Laia Garcia-Furtado. “There were very pretty girls in my class, very conventionally pretty, especially within the ’80s standards of what that meant. I knew that I wasn’t.”

Sevigny goes on to talk at length about her relationship to fashion, style, her work, and her self-image. It’s an expansive profile and worth a read, but here are some of our favorite tidbits from throughout.

She described working with Garner, Hall, and the rest of the team on The Five-Star Weekend as one of the most fulfilling experiences of her career.

“We were really like open books. Everybody overshared, and there was an ease and a comfort between us. With the mourning and the grief in the show, there was a lot of support for one another. It was a really good feeling.”

She wants to be in a Broadway musical.

“I love musicals, but I’m not very good at singing. Maybe if Cole [Escola] was writing something new, that would be fun.”

Her parents kicked her out of the house as a teen for piercing her nose.

“I was like, ‘Fine, I just won’t live here anymore,’ so then they let me come back.”

She loves Vera Bradley bags.

There’s no quote about this, but apparently she told Garcia-Furtado that she does while vintage shopping in Chinatown. Garcia-Furtado, Sevigny, or both attribute this particular fashion quirk to her growing up in middle class comfort in the suburbs of Connecticut.

She used to read the tabloid stories about how bad her style was.

While considering a threadbare Norma Kamali onesie in a vintage shop, she tells Garcia-Furtado “I used to have one just like this. I wore it in L.A., and Us Weekly made fun of me — they used to always make fun of me — like, ‘What was she thinking?’”

In her opinion, her best outfits are not the ones she’s actually photographed in.

“Everyone’s always like, ‘Chloë’s style!’ but it’s like, none of you even know my style because you don’t see me every day! There’s very few paparazzi [shots] of me day in, day out or me going out to Sway once a week. Nobody sees all those outfits, sadly, and they’re really good.”

Her little runway trick.

“One of my little tricks on the runway is to do a tiny smile, because otherwise I have a resting-bitch, dour, whatever, old-lady face. So I also have to just bring a little joy.”

She worries about “disappointing people” with her looks as she ages.

“I think because I’m so involved in fashion, there’s a pressure to maintain a sense of whatever it is that I’ve cultivated. You know what I mean? And so that can sometimes be challenging, and wanting to not disappoint people with my looks.”

She is totally for having cosmetic work done on herself, but nothing “major.”

“I’m going to do all the little things. I just haven’t done the major things,” she adds, laughing. Nothing that would change her face. “But I think also for women, if you were always touted as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’ it must be just really, really challenging,” she says. “I don’t have that. I’ve never felt that.”

She worked at the Polo Ralph Lauren store in her local mall as a teenager.

She got the job after she shaved her head between her junior and senior years of high school.

She moved away from modeling because it didn’t give her enough creative agency.

“I remember doing the X-girl fashion show [in 1994] and seeing everybody in the audience [and thinking] I wanted to be one of the creative types that was invited to watch the show and not one of the girls walking it. It was a crystallizing moment for me.”

Harper’s Bazaar’s May issue hits newsstands May 5.