Queen of the '90s: Alicia Silverstone reflects on Aerosmith, 'Clueless', Batgirl, and coming of age on screen

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EW's '90s Issue cover star dives into the decade that made her a star, what she's learned over the years, and what's next.
Alicia Silverstone flashes a coquettish grin, her legs swinging, propelling her back and forth as she grasps the woven ropes to her left and right. She lets out a giggle as she swings higher. All that's missing are a pair of sunglasses and Cary Elwys and this could be a scene right out of The Crush.
In actuality, it's been 32 years since Silverstone's 1993 erotic thriller hit theaters… though you wouldn't know it by looking at her on this mid-July afternoon on the Los Angeles set of Entertainment Weekly's '90s Issue cover shoot.
The 48-year-old credits her veganism for her youthful aura, but the entire day feels a bit like a time warp back to the decade she helped define. A "90s Girl Anthems" Spotify playlist blasts out hit after hit, leading crew members to share stories of their graduation songs and school dances, and the still-swinging Silverstone to absentmindedly sing along to No Doubt's "Don't Speak" between takes. Then there's the fact that most of the crew is dressed like they just stepped out of one of Silverstone's Aerosmith videos.
The 1990s are having a moment, something Silverstone didn't really notice until a recent shopping trip with her son Bear, 14, in Europe, where she was filming her new Acorn TV crime drama Irish Blood.
"He wanted to buy baggy jeans, and I thought, 'That's so European of you,' because I hadn't quite seen it in the States yet," Silverstone recalls. "I guess he caught it first, and I just didn't know about it. But we went and got him some vintage jeans in East London. Grunge is back, it's cool to see."
It has to be particularly cool for her to see given that a flannel-clad Silverstone helped solidify the look's popularity in the '90s via the "Cryin'," "Amazing," and "Crazy" videos before ushering in the preppy-plaid era with Clueless in 1995.
But before all that, "I was just a little girl putting on little dance shows at home," says Silverstone, who grew up in Northern California taking ballet classes — when she wasn't playing on her Game Boy.
That is until "my dreams got crushed," she says matter-of-factly. "My ballet teacher smacked my bum and said something like 'You're too short to be a ballet dancer and your butt sticks out too much.'" (She laughs now, "I do have a butt, but still.")
After that incident, the former aspiring dancer decided to put her creative energy towards acting. She'd done modeling and commercial work as a young kid, but fell in love with acting at the dawn of the '90s in theater class at Crocker Middle School.
Silverstone's father took notice of her talent ("He discovered me," she jokes) and enrolled her in monthly acting workshops with Judi O'Neil, an L.A.-based talent manager who moonlit as an instructor — and searched for new talent — in the San Francisco area.
"From age 12 to 14, I think I was pretty bad," she recalls. "I would be narcoleptic in class and just fall asleep all the time. There was a boy there, Jonah Blackman, that I had a crush on who danced with Baryshnikov and was in a milk commercial, so I was always distracted and giggling."
But after a scene where Silverstone "really clicked in," O'Neil invited her to give Hollywood a shot.
"At first, I was auditioning almost every day, but I wasn't getting anything," she says. "Then, all of a sudden, I started to get close to everything. They would say, 'It's between you and one other girl.' But that actually was worse. I'd get so close and then be disappointed, where before I didn't care."
And she really cared about The Crush.
"They had me back many, many times, and it seemed like I was going to get the part — and then they offered it to someone else," Silverstone says of auditioning for writer-director Alan Shapiro's film about a 28-year-old writer who finds himself the object of a 14-year-old girl's dangerous obsession.
"It felt really bad. For some reason, I felt like I was supposed to play this psychotic character," she adds.
Of course, that's not how the story ends. Silverstone says when the original star dropped out, she got the call that the part was finally hers.
"I had to kiss the guy from The Princess Bride!" Silverstone, then 15, says of working with Cary Elwes, who is almost 14 years her senior. "I was young, so because we had this kiss in the film, I thought that that meant he was my boyfriend now," she continues, with a laugh. "Not really… but a little bit."
Upon release of the film in April '93, Silverstone — whose only other professional credit at the time was an episode of The Wonder Years — was catapulted into stardom, her trajectory boosted just two months later by her first music video. ("I didn't know who Aerosmith was when I got asked to do the videos," Silverstone admits.)
The emancipated minor (so she could work longer hours) was given the labels "the new Lolita" and "video vamp," as well as 1994 MTV Movie Awards for Best Breakthrough Performance and Best Villain.
How prepared was she for all that attention?
"Zero. Zero prepared," Silverstone says. "It was really hard, because you're just a little girl. You're a little person and trying to grow up, and you're growing up in front of people. For any human, it's an awkward time…. For any human, most of life is pretty awkward."
Still a teen, her body was openly discussed by the public and press (even, very regrettably, by this publication).
"We definitely did it differently back then. And that was not easy, for sure. But it's all fine. Nothing to lose sleep over," she says quickly before pausing. "But certainly something that stays with you."
Though with that attention came work, lots of it.
"I got to work with James Gandolfini and French director Alain Courneau, I got to work with Jeff Goldblum," notes Silverstone, who collaborated with the former two on New World and the latter on Hideaway.
She was even offered a role on Beverly Hills, 90210. But, as the actress said in her first EW cover story in 1995, "There's no reason to get locked into a television show when you might be able to do a movie with somebody like Al Pacino."
Then came Clueless. Like Aerosmith music video director Marty Callner before her, writer-director Amy Heckerling was pushed by friends to see The Crush as she cast her next big project.
"But I really wanted the girl from the Aerosmith videos," Heckerling told EW during our Clueless reunion in 2012. "Then I saw The Crush and realized they were the same girl."
"Amy had to fight to get this made. All the studios said, 'We're not making a movie with a young girl as the lead. It's going to fail,'" Silverstone says of the 1995 film, which became an instant cultural touchstone.
"I really think that it's magic in a bottle," she continues. "You don't get that often, and none of us could have thought that that was going to happen. But I think it was the combination of Mona [May]'s costume design, Amy's brilliant writing and directing, and I think that it's funny and charming. And Jane Austen's Emma isn't too shabby either, as a starting off point. I think Amy really had her finger on the pulse, and had a beautiful way of capturing moments in time."
Clueless casting director Marnie Waxman would say the same of Silverstone in that '95 cover story, stating that her superpower was "embodying the culture." The actress seemed just as at home in the preppy high fashion of Clueless as she did returning to grunge in her next movie — another steamy psychological thriller, The Babysitter — released just three months later.
"What's funny is, when I got the role for Clueless, I wore jeans," Silverstone says when asked about being a fashion icon. "Actually, my entire auditioning process up until around the time of Clueless, I wore jeans and a green T-shirt with a little pocket on it. That's just what I wore every single day. At that age, I never had any interest in fashion at all, so I would just wear whatever was around, even if it was really unattractive flannel."
She may not have cared about her fashion, but helping craft her Babysitter character opened the actresses' eyes to the possibility of having more agency in her career.
"They kept asking me to do it, and the script was interesting, but the character just felt like an object, so I kept saying no," she says of director Guy Ferland's script. "And then they were like, 'Well, what is it that you want it to be?' And so I started talking about how to have her be a human, and more interesting things for me to do so I'm not just a sex object. I don't know why I knew that, or how I knew that, but that seemed obvious to me at that time."
But while she felt increasingly empowered behind the scenes, Silverstone's power at the box office dimmed in the summer of '97 with the poorly received crime comedy Excess Baggage (her first film as a credited producer), and the big-budget Batman & Robin.
"When it came out, I don't think people liked it very much," the Batgirl actress says of the superhero sequel, for which she won a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actress. "But later on, people told me it's their favorite movie. It's very camp," she adds.
Still, you want every project to hit.
"We're all humans, so obviously there are things that can hurt your feelings here and there, but I really just got into activism and my desire to make the world a better place," Silverstone says of brushing off career disappointments by diving into her animal rights and environmental activism, promoting the personal and global benefits of veganism, and authoring The Kind Diet (2009) and The Kind Mama (2014). "I think that gave me something else to think about. I guess if [acting] was all I had, then perhaps I might be a bit more devastated."
Silverstone concluded the '90s starring alongside Brendan Fraiser, Sissy Spacek, and Christopher Walken in the romantic comedy Blast From the Past, her schedule slowing down to a steady film a year heading into the 2000s — rather than the four a year she was managing just a few years earlier.
"Before Clueless, I was much more intuitive and playful and had more confidence about what I was doing. And I think after Clueless, for a minute I got a little stressed and made it more intellectual or something. I had about three or four years of this strange feeling," Silverstone says looking back at the end of the decade. "Acting is important to me, but I have taken breaks from it at times, and then come back to it because I loved it so much. I've figured out that you can do all the things."
Now is clearly not a break. In addition to Irish Blood (the first two episodes are out now), Silverstone has Yorgos Lanthimos' sci-fi black comedy Bugonia in theaters Oct. 24, and the Netflix holiday rom-com A Merry Little Ex-Mas (produced by and co-starring another '90s icon, Melissa Joan Hart) streaming Nov. 12. That's on top of executive producing the upcoming Clueless sequel series, where she'll reprise her role as Cher Horowitz, and Pretty Things, an erotic thriller released in July and available on-demand.
"The '90s erotic thriller is back!" Silverstone declares. "But in the '90s, the woman was the naughty one, and she was definitely crazy or going to kill somebody or end up dead. In Pretty Things, it's an older, powerful woman and a younger man, and he's the weirdo. My character has a healthy relationship with sex and he ends up being the cuckoo bird. Now some might say she's a little cuckoo too, but I don't think so…"
So it's not only the grunge look that's en vogue again.
When asked to play word association and is given the prompt "The '90s," Silverstone doesn't hesitate: "I think of Nirvana, Courtney Love. There's so much. But for me, it's Clueless."
It's totally not just her.
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Directed by Alison Wild + Kristen Harding
Photography by Jeremy Choh
Motion - DP: Ava Rikki; 1st AC: Philip Hoang; Steadicam Op: Luke Rihl; Gaffer: Dimitri Christoforidis; Best Electric: Hayden Klemes; SLT: Michael Roseman; Key Grip: Jonathan Lee; Best Grip: Gino Roberson; Grip: Anthony Sandalena; Camera PA: Jacob Rumer
Photo - 1st Assistant: Chir Yan Lim; 2nd Assistant: Ferid Hasbun; Digital Tech: Dante Velasquez Jr.
Production Design - Production Designer: Cody Fusina; Art Coordinator: Mitchell Dillon; Leadman: Trevor Rittman; Art Assistant: Joshua Eisenberg; Construction Lead: Devin Parker; Construction Assistant: Daniel Salveson
Post-Production - Color Correction: Taylor Pool/TRAFIK; VFX: Viktor Metelev; Design: Alice Morgan
Alicia Silverstone - Styling: James Yardley; Styling Assistant: Rachel Zlotowicz; Hair: John D/Forward Artists; Makeup: Allan Avendaño/A-Frame Agency
(Cover)Dress: Marchesa; Shoes: Casa Lily; Jewelry: David Webb
(Header)Dress: Jenny Packham; Shoes: Gucci; Earrings: Melinda Maria; Ring: David Webb
(Additional Photos)Dress: Phan Huy; Shoes: Casa Lily; Jewelry: David Webb
(Interview)Dress: Rebecca Vallance; Shoes: Reformation: Earrings: Rachel Katz; Ring: Effy
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