JANUARY 1994 #2
So it stood that despite the publicist and the full team on set and the sky-high stakes of hitting this all exactly right, I was in my hotel room doing my own hair and makeup before our screening.
We were a few days into our trip, and Ruchi had me on a near-continuous press circuit.
I had smiled and laughed and swooned for so many people that my cheeks had begun to hurt.
I’d found myself wearing that necklace of Harper’s—evidently plastic rather than turquoise, the fake silver chain greening around the edges.
But it had inadvertently become a luck charm of my own.
This role may not have been her, but it wasn’t entirely divorced from her either. A version of myself, with elements of her bravado that translated into a flirtatious aloofness, like you knew you weren’t getting as close as you wanted but wondered if that wasn’t half the fun.
I’d opted for a dark teal dress, crushed velvet with crisscrossing straps to match the necklace, tying my hair back in a loose and messy knot like I’d just woken up one day and thought to hop on a plane from London to Utah and accidentally ended up at a film festival.
Utah, which was, of course, fucking freezing.
My winter coat was designed for a London chill, to be layered with jumpers and scarves, and intended to get you from one tube station to another. This was a ski resort in January.
All this to say, I was shaking as I arrived at the screening and paler than the snow-capped mountains surrounding us.
There was no red carpet, just room J at the back of the theater and a quick press talk before the movie rolled. Backstage, as I clutched coffee in a desperate attempt to warm myself, Ivan found me.
“Ready for this?” he asked.
“Are you ready for this, Drozdov?”
Ivan smiled. “Nadine, I’m fucking terrified. Thank you for being here with me.”
I put the coffee down and wrapped my arms around him tight. “The film’s made. Nothing left to do but sell tickets for the show.”
———
More journalists attended than I’d expected. Evidently, Ruchi was good at her job. And I spotted a few faces I’d personally invited at parties throughout the festival.
Oisín’s hand found my waist as we walked, then it slid to my knee as we sat behind our table in front of the screen.
The questions came quickly.
“Nadine, what was the hardest part of filming Dreadbase?”
A glance at Oisín. “Not getting distracted by my coworkers.”
The soft chuckles of the press were a delight to entice. I almost liked it as much as acting—it was a show I was putting on. And my audience would take it and project it across the world.
“Did you have to go on a special diet for the role?”
“Less a diet than intensive physical workouts.” Another quick look and a sly smile. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been so physical.”
There were other questions. I told them what the role meant to me. Why I felt connected to Adeline. The work I did to embody her.
But those are the answers people still remember.
Not that they mattered much at the time—coverage was quiet. Only splashes in official Sundance roundups, where the glowing reviews were buried beneath lengthy thought pieces on the avant-garde shows and evident paid features from bigger studios.
When, three weeks after Sundance, Dreadbase hit theaters to moderate success and then snowballed to word-of-mouth popularity, the press dug through the recordings they hadn’t bothered to print at the time. Suddenly, we were everywhere.
An instant cult classic with two hot new rising stars at its center.
Adeline was a role that critiqued the Madonna-whore complex. She was the smartest of all the characters, the reason anyone made it out of the film alive.
But so many people missed the point—turned her into the very caricature she was critiquing and made her their icon. Every man’s perfect, impossible-to-achieve woman.
And, obviously, that scene.
The one that comes up if you search that film or say my name or enter any costume shop in the last decade.
Adeline, me, in the same jumpsuit we were all wearing, unzipped a little farther.
(I was a woman. It was the ’90s.) And that one scene, where Howard betrays her, tries to sacrifice her to the thing chasing them, and ties her to a gas pipe, a single wrist above her head, before she manages to wrestle his gun from him and shoots him through the heart.
The blood that will draw the monster right to her. The point where she will surely be devoured, refusing to be a quiet sacrifice but going out in a spray of her lover’s blood, the taste of his subterfuge and her sweet revenge the final thing to savor.
Or, rather, Adeline, chained for your ravenous delectation, vicious and violent. A girl to be consumed who’s feisty enough to at least make it fun.
They sold more Dreadbase jumpsuits than Princess Leia bikinis that year.
Because, yes, I was covered in blood, which made that jumpsuit just a bit too tight and made my nipples press through the fabric.
Just like they did that velvet dress in the ice-cold Sundance press junket.
That’s the shot, the one they made posters of: Adeline, gun raised, splattered with blood, unable to escape.
Blockbuster ordered life-size cutouts to accompany the eventual tape release, and people looted them before the week was out.
I went to Central Art and Drama School. I wanted to win an Oscar one day. I’d taken a complex role in an arthouse film because the character spoke to me.
And my tits made me famous.