From being a face in the Brain Candy crowd, Blair carried on to land a standout role in Cruel Intentions, the youthful, contemporary remake of Dangerous Liaisons starring Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Michelle Gellar. A romantic lead in the Hellboy franchise followed, as well as the supporting role in Legally Blonde and the TV show Kath & Kim, but Blair removed herself from the casting Rolodex shortly thereafter.

“I took a step back the last few years and haven’t worked. I took care of some kids and horses. I actually bought a horse … and it saved my life,” says Blair.

“I started riding seriously at 17 … show jumping. Now I do dressage, also, but I finally decided last year I’m not going to devote everything in my life to the next movie or the next TV show. I’m going to move on.”

Now back in the saddle professionally, as well as personally, Blair is in the midst of shooting a Vancouver indie thriller called Replicas. The debut feature from music video/ magazine publishers Justin Tyler Close and Jeremy Power Regimbal, Replicas features Blair in the lead role as a mother trying to enjoy some quality time with her family — when things go horribly wrong.

“A friend gave me the script and it was something I hadn’t done before. (So) I said yes and attached myself. It’s a really quick shoot, and when you do an indie with a new director and a new producer, you feel their excitement,” says Blair of the film currently shooting in Langley, B.C.

“I’m definitely the veteran on set. I’m certainly the oldest. It’s a young crew, and they’re so happy to see their dream coming together.”

As someone who describes herself as “a tough smile” who “never had a lot of twinkle and shine,” Blair says she’s lost some edges with age, and says the nice thing about getting older is that she can finally detach from any ingenue expectations.

“I’ve never been the most ambitious actress. I don’t look like Julia Roberts; that’s not what I bring physically to a role. Now I can play mother roles and it works. I feel something good is happening,” she says.

“If I could dream of the kind of career I’d like to have, it would look like Catherine Keener’s or Dianne Wiest’s — OK, I really am fantasizing here. But I think those actors are a huge pleasure to watch.”

Blair shouldn’t sell herself short. She, too, has a proven track record for being interesting, whether it’s as the villain-turned-ally in Legally Blonde or an ill-fated turn in The Fog.

“So it’s not Titanic,” she says. “I get confidence from doing it consistently, even if it’s under the radar. I can say to myself: ‘OK, I’m sticking around. I’m going to keep doing this,’ ” she says.

With personal and professional esteem surging, Blair says the other half of the confidence equation is crushing the bogeymen.

“It’s not an overwhelming thing. It’s just that somewhere, there’s this little bit of knowledge that someone is willing to take you down a notch. And you know, to not be paranoid of it, but just to realize it, and that’s the way a lot of people work,” she says.

“You can’t do anything about it except be mindful, and then move on with your life.”

And Blair is certainly moving. In addition to Replicas, she’s working with Todd Solondz on Dark Horse alongside Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow.

She’s also slated to appear in Four Saints, a First World War drama about brave nurses, and A Different Kind of Love with Richard Dreyfuss.

“I love Todd Solondz. I love a director with great vision who really knows what he wants.

“It makes the job easier, because you can understand the vision that much better and communicate it better. I want to do that for every director.”

Replicas wraps this month, with a release date to be determined.

Source

It’s always a big step for someone whose best-known work is on the movie screen (Hell Boy, Hell Boy 2 and Legally Blonde), to suddenly do live theater — but for Blair, it’s bigger than most.

She’s scared to go onstage, but she picks a show when she shares 90 continuous minutes of duty with Fleischer who plays Doug. She’s not a big fan of ick, but gore and vomit are crucial parts of the plot of this dark comedy by playwright Rajiv Joseph.

Blair and Fleischer, who most recently starred in Joseph’s play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (and who, if you Google, you can see in a guest role of Timmy the soldier on Jericho), sat down with Hair Balls to answer a few questions between shows. They’re relaxed and clearly friends; knew each other before this play, and seem in some (but not all) ways close to the characters they play: the outgoing and athletic Doug who gives too much for love and the more tightly-wound Kayleen who loves and cares, but perhaps not as much, and who cuts herself.

The play bounces back and forth in time as the audience learns of one injury after another that each of the leads incurs from the time they meet at age 8 to when they are both 38.

The injuries are horrendous and have earned the play its mature advisory from the Alley. At the same time, while extreme, they are more than suitable metaphors for the way people have of hurting each other in relationships.

“I think the ick factor of the play is something that keeps the audience visually in check. It keeps testing them. Where did those scars come from?” Blair said. “I’m not an ick fan. I had trouble even looking at him when we were first dealing with the prosthetics in the rehearsal process, just dealing with any blood is very frightening to me.”

In contrast, Fleischer said he felt right at home the first time he covered his face in blood. “I come from the horror movie background so I love that stuff. I put the stuff on and I think that’s great. I love putting that stuff on.”

But Blair is nothing if not a trouper: “I keep my scars on to stay in Kayleen’s skin when I’m not at work and then just touch them up before shows.”

The length of the one-act show is tough, both agree.

“Having done a bunch of theater before, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Fleischer said. “It basically is a one-man show where you’re lucky enough to have somebody else out there where if you start faltering at all or if your energy starts to drop, you can look at the other person and pick it up.”

“Rehearsal itself was really exhausting to me, but the payoff is so important,” Blair said. “It’s a blessing to get to do a play like this with Brad and with Rajiv’s words. I love this play but it does require an endurance I need to find and it’s an important play and I need to do it justice eight times a week.”

Fleischer was an easy pick for his role, but playwright Joseph said they tried out several actresses for the Kayleen part before they found Blair, who wanted this role for a lot of reasons.

“This play is so close to me. This is a huge huge factor in my life, this play, and it was something I also wanted to prove — can I do this? I’m terrified of stage, never really sure if I’m a good actress or not and this is a play where you get to figure it out; you get to work through a lot of choices and do it so many times.”

At this point, Fleischer broke in to say: “I can tell you exactly why she got it … We walked in and Selma is nervous and I was nervous for her and we started and …all of a sudden Selma says ‘I’ve got to stop,’ and blood’s coming out of her nose. For no reason at all, blood’s coming out of her nose.”

“I look over to Rajiv and he sits back and goes ‘Oh, my God’ and was just smiling and I’m thinking ‘Rajiv, you can’t start smiling when someone’s bleeding out their nose.’ And Rajiv says to me, ‘Are you kidding? This is Kayleen!’ ”

Gruesome Playground Injuries runs through Sunday, November 15 on the Neuhaus Stage at the Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue. For tickets, go to www.alleytheatre.org or call 713-220-5700.

From the Houston Press

What adds to the impact is that it’s based on the true story of the mother of actress Lori Petty, who both wrote and directed the film. Parade.com’s Jeanne Wolf found out that Blair was shocked by some of her scenes.

A character you love to hate.
“I wasn’t doing a likable portrayal of this woman. There wasn’t any point in sugarcoating it because this really happened. There were not really any redeeming moments. Lori’s mom was neglectful, hurtful, narcissistic, drunk, drugged and selling her body. She just was not getting it together for herself or her kids. That’s a pretty hateful place to be, but I really believe drugs and alcohol do that to the extent that you’re abusing them. I know plenty of damaged people and I’ve had my own moments of being a really damaged person.”

The downside of making her believable.
“Some people kind of got angry at me. At a screening I got some comments like, ‘How could you be so awful?’ I guess that’s a compliment because I was really just acting, actually. Horrible things happen to people. People go through dark periods. People do horrible things to other people. But I think this was also a story of redemption.”

See photos of Hollywood mothers and daughters

The real life happy ending.
“Lori and her mother have a good relationship now — a supportive relationship. Things have changed and her mother has finally gotten it together and is so supportive of Lori. Knowing that allowed me to play her as kind of truthfully and really kind of ugly as I did because I knew she wound up on the other side.”

Lori Petty behind the camera.
“Lori is a very outspoken woman, so she wasn’t going to just pussyfoot around something if I was really kind of mucking it up. She can talk about anything or tell you to get the ‘bleep’ out of her business. She’s not a shrinking violet. But that made me feel comfortable because I knew exactly where she was coming from.”

The booze flowin’ in the Poker House wasn’t exactly 100 proof.
“We were just drinking ginger ale. It’s always ginger ale or they have that near-beer like ‘O’Doul’s’ or something. But if you down like six of those it’s like the equivalent of one beer, I guess.”

As for the non-stop smoking.
“When you smoke in a scene, I’d rather just smoke a regular, darn cigarette. But they have these weird herbal cigarettes—especially for kids that are smoking in scenes—which are really headache-inducing and awful.”

And they’ve become a taboo prop.
“Cigarettes are a lovely crutch for an actor but they’re so not politically correct anymore. You’ve automatically made your character a villain if they smoke a cigarette. I get it. They’re very unhealthy.”

Who she’d most like to play in a biopic.
“I would love to do Courtney Love. I ran into her once – I’m sure she doesn’t recall it – but she was joking like, ‘Oh you should play me in a movie.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so great.’ I mean, I looked nothing like her at the time. Maybe now I do. But you know it was just crazy.”

From Parade

Probably not very. Historically, in superhero movies, the only way for an actress to get a piece of the action is to be a piece of action. While all these female characters will certainly be smart, capable women, their primary function will still be as the hero’s love interest. These perilous roles virtually guarantee that no amount of brains or pluck will be enough for a damsel to save herself from distress; her endangerment serves to ratchet up the tension of the film, which is always nicely resolved with the tender coda of her rescue. Naturally, as usual, the girls will also suffer the emotional kryptonite of loving a man with a serious identity crisis. On top of that, they’ll be given no otherworldly powers to contend with their crises, unless you count being really foxy with superhuman capacities for understanding.

Thank the gods, then, for Selma Blair. As the sharp, pyrokinetic Liz Sherman of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Blair promises to be the antidote to all this leggy helplessness. She may be Hellboy’s main squeeze, but she wields her very own superpower as a member of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, an international intelligence agency frequently tasked with saving the world. Still, it’s telling that the only real superwoman we’ll see this summer is in the most low-profile film of the genre, being played by the actress least likely to be featured in Us Weekly. That’s a pretty woeful state of affairs for such an otherwise enlightened set of hero tales. What does it take to get some superequal rights up in here? —Tammy Oler

From New York Magazine