Please Rewind Talent Wall

Bijou Phillips

Bijou Phillips has built a screen career around characters who rarely arrive without complications. Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 1, 1980, she began working as a model in her early teens, appearing on the covers of Interview and Vogue Italia and in Calvin Klein campaigns. Music followed: her debut album, I’d Rather Eat Glass, was released in 1999 and remains her only full-length record. That same year, Phillips made her film debut in the independent drama Sugar Town before taking a larger role in James Toback’s Black and White. She appeared in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous in 2000, then moved deeper into independent cinema with Tart and Bully. Those films helped establish a willingness to play volatile, exposed young women rather than soften their rough edges; PopMatters described her work in Tart as “fearless,” while The Hollywood Reporter named her one of its 2002 “Shooting Stars of Tomorrow” following Bully. Phillips continued to gravitate toward uneasy material. She played a nanny in the John Irving adaptation The Door in the Floor, a spoiled socialite in Havoc and an ill-fated student in Venom. Horror became a significant part of her filmography through The Wizard of Gore, Hostel: Part II and It’s Alive. Her work in Hostel: Part II demanded an especially elaborate torture sequence, an experience she later said she did not need to repeat. Her range extended beyond contemporary drama and horror. In What We Do Is Secret, she portrayed Germs bassist Lorna Doom, earning praise from Variety for a “striking” performance. She also appeared opposite Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston in Choke and played a club singer in the 1930s-set Dark Streets. On television, Phillips took a darkly comic recurring role in Raising Hope as the title character’s biological mother, a serial killer sentenced to death. Across film, television, music and voice acting, her work has consistently favored the strange, abrasive and off-center.