Leelee Sobieski doesn’t want to talk about sex, which is a bit of a surprise: After all, she was only 13 when she acted a pervy scene with two old Asian men in wigs and underwear in Eyes Wide Shut, and her latest movie is Finding Bliss, where she plays an uptight NYU film grad who edits porn flicks as her day job. “The majority of things that turn people on deal so much with degradation, and that’s a weird reflection of humanity to me,” she says. “But it doesn’t turn me on. It’s more, like, fascinating.” She remembers that, trying to be helpful while filming with Stanley Kubrick, she suggested whispering something in Tom Cruise’s ear much dirtier than what the script called for. (She won’t say what she actually whispered.) “And Stanley was like, ‘No, don’t talk like that!’ He was very protective over me. He wanted me to remain innocent.”
We’re sitting in the wood-paneled Cosmopolitan Café around the corner from the Tribeca apartment where Sobieski, 26, lives with her fiancé, the menswear designer Adam Kimmel, and their 5-month-old daughter, Louisanna Ray, whom she calls Lewi. Sobieski was born in the city—her mother, Elizabeth Sobieski, is a writer, and her French father, Jean Sobieski, is a painter and former actor. “I like to feel safe and empty at the same time,” she says of the area. “Usually emptiness in New York is when someone’s lurking around corners to get you, but here it’s a woman with a stroller and a baby.” Like her. Despite her big-time gigs in Deep Impact and in the title role of the TV movie Joan of Arc, she’s cast herself as a mom for now. “People in the middle of America have babies at my age,” Sobieski says. Had she and Kimmel planned to be parents this early? She pauses. “We fell in love,” she finally says. Still, “I wish I had a girlfriend that had a baby. That would be so nice. I feel like I’m doing this thing that’s really weird, but I look around me and realize that everyone has babies. Look at all these people! So what?”
She’s excited about a spot on Lifetime’s Drop Dead Diva (“I’m somehow involved with a nail-polish formula that goes missing”). “I think I’m kind of off the radar now,” she says. “If I do get back on the radar … I don’t know if I want that. I love being able to sit outside at a café with my baby and relax and enjoy the sun.”
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