Monday, Mar. 23, 1998

The Call Of The Wild

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Start this story where it ends: on a drizzly night in Los Angeles, Neve Campbell's car is running out of gas. You've been at a coffee bar with the rising young actress, and afterward she takes you for a spin in her dark-green Porsche and then offers to drive you to your hotel. The needle on the gas meter is on the running-on-fumes side of EMPTY, and there's even an exclamation mark shining crimson on the dashboard. But Campbell, preternaturally polite, continues blithe small talk. "Is that band the Cult still together?" she asks. You confess that when it comes to '80s goth-metal bands, you're no trivia master. She continues, "I went for coffee with this guy who was in the Cult, and I was wondering if they were still doing anything." The needle dips further. You're close enough to the hotel. You get out so she can get gas. She drives off, smiling.

There's a resolute sunniness about Campbell; she's charming despite adversity, friendly under fire; her affability marches ever onward, like a line of ants. On her Fox TV series Party of Five, her character Julia is beset by such problems as a brother who may be dying and an adulterous husband, but she's always glowingly empathetic, never simply tragic. In the teen-horror flicks Scream and Scream 2, despite being pursued by psychos and serial killers, she exudes likability and warmth. And in her newest film, the sweaty, hormonal romp Wild Things, Campbell glistens with sincerity, even as her character is swept up in an unlikely swirl of perjury, murder and three-way sex. "[Neve] makes you care and empathize with her," says Bob Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, the studio behind the Scream films. Says Peter Roth, president of the Fox Entertainment Group: "She's beautiful but accessible. You feel she could be your friend."

Everybody wants to be Neve's friend these days. She's one of the recent crush of young actors whom Hollywood powerbrokers are starting to bank on to bring a new generation of fans into movie theaters. Her rise has been rocket-fueled. She was born and raised in Guelph, Ont. Her father, a high school drama teacher, and her mother, who ran a dinner theater, divorced when Neve was young. At age 9 she joined the National Ballet School of Canada; at 14 she dropped out of school to join the Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera; a few years later she moved to L.A. and was cast in Party of Five. "This new wave of talent is all- consuming in Hollywood right now," says Cathy Konrad, who produced the Scream movies. "Neve has a step up because audiences have been identifying with her for years on Party of Five. When she makes her real star turn, she'll have a body of work behind her."

With Wild Things, Campbell, 24, is making a bid to expand and eroticize her wholesome TV image. Although the film features plenty of sex--you see more than you need to of Kevin Bacon--she drew the line at exposing anything more than her shoulder blades. Says Campbell: "If I have to show my breasts, then I shouldn't be doing the movie at all--that's sort of how I feel." Later this year Campbell will appear in the disco-days flick 54 with Mike Myers. And with her brother Christian, she's co-producing and co-starring in Hairshirt, a low-budget comedy about newcomers coping with L.A. life. She hopes to screen it at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Campbell, who is in the fourth year of a six-year contract to star in Party of Five, says she will be through with TV after her deal is up. In order to work simultaneously in TV and film, she has sometimes had to put in seven-day weeks. "I need to have a life," she says. "I don't have one right now." The long hours seem to have taken a toll on her personal life. She says she's in the process of getting a divorce from her husband Jeff Colt, who is also an actor, though so far a less successful one. Campbell's favorite book is the inspirational philosophical text The Prophet. "There's one passage about relationships," she says, "about two trees growing, and if they grow too close together they'll shade one another and won't be allowed to grow, but if they grow enough of a distance apart, they'll be able to grow and continue their love. I find that to be really beautiful."

So let's end this story where it started: Neve arriving and, upon seeing you, smiling so broadly that it feels for a moment as if you both go way back. She is dressed crazysexycool: a puffy hat, a low-cut leotard top with a cardigan throwover, knickers, black boots. There is a freshly cut apple sweetness about her face and also something simultaneously sad and bright, like sunlight off a raindrop. This amiable radiance is, of course, why she's a star, and you're getting it firsthand now, unfiltered, undiluted. Still, she's got a tricky, winding road ahead. Finding film scripts as well written as her TV series, scripts that aren't steaming chunks of Gen Y exploitation, would be a tough task for any young actress attempting to make that small-screen-to-silver-screen leap. But with a scrappy new movie, a hot TV series and that smile, at this moment she's got enough gas to go wherever she wants.