From birth, it was practically guaranteed that Asia Argento would grow up to be someone interesting. She was born into an Italian horror movie dynasty, for a start. Her father, Dario Argento, has made some of the blackest and bloodiest movies of the genre – slasher flicks like Suspiria, Profondo Rosso, and Tenebre. Her mother, Daria Nicolodi, an actress, met a gruesome end in many of them. The only things her father would read to her at bedtime were his movie scripts, and as a treat on her sixth birthday, little Asia was allowed to watch Poltergeist. Growing up Argento was clearly a barrel of laughs. “My father did horror movies and my mother was always being killed in these movies – but my childhood was not as extreme as you would think,” says the 30-year-old Asia (pronounced Ah-shee-a). “I had a certain detachment from it, and a lot of pride. I thought it was really cool.”
While her unusual upbringing made it pretty safe to bet Asia Argento would never be boring, no one could have predicted just how beautiful she would become. Today, Argento is worshipped by men and women alike. Her sultry looks, heavy eyeliner, and tattoos (most of which she got between the ages of 14 and 17) combine to make her something of a thinking man’s Angelina Jolie. But the teenage Asia, who shaved her head and wore boyish clothes, spent much of her time convinced she was not much better looking than one of the corpses in her father’s movies. “I was the ugly one,” she says, “the weirdo, the geek, the freak.”
An introvert, she immersed herself in books as a way of making up for having virtually no friends. While the kids at her school were obsessing over Madonna and Duran Duran, Argento was crushing on Dostoyevsky and Baudelaire and watching the films of Roman Polanski. “Those were my youth idols,” she says. At age eight, she had already published a book of poems. She persuaded her father to let her act, making her debut when she was only nine years old in Sergio Citti’s 1984 Sogni e Bisogni. She worked with her father for the first time in his 1993 film Trauma, playing an anorexic girl looking for her parents’ killers. By the age of 21, she had already appeared in 14 movies, winning two Donatello awards (Italy’s equivalent of Oscars) for best actress as a paraplegic in Carlo Verdone’s Let’s Not Keep in Touch and Peter Del Monte’s Traveling Companion.
Then, in her early 20s, people started noticing that Argento was actually something of a minx. She was offered a part in Michael Radford’s B Monkey, and was required to learn how to be ultrafeminine for the role. Argento transformed herself into a gothic femme fatale, and found that she rather enjoyed the attention. A tendency toward soft-core in later movies resulted in Argento gaining a bit of a bad-girl reputation among the Catholic purists in her home country of Italy. Not that she cared. “I was very young when I started being naked in front of people – 21 or so,” she says. “From being someone who only cared about studying and reading all these books and then all of a sudden being the sultry bitch from hell, it was funny to me. Being a sex queen was funny. Today, I see it as my insecurity and my fragility manifesting itself. But at the time I thought, ‘This is the real power – look at my pussy.’”
And look we did, until Argento decided she had something more powerful than her body to offer the world: her mind. In 2000 she wrote, directed, and starred in Italy’s first digital film, the explicit, semi-autobiographical Scarlet Diva. The film came out in 2002, the same year she appeared opposite Vin Diesel in xXx. Suddenly an action babe, Asia found herself working out, wearing designer clothes, and lunching with Hollywood agents. It just wasn’t her. At the same time, becoming a mother in 2001 had also had a profound effect on her outlook. She and her daughter’s father, Marco Castoldi, had taken some “rancid” photos of each other, but Argento realized this was not the kind of stuff she ever wanted her child to see. “It’s kind of bourgeois and idiotic,” she says, “but I thought, ‘There is going to be a stage in my child’s life where she is going to see that and be really embarrassed.’”
The time had come for a new chapter. She continued to act, appearing in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days in 2005, but toned down the T & A. And she ventured into other areas, like directing music videos. “I always regarded acting as a simple job,” she says. “I am not a princess; I am a worker. I don’t want my ass to be licked. Maybe that’s why I do a million other things. Acting is not hard – that’s a lie that many actors tell. They feel embarrassed to be appreciated for something that isn’t very hard. So they can become spoiled brats. I fell into this trap for a while myself.” Director Abel Ferrara, with whom she had worked, had been a big influence for her. “With him, I saw another way of working, more free and more communist, where people can bring ideas and actors are not elite.”
Asia’s second directorial effort, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, was adapted from the book by J.T. LeRoy, with whom she had a well-publicized friendship. She directed and starred in the movie, but did not call on her father Dario for directing advice— they had a falling out after she refused to star in his last movie. It is not known whether she is still buddies with LeRoy either, since it was recently revealed that he is, in fact, a made up person. The author had fooled everyone (including Argento, apparently) into believing he was a former child truck stop prostitute with AIDS, when “he” was really a former phone sex operator named Laura. Naturally the press had a field day over this literary “scandal,” but we’d bet it was just business as unusual for Asia Argento.
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