Fly, Robin, fly

Robin Tunney's name may not actually be listed In any directory under the heading Suicide Chick, but there is a certain thematic consistency to her work. The big-eyed, freckle-faced twenty-five-year-old Irish-American actress from the South Side of Chicago has taken a razor to her wrists in the stillborn, all-singing, all-dancing youthquake Empire Records (1995) and the foxy-teen-witch romp The Craft (1996), while in the unreleased Christian Slater mood piece Julian Po she Jumps off a bridge.

Tunney ratchets up her intensity level another couple of notches in the recently released Niagara, Niagara. As Marcy, a Tourette's syndrome sufferer whose obsessive search for a black doll head sucks In the passive, infatuated Seth (Henry Thomas), Tunney eschews the inherent shock value of her role, imbuing her character with an aching vulnerability instead. She emerged from the movie with both a Best Actress award, from last year's Venice Film Festival, and a husband, Niagara director Bob Gosse. This Jolt of happiness does not appear to have altered the trajectory of Tunney's career; she next appears in the Sundance entry Montana as a coke-snorting gangster's whore who comes under the unlikely protection of hitwoman Kyra Sedgwick.

JONATHAN BERNSTEIN: Getting to play someone with Tourette's syndrome must be like hitting the jackpot for an actor. All those tics, all that twitching . . .

ROBIN TUNNEY: Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they're happy. I was afraid it was going to be one of those actor's dream roles where you can see me acting and it looks like a vanity piece.

JB: Like Nell?

RT: I remember reading a review of that which said Jodie Foster was screaming so loud to be given an Oscar, you wanted them to give it to her just so she'd stop.

JB: Did you have to go to Tourette boot camp to bone up on the disease?

RT: This Tourette's center sent me a package that was like nine hundred pages. Bob [Gosse] told me to read all of it and then forget it. I was aware what was going on neurologically, I knew how it was medicated, and I read some diary entries from people with Tourette's. Then I watched a documentary called Twitch and Shout, which had a sense of humor about it. I find that most people with Tourette's do have a sense of humor-it's really the only way of coping. There's a scene in the film where Henry [Thomas] starts to imitate me, and I felt comfortable with that only because there was a still photographer on the film who was also the Tourette's consultant, and when we both imitated him he'd laugh about it.

JB: That's an unusual career choice for someone with Tourette's.

RT: Still photographer? Because you're not very still? I actually took a lot of his tics. I borrowed tics from several different people that I'd seen. There was this guy I knew socially who walked up to me in a restaurant one night and said, "I hear you're doing the Tourette's movie. You should call me." I looked at him and I didn't understand. I'd known him for three years, and it turned out he had Tourette's. I always thought he was just a bit of a nervous personality. He went through the script with me and validated certain plot points. After I read all the medical journals and watched all the documentaries, I still didn't understand the physical sensation of ticking and where it comes from and what it feels like. He was saying that it's all about physical satisfaction. If I have this tic and I touch you, it's because I see the hair on your arms and I have to feel my finger on the hairs. It's not the motion of going there; it's about where you're going.

JB: You do a lot more physical ticking than swearing, which Is the characteristic most commonly associated with the disease.

RT: Actually, under 10 percent of people who have Tourette's have coprolalia, which is the swearing part. I have vocal tics in the film, but I say nonsensical phrases because I thought it would be a more interesting take. Everyone knows about the swearing - you've seen that on Geraldo Rivera and Maury Povich. People find it funny, but I don't know if it gives you much of an insight into people who have the disease. I think it's a lot weirder to say "hurdy-gurdy birdy" than "fuck." We numbered the different levels of my Tourette's from 1 to 10, and for each scene Bob would say, "That last line was like a 4.5, and for the next one gimme a 6," like he was ordering a hamburger.

JB: And that performance got you the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival.

RT: I thought they were going to give me the You Were So Brave To Make Such A Big Idiot Out Of Yourself Award. When I won it, I was really choked up. They don't tell you it weighs fifty-five pounds. Here, pick it up.

JB: Oh my God, I think I put my back out.

RT: I know, and I'm a small girl, and I'm holding it with both arms flexed. And I wanted to put it down, and the Italians were like, "You don't walk off, you stand? They had this awards ceremony afterwards, in this old monastery in Venice, and I got up to go to the bathroom, which was about two thousand feet away, and the people at a table would get up and go, "Bravissima!" I was like, "Thank you," and I'd walk by another table and they'd get up and do it again. It was like being the Beatles for twenty-four hours. As an actor, those are the moments I always wanted. Approval from other people means a lot. If someone said, "Robin, Universal's doing this movie, Pigs Underwater, and they're going to pay you $1.5 million but you've got to give the award back," I'd be like, "I can't be in Pigs Underwater."