Julia Stiles: ‘In the nineties female characters were either sexy or had glasses’

The star of the rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You has directed her first film.

Julia Stiles stars as Georgina Clios in the TV series Riviera.

It is, amazingly, a quarter of a century since a 17-year-old Julia Stiles redefined the rom-com heroine in 10 Things I Hate About You. Surly, bookish and magnificently uninterested in being liked, Kat Stratford, the lead character of Gil Junger’s high school take on The Taming of the Shrew, became a feminist icon for millennials. Kat read Sylvia Plath, kicked mocking classmates in the balls and dismissed Ernest Hemingway as an “abusive, alcoholic misogynist who squandered half his life hanging around Picasso, trying to nail his leftovers”. Sweet and pliant she was not.

“Teen romantic comedies were very popular in the late ’90s and the female character was either sexy or had glasses on,” says Stiles from New York, where she was born and still lives. At the time, she was often told that she was “too intellectual and too serious, and needed to smile more, which is why Kat was so appealing to me”.

The film was adored for its arch script and Kat’s slowly thawing romance with Patrick Verona, the class bad boy played by Heath Ledger. “When it came time for us to kiss he made me feel really comfortable,” Stiles says of Ledger, who died in 2008. “I was better able to perform because I wasn’t feeling threatened by him.” He could smoulder too. “Oh, he lit up a room. So magnetic.”

Heath Ledger and Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You from 1999. Picture: Getty Images

The film has become a cult classic. “It’s such an affirmation that people are still interested in it,” Stiles says. And it made her one of the most coveted young female actors in Hollywood, leading to a starring role in another millennial favourite, the dance drama Save the Last Dance (2001), and a recurring part as agent Nicky Parsons in the Bourne movie franchise (2002-16).

Junger has just announced that he is developing a sequel trilogy called 10 Things I Hate About Dating, 10 Things I Hate About Marriage and 10 Things I Hate About Kids. “I would love to work with Julia again,” the director told People magazine. “She shaped the lives of millions of women. That Kat character really spoke to young women in a very powerful way.” Stiles, 44, doesn’t want to comment on her involvement in the sequels but her participation would send ageing millennials wild.

Before that has come her directorial debut, Wish You Were Here, an adaptation of the novel by best-selling romance writer Renee Carlino. Given her intelligence, earnestness and Ivy League English degree, Stiles writing and directing an uncynical love story feels as likely as Kat Stratford becoming a cheerleader. Stiles is more sentimental since becoming a mother, she says, having given birth to her third child just three months before shooting started. “I feel so much more raw and ­emotional.”

Wish You Were Here stars Isabelle Fuhrman (Clove in The Hunger Games) as Charlotte, a young woman who falls for Adam (Mena Massoud, the title character in the live-action Aladdin), a mysterious street artist who lives in an unrealistically expensive loft apartment. After a night of passion Adam ghosts Charlotte, who discovers he is harbouring a secret.

“I had a really visceral reaction to the book,” Stiles says. “I was laughing and crying and then laughing through my tears.” When it came to the film she tried not to get carried away: “These romance movies can become sentimental very quickly.”

The brutal turnaround between birth and shoot “wasn’t by design”, Stiles says. It took her five years to adapt the script and sort out producers, financing and the cast. “Then the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) strike happened. Then I had a baby. And when we were finally able to get back in production, I just thought, ‘I have to do this now’.”

Her husband, cinematographer Preston J. Cook, went back to work at the same time, “so I was kind of solo parenting three kids. But my parents were immensely helpful – they came to live with us – and I had a wonderful nanny”.

“I was certainly overwhelmed at times,” she say, “but I just kept saying to myself, ‘You can do this because women do it all the time’. Women with jobs equally if not more complicated or demanding than mine.”

Well, Heather Graham, her co-star in last year’s Chosen Family, did say Stiles “could be president of the United States”. She wrinkles her nose. “That’s so silly. That’s nice of her to say, but it’s a bit hyperbolic. Also, by the way, apparently no woman can be president.”

Stiles on the set of Wish You Were Here.

Stiles, who is the daughter of a ­businessman and an artist, is refreshingly immune to flattery. Putting her career on hold in 2000 to study at Columbia University “really helped stop me from being a complete narcissist”, she says. “It kept my focus outward instead of inward.”

She is popular in the industry, and has pulled off a double coup in Wish You Were Here by casting Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) and Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing) as Charlotte’s parents. In one scene Grammer shows off his mighty baritone, singing a passage from The Marriage of Figaro while cooking. “I wrote that specifically so we could hear him sing opera,” Stiles says.

They met while making the 2021 film, The God Committee. “We didn’t have trailers, we had little cubicles and I could hear him singing. He was practising for (the stage musical) Man of La Mancha, which he did in London right after. I saw him in that and he has such a powerful voice. I thought, ‘we have to hear him sing’.”

Stiles soon abandoned all of her high-minded directorial ambitions. “I did all the things to the actors that I swore I would never do,” she says. The plan had been not to give notes on a first take “but very quickly I would just cut that short and say, ‘Do it happier’, ‘Do it faster’.” She has learnt from some of the best, naming Doug Liman, who directed her in The Bourne Identity, Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) and Rodrigo Garcia (the web series Blue) as the three who have influenced her the most.

“The number one thing with all of them is they remain calm on set,” Stiles says. “They do not bring all the stress that they’re dealing with behind the scenes with them. That makes actors feel comfortable. The cast are going to be fighting with their own nerves – they don’t need to be dealing with yours.”

Stiles with actor Matt Damon in The Bourne Supremacy from 2004.

Her experience on Silver Linings Playbook (2012) was less of a breeze, given that it was directed by David O. Russell, who denied reports he had a physical fight with George Clooney on the set of Three Kings. “I had a hard time with David O. Russell,” Stiles says. “His style is very challenging, but I did learn a lot from him and he does make good movies.”

Stiles, whose recent television roles include Georgina Clios in Riviera (2017-20) and Maisy-May in The Lake (2022-23), is next appearing in Unbearable Christmas, a comedy “very much in the spirit of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – a family road trip where everything goes wrong. It’s very funny”. After that there may or may not be a part in the 10 Things sequels, but she definitely wants to direct again.

“I am totally hooked,” she says of Wish You Were Here. “I really have never felt more energised.” Coming from a parent of three young children, that is seriously ­impressive.

The Times

Wish You Were Here is streaming on Amazon Prime.