One symptom of the decidedly nonmedical condition known as “baby face“ is the ability to cry your way out of any speeding ticket. Another, at least in the case of a winsome few, is a pronounced lack of difficulty in finding work in Hollywood. Such are the maladies that afflict Alison Lohman, the actress with the Kewpie-doll countenance and a reputation for playing characters far younger than her 26-year-old self: She was the luckless kid who was bounced between foster moms Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger in White Oleander; the teenage incarnation of Jessica Lange in the Tim Burton fable Big Fish; and the possible long-lost daughter of Nicolas Cage in Ridley Scott’s con caper, Matchstick Men. “I’ve never really thought of myself as a child,“ says Lohman, sipping chamomile tea at a coffee shop in Santa Monica. “But it’s always something that I’ve found useful.“
It will be even harder to think of her that way—harder to think of anything at all, really—after seeing her performance in Where the Truth Lies, the latest offering from director Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter). The film casts Lohman as a ’70s-era reporter investigating a murder that broke up a Martin-and-Lewis-like comedy team played by Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon. Of course, our intrepid journalist will stop at nothing to get her story, even if it means engaging in explicit carnal entanglements with both her leading men and—hey, lady!—a girl-on-girl love scene. The movie has already been slapped with an NC-17 rating, apparently having run afoul of the MPAA’s “three thrusts“ rule. “Isn’t it unbelievable that they go into such mathematical depth?“ says the outraged Lohman. “It takes all the fun out of the scene.“
Undaunted by the amount of flesh she had to bare in Truth (“Maybe if we ran around topless all the time,“ she opines, “we wouldn’t have NC-17 ratings“), Lohman says the role wasn’t a conscious attempt to prove to the film industry that she’s all grown up. “I just love to scare myself,“ she says. “I think it’s my motto.“ Even scarier: She’ll soon be playing a 16-year-old girl in the Fox remake of My Friend Flicka. So is the studio aware that the fresh-faced star of its family-friendly horsie picture will be coming off a steamy tale of sexual intrigue when Flicka opens? “I don’t know,“ Lohman says, shrugging. “I’m not going to be the one to tell them.“ Neither are we.—Dave Itzkoff