Katie Holmes: A Girl on the Verge
The worst part of watching the Discovery Channel is that moment before the Swoop. An innocent antelope munches peacefully while a voice intones, “This little fellow is enjoying a midmorning snack on the African plains.” You know the end is near. I am reminded of this when I sit down with Katie Holmes. Mercifully, it happens early.
Holmes is happily chatting about, you know, guys and stuff. “I’m more apt to go for a dark-haired man,” the nineteen-year-old star of the WB Network’s Dawson’s Creek is saying. “I don’t know, it’s my thing. Someone who’s intelligent but not showy. Especially in this business. You get around so many people who always need to be on, and it’s nauseating. It’s like, ‘Would you just be normal?’ ” She is lounging at a restaurant in Wilmington, North Carolina, which happens to be a hangout for the Dawson’s cast.
Holmes rolls her eyes. “My friend and I go on and on about our horrible guy stories.” She hesitates for a nanosecond. “Actually, I had really good luck this past year and I had a really wonderful, amazing experience.”
It is then that I feel the adrenaline pumping, for it is time for the Swoop. Which can be fun if one is armed with rumors of onset tantrums or some such ridiculous behavior. It is not as amusing to swoop down on a nice girl from Toledo, Ohio, about her “wonderful, amazing experience.” But swoop I must.
“Ahem. I have it on good authority that your experience was with Joshua Jackson, a.k.a. Pacey Witter,” I say as Holmes stares bleakly and then buries her face in her hands. She raises her head and takes a trembling breath.
“I’m just going to say that I met somebody last year,” she begins. “I fell in love, I had my first love, and it was something so incredible and indescribable that I will treasure it always.” She pauses. “And that I feel so fortunate because he’s now one of my best friends. It’s weird, it’s almost like a Dawson-and-Joey type thing now.” And that is all she will say. No, wait, there is one more thing. “He’s been in the business so long, and he’s really helped me. I respect him as a friend and as a professional.”
And with that, calm returns to the Serengeti.
***
Certainly, this past year has been action packed for Katie Holmes, one of the four young stars of Dawson’s Creek. Created by Kevin Williamson (who wrote Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer), the teen drama was an immediate hit for the WB. It features frank sexual patter (the pilot included a conversation about the correlation between finger length and the size of one’s cob), myriad pop-culture references and hey-now plot lines — Pacey, for instance, boinks his English teacher. The show, also starring James Van Der Beek (Dawson), Michelle Williams (Jennifer) and Jackson, swiftly became Number One among girls twelve through seventeen — and helped the WB’s ratings jump nineteen percent last season.
Holmes, who plays Joey Potter, the girl next door who joneses for Dawson, is the breakout star. On a show not too removed from a Knots Landing for teens, Holmes brings an unexpected nuance to her role — her character is gangly, only faintly aware of her beauty’s power, sometimes nasty and a little melancholy. Amazingly, Dawson’s Creek is only her second professional acting job, after her big-screen debut in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. Nowadays, Holmes is a regular screen veteran. During her recent offseason, she did not one but three films: Disturbing Behavior, this fall’s Killing Mrs. Tingle (Williamson’s directorial debut) and the indie film Go. To give you a better idea of what this year has been like for Holmes, consider that if we had consulted her calendar just one summer ago, we would have found her at the graduation ceremony at Notre Dame, an all-girls Catholic high school in Toledo. Nowadays, Holmes is so busy that she recently bought a condo in Wilmington sight unseen.
“I know it sounds really irrational,” she says, “but I talked to James, and he was like, ‘I found a great place, but I decided to get an apartment.’ So I called the Realtor. I was basically basing it on James’ opinion.”
Part of Holmes’ appeal is that she is a classic beauty, much lovelier in person than in photographs. Here she sits in front of her Wilmington hotel, awaiting her visitor for a shopping trip in town. She is cross-legged on the grass, wearing jeans, a man’s white V-neck T-shirt and light blue Chuck Taylor low tops that expose a stretch of tanned ankle. With her hair up and wearing no makeup, she’s a downright oddity among the parade of lacquered young actresses on the circuit these days, so fresh faced and healthy, the embodiment of American girlhood. “Hi,” she says, smiling wide and standing up to her full five-foot-seven-inch height. “I just spilled something on my T-shirt. God, I’m such a nerd.”
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