by SARAH ROWLAND

“I wouldn’t have thought of casting myself if I were making a film about Bettie Page,” says Gretchen Mol, star of The Notorious Bettie Page. And why would she? The slender, Nordic-looking actress is the physical antithesis of the raven-haired ’50s pin-up model. “I remember people saying, ‘Are you gonna gain weight? Are you gonna gain weight?’ The thing is, though, if I gained weight, who’s to say it would have gone to all the right places.”

True, the last thing you want in a bondage babe is thick ankles. So instead of super-sizing herself, Mol opted for what she calls “artistic padding” to fill out her leopard-print bikinis.

But before director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho) was willing to invest in faux fat, she needed to know that Mol understood the inner Bettie and, as the indie filmmaker explains it, that was a tough sell.

“The first time she came in, I wasn’t expecting her because she wasn’t on the list of people that I was seriously considering,” says Harron, who recently sat down with the Mirror in L.A. “But I knew her already and so I was like, ‘Well I love Gretchen, so just bring her in.’”

Unlike the other auditioning actresses who tried too hard to be over-sexed vamps, Mol seemed to grasp the naughty but nice playfulness of Page. So Harron took the taped audition home to her husband. “He was like, ‘Well, you found her, why audition anyone else?’”

That’s when Mol insisted on returning for another reading in full-on Page regalia and of course the infamous black wig—a look that achieved cult-like status, particularly among the rockabilly set in the ’80s.

“Before she came back, I had already made my peace with the fact that I was going to have a great actress but that she wasn’t really going to look like her,” says Harron. “So that second time we saw her done up, we were really knocked out. It was an unexpected bonus.”

Snapshot of a model

She may look convincing sprawled out on tiger skin in six-inch patent leather boots, but can Mol—a ’90s “it” girl who came dangerously close to being a millennium has-been—pull off Page’s descent into mental illness? Well, we’ll never know. Much to the disappointment of some critics, the mostly black-and-white biopic concentrates almost exclusively on Page’s heyday in New York and Miami. Starting with the 1955 Senate hearings that summoned Page for her role in porn peddling, Harron flashes back to the years leading up to the bust.

“When you’re doing a biography, you’re always faced with the challenge of shaping a film around the intractable nature of real life. And I wanted to keep it as real as we could, but there were parts of her early life that had to be cut,” says Harron.

As a result, childhood sexual abuse is only alluded to, her gang rape was glazed over and the fact that she married the same abusive man twice is not acknowledged. Nor is the time she was institutionalized for allegedly threatening her landlady with a knife.

“Those are interesting stories,” says Harron. “But in the end, it was like, ‘No, it’s about the ’50s in New York more than anything else and the other stuff is just the preamble to what is most interesting.”

The real Bettie agrees. The reclusive octogenarian recently went on record stating that she liked the movie. Oddly enough, though, she disapproved of the title.

“It’s kind of naïve in a way to say, ‘Oh I was never ‘notorious,’’” says Harron. “I mean in a way that’s right, she was never what people thought she was. But at that time, she was considered notorious. And what we’re trying to do in the film is make fun of the difference between the real Bettie and how she was portrayed in the hearings.”

Faith and fetish

What she really was, according to Harron’s portrayal, is a devoutly religious Nashville girl who just happened to make a big a name for herself in the fetish photog world. This seemingly contradictory attitude toward Godliness is epitomized in the scene where the Tennessee tease is sporting a muzzle-ball around her neck while she discusses Jesus like she’s talking about the weather. It’s this kind of dichotomy that inspired Mol to pursue the part.

“I knew the image of a vixen with a whip,” says Mol. “And then I saw an E! True Hollywood Story on her and I remembered at the end she came on and she was all kind of blacked out. She didn’t want anyone to see her today. She wanted them to remember her as she was. And her voice just really struck a chord in me because she had this kind of earthy Southern accent a very melancholy quality. After looking at these images where she was so exuberant and healthy I just thought, ‘Who is this woman?’”

Though Mol would have loved to have met her mysterious muse, who now resides in SoCal, it was not meant to be.

“I didn’t even try to look her up because at that point, I knew that Mary had talked to her brother and her ex-husband and she [Page] had written a letter saying she didn’t want to be involved in the film, so I had to respect her privacy.”

Mol wasn’t the only one who was disappointed.

“It’s a shame,” says Harron. “We tried to get her involved very early on but unfortunately her lawyer at the time was negotiating a deal with a rival project. At one point, I think Scorsese was interested, so for quite a long time I thought the other project would get there before us but for whatever reason that fell away.”

The naked truth

In addition to understanding Page’s countrified piety and innocence, Mol also seems to share the same free spirit when it comes to stripping down.

“Yes, she is by nature more comfortable than most with her body—of course it helps to look like Gretchen,” says Harron. “And it was a low-budget film and a very tight shoot. So I didn’t want to have to spend a half an hour in a dressing room helping somebody feel okay about it.

“It’s like if you’re gonna take this on, get used to full frontal nudity. And if you’re not comfortable with that, then you can’t play Bettie Page.”

Despite her own willingness to bare all, even Mol is in awe of Page’s naturist ways.

“When I look at her photos, I’m just sort of flabbergasted at her ability to be so proud and healthy about her own nudity, she’s kind of saying, ‘What’s the big deal?’ And it’s true: what is the big deal? Why do we get so worked up about it?”

Good question, especially considering we are living in a post-nipple-gate era.

“I think it’s interesting that [Harron] started this project eight years ago,” says Mol. “Back then things seemed to be a bit looser. But now suddenly the film feels a little more relevant with all the censorship that’s been going on. And I don’t think she meant it to be, meaning we didn’t expect the film to feel as timely as it is.”

The Notorious Bettie Page opens Friday, April 28

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