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Julia Stiles has been on our screens for almost three decades. After studying theatre in New York as a child, Stiles was cast as a disturbed teenager in the 1998 Michael Steinberg thriller Wicked. This led to her break-out role as the antisocial older sister of Larisa Oleynik and potential girlfriend of bad boy Heath Ledger in the 1999 Shakespeare-influenced 10 Things I Hate About You (based on The Taming of the Shrew). On screen, she then dated Freddie Prinze Jr in Down to You, and swapped ballet for hip-hop with Sean Patrick Thomas in Save the Last Dance.
As Stiles grew up, so did her characters. She played a young assistant to Betty Rizzo from Grease (Stockard Channing) in The Business of Strangers. She was Julia Roberts’s student in Mona Lisa Smile and then, most scarily, she played the adopted mother of the son of Satan in the 2006 film The Omen.
But it was for her role as black ops CIA agent Nicky Parsons inThe Bourne franchise that Stiles truly went blockbuster. Her on-screen chemistry with Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne is gripping. Bourne holds her at gunpoint in The Bourne Identity, kidnaps her in The Bourne Supremacy, rescues her in The Bourne Ultimatum, and spoiler alert, mourns her in 2016’s Jason Bourne. It’s quite a ride.
She also played Ophelia to Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet, Alec Baldwin’s inappropriate love interest in film-within-a-film comedy State and Main, Jason Lee’s homewrecker in the comedy A Guy Thing, and Jennifer Lawrence’s sister in Silver Linings Playbook.
On telly, she has appeared in Dexter, hosted Saturday Night Live and has been Punk’d by Ashton Kutcher (supposedly tearing apart an irreplaceable queen’s garment during a photoshoot). She’s also great as the rich, but conniving, American art curator widow in Sky Atlantic series Riviera. She once wrote about being a feminist in the Guardian. And her favourite pizza topping is: not a whole lot.
Now she is about to make her directorial debut in romantic drama Wish You Were Here, with Jennifer Grey and Kelsey Grammer, and is here to take your questions. Ask her anything, from being a child star, working with Matt Damon, her lack of pizza toppings, her apparent love for Fleabag and Duran Duran, to – news just in – that the director of 10 Things I Hate About You has announced three new sequels – will Stiles star?
Please give us your questions by 6pm BST on Monday 12 May and we’ll print her answers in Film & Music on 23 May.
