Trudie Styler Interview on Alpha Male

Here's the excerpt about Alpha Male. Find the rest at The Independent.

She discovered Alpha Male director, Dan Wilde (whose short film, Bookcruncher won him Best Director at the New York Independent Film Festival in 2002) when he worked as her receptionist for three years. "He wasn't a very good receptionist," she says dryly. "He was clearly distracted by something. When I got to the bottom of it, I said, 'Well maybe when you've posted the mail, you'd like to show me your script.'"

Alpha Male is a compelling take on grief and dysfunctional families. A father's death brings his children's world crashing down. At first you find it hard to care about any of these posh, privileged people, but gradually you're hooked. Styler is especially touching as older sister Brede, who tries to seduce her brother-in-law (Danny Huston), then manipulate her grief-stricken sister (Ehle) after his death.

The impressive thing is that Styler can access the mindset of an abandoned middle-aged wife or a needy single woman. In Love Soup she was heartbreakingly funny as Irene, who dresses up in miniskirts to annoy her unfaithful husband. "It's that thing of 'To hell with her! To hell with him! I hope you're looking at me... in my skirt with the dustbin man.'"

Styler deliberately chose a dark wig to play Brede because it washed the colour out of her face: "I've got very pale eyes so the contrast made her a little bit disturbing. And she has quite a groovy haircut because she tries very hard, but something's a little bit off. She hasn't quite got it."

As for the sibling rivalry... "Of course, what I've drawn from is that I'm one of three sisters - in the middle. Growing up together, the sibling rivalry was fairly classic. Especially because my two sisters were both taller than me, so they got the new clothes and I got the hand-me-downs. It was always a rich source of discussion in our house." One starts to understand where Styler's passion for Gucci and Alexander McQueen comes from.