At a Los Feliz café, Mia Kirshner seems nothing like Jenny Schecter, the narcissistic diva she portrays on the Showtime lipstick lesbian drama, “The L Word.” When the sixth and final season premiered recently, Schecter was found dead in a swimming pool, possibly offed as a result of her sexual or other improprieties. The role is the latest in a series of provocative characters the 34-year-old actress has played in film and on television since she was a teenager. But in person Kirshner comes off less as a femme fatale than a waif in her baggy black dress, long ponytail and tiny gold Star of David necklace.
In a demure, polite voice, she said she has been grateful for the chance to play Schecter, in part, because the salary has allowed her to pursue a more personal project: “I Live Here,” a four-volume anthology about the lives of refugees in the Russian republic of Ingushetia; Burma; Juarez, Mexico; and Malawi. Kirshner said she spent $200,000 to travel to these regions in order to collect testimonies from people rendered stateless or without a home. Collaborating with three co-authors and top comic artists such as Joe Sacco, she aspired to tell their stories through photographs, collages, paintings and journal entries, including her own.
In a brothel on the Thai-Burmese border, Kirshner spoke with prostitutes who appeared to be under 15: “There are no beds, only plastic mats with faded flowered bedding,” the book says. “A girl climbs out of the closet and into the room. She was hiding from a potential customer.”
Kirshner also met with child soldiers, mothers dying of AIDS in Malawi and a Chechnyan mother and children living in Ingushetia in a rank “shed the length and width of a throw rug, with a water spigot out back.”
The inspiration for “I Live Here” was deeply personal for Kirshner. “I come from a family of displaced persons,” she said. Her mother, Etti, the daughter of Bulgarian immigrants to Israel, immigrated to Israel after World War II and relocated to Toronto after marrying Mia’s father, Sheldon Kirshner, a Middle East analyst with the Canadian Jewish News.
“The winter was not the only thing in Canada that made [my mother] feel like a foreign body,” the actress writes in “I Live Here.” “The house where my mother grew up was a salon of languages: French, Hebrew and Bulgarian; visitors who brought Turkish coffee, bourekas, olives, conversation. Here in Canada it is so often silent. Joy replaced the blankness when an aerogram would arrive … my mother would read them over and over, as though each word were a small boat taking her back across the sea to her parents’ home in Jaffa.”
Meanwhile, the actress’s paternal grandparents had survived the Holocaust but lost a 9-year-old son, Izhou; when Mia was 9, she perused myriad books on the Shoah in her father’s study to try to find a photo of her dead uncle. At Shabbat dinners at her grandparents’ house, she writes, “I would watch my grandfather vanish. His eyes dark slits, mouth open in mute horror. Sometimes, he would stop talking for days…. Now my father likes to travel; they never want him to leave. Hysteria accompanies his departures, my father repeating his itinerary over and over again.”
By the time Kirshner was 15, she, too, was on the road, living out of hotels as she took acting roles in a series of art-house films. She found herself an agent at the age of 12 and several years later persuaded her father to sign a “nudity waiver” in order to make her film debut as a dominatrix in 1993’s “Love and Human Remains.” “My mother wouldn’t sign it, which was understandable,” Kirshner said. “She didn’t want me to show my breasts. I imagine as a parent that must have been a very difficult thing for my father to do, but the film was tastefully done and I’m grateful that he was supportive of my dream.”
Kirshner next played a stripper in Atom Egoyan’s “Exotica,” a seductive assassin in TV’s “24” and, in 2001, landed the role of Jenny Schecter in “The L Word,” which has been deemed a groundbreaking (if soapy) series portraying steamy lesbian relationships. In the series’ pilot, Jenny arrived in Los Angeles and immersed herself in the lipstick lesbian scene; eventually the character emerged as perhaps the most scandalous Jewish woman on prime time, revealing that, among other things, she had once stripped under the name, “Miss Yeshiva Girl.”
Kirshner voiced regrets about some of her professional choices. “Unfortunately, when you start your career at such a young age, in a way you’re becoming a young adult through your work, and mine represented some of the dark narcissism you can feel at that age.” She said her mother in particular was uncomfortable with her risqué magazine spreads and provocative interviews. “I did say a lot of things to shock; it was a form of defiance against my conservative background, and quite immature, unfortunately…. Certainly it was empowering for me to pose in lingerie and bikinis, but some of those photographs were not refined.”
After Sept. 11, Kirshner said, she was feeling “dead inside creatively. On the one hand, I was able to support myself as an actress, which is a very lucky thing, but on the other, I was not living a life that I was proud of. I wondered, ‘What am I contributing? It’s time to make a change.’”
She envisioned “I Live Here” as a way to provide information about “‘secret’ lives being led all over the world, in brothels, in prisons — stories that in many ways aren’t accessible to the media.”
“I think it’s a very creative project,” Sheldon Kirshner said in a phone interview. “I think it’s very well researched. Obviously, I was worried about Mia’s safety in some of these places. But I do believe the project shows that she is interested in the outside world, in things that transcend acting.”
Kirshner intends to continue the project through her I Live Here Foundation. “It’s as much on a personal level a journey of exposing some of the very selfish ways in which I live, and the great ignorance in which I had been living,” she said.
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