Actress Carmen Chaplin has a lot of Hollywood history resting on her slender shoulders — as her last name indicates, she’s the granddaughter of Charlie, not to mention the great-granddaughter of Eugene O’Neill. But while other thespians might be envious, her own feelings about her illustrious name weren’t as easy to reconcile.
“Acting always interested me, but because of my lineage, I found it embarrassing and pretentious to express that desire,” admits Chaplin, who stars in “Day on Fire,” which screens at the Hamptons International Film Festival on Thursday. It was only after she started acting classes and completed her first film that she felt comfortable talking openly about becoming an actor.
“I love my grandfather’s films, but it ends there for me,” says the British-born Chaplin, who was raised far from the spotlight in Europe and attended Swiss and English schools. “I’m lucky. I’m one generation removed from Charlie Chaplin, so the weight of that name was on my father [Michael Chaplin]. But my parents were very healthy about it. They never brought us up in the cult of Charlie Chaplin.
“Maybe that’s why I love being in New York,” she continues. “There’s a freedom here. People don’t care about my name. It doesn’t really matter much.”
In fact, she landed her first role, in the 1990 Wim Wenders film “Travel Around the World,” by chance, not nepotism. Wenders’ producer spotted the statuesque beauty while dining in Paris and asked her to travel to Venice to make a cameo. Other films quickly followed, including “Sabrina,” “My Favorite Season” and a role opposite Ewan McGregor in “The Serpent’s Kiss.”
She won her star turn in “Day on Fire” — as Najia, a Palestinian journalist who loses her brother to a suicide bombing —in a similarly fortuitous way. Chaplin met director/screenwriter Jay Anania at an NYU master class one year before the 2006 film began shooting. After a few more chance run-ins at coffee shops, Anania invited Chaplin to read Najia’s challenging, eight-page monologue in another master class.
“Jay only gave me 15 minutes to prepare,” she admits. But Chaplin landed the role. Despite being little known in the U.S., “Day on Fire” co-producer and casting director Lina Todd says Chaplin was the only choice to portray Najia.
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“It’s nice when someone trusts you because I’m not a big movie star,” says Chaplin.
She has intensely personal memories of her legendary grandfather. Chaplin recalls spending Christmas and Easter holidays at his home, playing with his props in the attic and watching home movies he’d shot with his own father. “I even found a recording long after his death of my grandfather playing instruments. It was like finding a treasure,” she says.
Chaplin, meanwhile, is completely sanguine about her own career.
“I’ve had breakthroughs,” she laughs. “It’s so up and down in this business. After a while, you get used to it.”