Juliette Lewis interview

Fifteen years ago the actress I am meeting for lunch in a low-key Los Angeles café would have arrived followed by a trail of paparazzi.

Back then she ticked all the celebrity boxes: she'd dated Brad Pitt; been nominated for an Oscar when just 17; done time in rehab; become a Scientologist …

But no one spills their latte as Juliette Lewis parks her SUV across the street, scurries across four lanes of highway and then tosses her keys on the table, breathlessly apologising for being late.

In an industry where fame is often the paramount objective it is hard to name another actress who willingly jumped off the A-list bus, exchanging the glamorous red-carpet lifestyle to toil in semi-obscurity in pursuit of a private dream.

'I've never really cared if I was famous for my music. It was just something I had to do,' explains Lewis, 37.

For the past seven years she has been fronting a punk-rock outfit called Juliette and the Licks, performing angry, energetic songs with names like Junkyard Heart and Suicide Dive Bombers in front of double-figure crowds.

Spending months shuttling between tiny venues on a beaten-up tour bus is quite a contrast to the years of luxury trailers and million-dollar pay cheques.

When we meet, Lewis has just returned home to Los Angeles, not 24 hours after performing at a party in Paris. Far from being jet-lagged, she radiates nervous energy.

She talks so fast that sentences spill over each other, punctuated by throaty laughter so raucous it rattles the cups and plates on our table. Frequently she concludes her excited speeches with an exclamation of 'that was a long-ass way of saying it!'

She is slim and pale in a silk shift dress printed with rows of beefeaters, her bare legs capped by black leather ballet pumps, her face scrubbed free of make-up and shower-damp hair tied in a messy top-knot.

She looks stylish but in an off-beat, thrown-together way quite unlike the groomed and glossy glamour of many of her contemporaries. But glamour has never been Lewis's thing.

She began acting professionally at the age of 12 and went on to deliver visceral performances in Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of Cape Fear, in which she played an overtly sexual schoolgirl opposite Robert de Niro, and for which she earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, and as a psychopathic serial killer in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994).

Just as her professional life took off, though, her private life fell apart. A turbulent three-year love affair with Brad Pitt, her co-star in Kalifornia (1993), came to an end amid mounting problems with drug abuse.

Lewis continued to turn out consummate performances – in Lasse Hallström's What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), The Basketball Diaries (1995) and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) – but gradually the juicy roles petered out.

She was just 22 when she entered into the controversial Narconon rehab programme, which has been criticised for its links with the church of Scientology.

'It 1,000 per cent worked,' Lewis insists 15 years later. 'I've been to one rehab and never had a drug problem ever again.

Yes, L Ron Hubbard [the founder of Scientology] developed it. It's specific to detoxifying the body and rehabilitating your integrity and sense of self worth because that is what went out the window for you to become a drug addict.'

Lewis has since become a Scientologist herself. 'Well, after that, you kinda go, "Oh, what a brilliant guy to come up with this so let's see what else he came up with."'

'There is this truth,' she continues, 'that you have to have found your bottom; your place of "enough is enough" to have a real desire to change.'

What does she make of the young Hollywood party-girls plastered all over today's gossip blogs and magazines? 'I understand,' Lewis says softly.

'I know what it's like to go clubbing and be out, and that becomes a stimulation of sorts, but all you're doing is you just don't want to be alone with yourself; it's a cliché but it's true – you have to become a friend to yourself also. I just want people to leave them alone.'

Despite her wild-child reputation Lewis claims that 'in my destructive phases I was actually very reclusive. I went through one great clubbing stint in New York with drag queens. But that was like in '94 for three months.'

None the less, she became a tabloid sensation. 'I was not prepared or equipped for that kind of attention,' she says passionately. 'So I did totally revolt against it.

'I was an introvert; I did not say the right things; I did not go to the right parties; I did not wear the right clothes; and nor did I care. It's not like I care about it now, but I do have a more complex point of view,' she says, vigorously stirring her iced green tea and speaking as fast as she stirs.

'Actually, you know what? It would be a thrill for me to have my art be in the mainstream. It would be a kick and a half to have one of my songs on the radio. But as far as fame is concerned?

Take the Lady Gaga character: that's someone who covets fame and I couldn't be more the antithesis of that because my music is all about not hiding behind veils and make-up and a cold front.

Mine is more about shedding and sweating and getting inside your heart and making it explode. When I first began my music I didn't make a movie for about five years.

It did my head in to try to think about a movie while I was making a record, but now I've grown artistically [to the point] where I think I can manage both.'

Lewis has a brief but brilliant turn as a hippie pot-dealer in the road-trip comedy Due Date, Todd Phillips' first film since last year's phenomenally successful The Hangover.

Due Date marks Lewis's third film with the director. 'I'd say I'm his go-to gal,' she says. 'We worked together in Starsky & Hutch and Old School. In Due Date he even calls me Heidi, the same name he gave me in Old School.'

However, the film that is garnering most attention is Conviction, based on the true story of Betty Anne Waters (played by Hilary Swank), an unemployed single mother who puts herself through law school to exonerate her brother, who spends 18 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of murder.

Lewis puts in a brutally honest performance as Roseanna Perry, the ex-lover of the man and his accuser. 'I'm playing a real person who you meet at two points in her life, when she's about 25 and then 18 years later, so it gave me this incredible opportunity to completely transform into a person who's lived a life of drugs and alcohol abuse.'

Lewis is not unaware of the character's parallels with her own life – or, rather, with what her life could have become had she not kicked her addictions early. 'I'm definitely not selling some positive side [of drugs and alcohol],' she comments.

Earlier this year she worked with Jennifer Aniston on the romantic comedy The Switch. It was the first time the two Brad Pitt exes had met and, while much was made of this, she says respectfully, 'The whole thing was hilarious because of course that's going to be commented on, but I had no juice to tell anyone.

It's exactly what wouldn't be talked about. Why would it be? We're both adults – not like two gossiping girls. She's friendly with him; I'm friendly with him. You know, like, it's just friends.

But I can't really compare our individual situations because it's not like that. I mean, she was married to Brad. That was a marriage; our relationship was like in high-school age.'

Lewis's own two-year marriage, to the professional skateboarder Steve Berra, also ended in divorce seven years ago, although she says they are now best friends.

He is one of the first people she calls when she gets home from a tour; in fact, they've already made plans to see The Social Network on the Saturday following this interview.

'We're actually like family,' she says. 'It's really special and also unusual. You go through difficult times, and it's not like we were immediately, "Hey! Let's be best friends now!" But it came to that and now we're each other's biggest support.

'And he's dated, and I've dated – it's no problem. We just really love each other. But we both know why it is we're not together, so we don't really have illusions about it,' she says.

Recently, she says, 'I was seeing someone who was really lovely who I liked a lot – he just lived on the other side of the world, darn it! We met on the road because he was a travelling musician as well.

'Anyway, I love him a lot but we're not together. The geography didn't matter to me. I saw things differently to him. Where there's a will, there's a way. But he did not see that …'

Would she marry again? 'Absolutely I would if I was inspired to do so. I'm very traditional in some senses; I believe in love in a monogamous relationship – healthy sex within that – meaning, to me, good sex only comes from a loving relationship. I don't have it any other way.'

Motherhood is something else she hasn't ruled out. 'I'd like that,' she says. 'But my yearning toward motherhood comes out of love; I have it when I'm in love with somebody.

So it's not just wanting to be a mom regardless, which some people have. I only feel it if I'm in love, so we'll see how that goes.'

Lewis's own parents divorced when she was a toddler. Her childhood was split between periods of living with her father, Geoffrey Lewis, an actor, and her mother, Glenis Duggan Batley, a graphic designer – until she 'divorced' them at the age 14.

Today, Lewis claims this was merely done for professional reasons. Indeed, legal emancipation (to give it its less sensational name) enables young actors to start receiving pay cheques rather than have their earnings held in trust until they are 18.

Even so, soon after the ruling Lewis dropped out of school (having completed only three weeks there) and moved out to live on her own.

Unsurprisingly, the public perception is that hers was a thoroughly dysfunctional childhood. 'That still bothers me,' she says, 'because it was down to me and my big mouth going, "Oh, I live on my own! I got emancipated!" not knowing how that would be taken as a division between me and my parents.

The truth is that it's something very common that you did when you were acting very young and my parents actually helped me to do that,' she says. 'My parents are just the best.'

I tell her they sound very bohemian, what with her mother's activism and her father's involvement with a storytelling performance group called Celestial Navigations.

'I don't know if the word "bohemian" is quite right; they're kind of progressive. My dad instilled in me to naturally question all authority. I don't follow anything blindly. That's religion, cops, doctors, schools, you name it.'

Lewis becomes thoughtful for a moment. 'It always surprises me when people say, "I don't regret one thing about my life. I wouldn't change anything because it's all led me to where I am today."

'I would want to change certain things that have caused others pain,' she reflects. 'But mostly you're wasting your time looking back when you should be living today, so do I regret anything today?

The short answer is: well, I'm not looking back at the past; I'm looking forwards.'

'Due Date' is out now. 'Conviction' is released on 14 January