Paz de la Huerta is probably best known as the naked girl on Boardwalk Empire, a state that is more comfortable for her than being clothed, and she doesn’t seem to be planning on putting her clothes back on anytime soon.
She stripped bare again for Paper Magazine, dishing equal helpings of skin and confessions, including that she got suspended from school in the sixth grade for breaking a chair over the head of a classmate:
In sixth grade, she was kicked out of Grace Church School. She says classmates picked on her for being too skinny. One day she just lost it. “I broke a chair over a girl’s head,” she says flatly. “That was it. I thought it was a horrible school. They had some evil teachers. I always hated school.” She transferred to the artsy Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, where she met her friend designer Zac Posen. “She’s wild and crazy, but has a heart of gold,” says Posen, who later had her model in his first fashion show. “St. Ann’s was interesting — a lot of rich kids and a lot of kids whose parents were successful artists,” de la Huerta recalls. “Because I was already a model at 15 and out in the world, I was meeting their parents. The kids had a lot of jealousy. But kids are like that.”
She’s currently channeling a different kind of energy by practicing yoga to help her become a better actress and artist and deal with feelings of abandonment. She told the mag that she’s always had a rocky relationship with her mother, and although she can relate better to her Spanish rancher father, she still feels like an “orphan.”
Changing the pronunciation of her name from the Castilian pronunciation “path” to “pahz” in the last year wasn’t just a way to be user friendly for the American audience, she also did it to distance herself from her parents. “I just reached the point in my twenties where I didn’t want to be connected to the people who gave birth to me.”
Photos from Paper Mag by Theo Wenner
Read and see more at PaperMag.com
