• The Guardian
  4 Wednesday 24 July 2019

It took more than 25 years

for Samantha Mathis to acknowledge
how her life was shaped by one
horrifi c night in 1993.
On 30 October that year, Mathis
found her boyfriend convulsing
on the pavement outside the
Viper Room nightclub on Sunset
Boulevard. Despite being told by
the man he was with to “leave
him alone ... you’re spoiling his
high”, she ran back inside to fi nd
his brother, who called 911. By the
time the paramedics arrived, her
boyfriend had stopped breathing.
He was pronounced dead at the
hospital, having overdosed on
cocaine and heroin.
It would have been a traumatic
event for any young person, but
Mathis, who already had several
movie roles , had to cope with an
extra level of attention. The man she
was dating was River Phoenix, who
had already established himself as
an alternative screen idol, thanks
to roles in fi lms such as Stand By
Me, My Own Private Idaho and The
Thing Called Love, a comedy-drama
in which he had starred with Mathis

Samantha Mathis

witnessed her

boyfriend, River

Phoenix, die in

1993. She tells

Lucia Graves

how her love of

the stage helped

her to recover

in the same year that he died.

For decades, Mathis followed the

lead of Phoenix’s family in keeping

the events surrounding his death

private, but recently she realised

the story – and the pain that came

with keeping it – was hers, too. So,

on the 25th anniversary of his death

last year, she spoke to the Guardian

about her relationship with him and

how she witnessed his death when

they were both just 23.

“What came up for me last year

around the anniversary was: ‘Oh,

this also happened to me, and had

a profound eff ect on my life, more

so than I still understand even with

all the years of therapy,’” she says.

“I needed to talk about it for myself.”

As we sit together, barefoot, on

her couch in Greenwich Village,

her pain is still palpable, but she

says there is, fi nally, an awareness

of what she went through. “People

who are in my life, but hadn’t been

in my life at that time – and some

people who were in my life then –

were given a chance to understand

how painful a time that must have

been for me ,” she says.

Still, she’s not sorry she waited

so long to speak to the press. “By

and large I was left alone, whereas

now I would have been walking

out of my apartment building with

a camera in my face,” she says.

“I can’t imagine a 23-year-old going

through that today.”

Mathis is now 49, and is

rehearsing six nights a week for

her role in the play Make Believe,

which opens later this month in

New York. “There’s great power in

art to refl ect back our humanity, and

there’s something really exciting

about doing that live,” she says.

“There’s a nimbleness one must

have. Just when you settle in and

think that you know what you are

doing, someone will drop a cue, an

audience member will talk out loud,

a light won’t happen or a prop

won’t be there, and you are

awake and alive to the moment.”

Since she was born in New

York in 1970 to Donald Mathis

and Bibi Besch, work – or acting,

at least – has been central

to Mathis’s life. Her parents

divorced when she was a toddler

very familiar to me,” she says.

She dated Christian Slater, with

whom she worked on her fi rst

movie, Pump Up the Volume, in

1990. She also dated Christian Bale
      when he was playing Laurie to her
      Amy in Little Women.
      When she was younger, she says,
      she was more vulnerable to the
      possibility of falling in love with
      a co-star. “As you get older, you start
      to realise it’s a time and a place, and
      this person is not the character,”
      she says. “On-set romances don’t
      usually last.”
      With Phoenix it was diff erent.
      Mathis had sensed a connection
      with him years before they worked

and Besch, an Austrian-American

actor, moved to Los Angeles with

her young daughter to pursue her

TV career. As a child, Mathis found

that world “incredibly exciting

and glamorous”, with frequent set

visits and trips to the Paramount

lot, where she would see stars such

as Tom Hanks.

It was also a life of instability and

heartbreak, and her mother was

adamant, at fi rst, that she should

pursue something else.

She relented when Mathis was

16 and landed a spot on a TV pilot

being shot in Australia – even as

she continued to worry that her

daughter would conclude that acting

‘It was just

too much

loss. I had

to stop’

was an easy, jet-setting lifestyle.

But Mathis wasn’t in it for the glitz.

“I was in love with acting, so there

was nothing she could say that

would dissuade me.”

Later, she came to understand

her mother’s warnings. “It’s a Gypsy

life,” Mathis says. And, although that

was part of acting’s appeal when she

was younger, it was never easy.

To stave off loneliness, Mathis

found comfort in relationships with

other cast members – and many of

her early romantic relationships

developed on set. “The feeling of

family, the feeling of community

that occurs in creating a fi lm or

a TV show or a play, is something

It has never been

a better time

to be a woman

in her 40s in

show business

Mathis with

River Phoenix

in The Thing

Called Love

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