The 43-year-old actress also says that the trauma she received from years of sexual abuse made it easier to play sex-obsessed teen Angela Hayes in Oscar-winning film 'American Beauty'.
- Jul 27, 2022
AceShowbiz - Mena Suvari apologized to a woman with whom she had a threesome while in an abusive relationship. The 43-year-old actress made the admission while opening about suffering years of sexual abuse that included being raped aged 12.
Mena said the trauma made it easier to play sex-obsessed teen Angela Hayes in 1999's Oscar-winning film "American Beauty", and told how she would go home to an abusive relationship after shooting. Mena told The Guardian, "I identified with Angela. I knew how to play that role, because I was so schooled in it. 'Oh, you want me to be sexually attractive?' Done. I felt unavailable in a million other ways, but I knew how to play that card."
She said her romantic relationship off-set was "the worst" of her life, adding, "I was being extremely abused. It was very dark for me at that time, (and work) felt like a respite, because I could go to work and be important there. I wasn't called a 'r*****' and an 'idiot.' "
Mena said a lighting engineer she dated would tell her how stupid she was, call her names and force her into sexual activities so traumatic they left her requiring medical treatment. She added, "I was not being loved. I was just a body, a receptacle for his desires."
Mena said he would ask her to pick up other women to have threesomes with, including those she met on set. She bumped into one much later in a Whole Foods store, after she had become famous, and says she felt mortified. When she ran into one of the women on a separate occasion she approached her.
"I said, 'I want you to know that I never wanted to do any of those things.' She was surprised. She said, 'Oh, he told me you wanted to do that.' It was a huge eye-opener for me, how I was being manipulated and I had no idea," Mena shared. "The circumstances had been created for me, and I was just swallowed up by it."
Mena, who has son Christopher, 15 months, with set designer Michael Hope, previously detailed her years of abuse in her memoir "The Great Peace". It detailed how a friend of one of her older brothers wrote her love letters, before raping her several times at his house.
She told The Guardian, "That sucked the life out of me. I think that was just excessive confirmation that no one was going to save me, no one was going to do anything for me." When she was treated for a bladder infection as a result of the rapes, the doctor put her on contraception instead of asking her about what was happening to her.
