Mena Suvari On 'Garden Of Eden," Filming Sex Scenes

Mena Suvari first turned heads in Hollywood with American Beauty and her comic turn in American Pie. Now she is playing the doe-eyed Eastern European princess is in The Garden of Eden, based on a posthumously released Ernest Hemingway novel, which hits theaters December 10.

The Estonian-Greek-American actress and model was born in Newport, Rhode Island, and has lived in the Virgin Islands, Charleston, S.C., and now California. While living in Charleston, she signed up to work with Wilhelmina Modeling Agency which came to recruit girls from her middle school, Ashley Hall. Her greatest accomplishment with Wilhelmina was modeling for Oscar de la Renta print ads. While living in California with her parents she made her television debut on a Rice-A-Roni commercial followed by appearances on Boy Meets World, ER and Chicago Hope.

Suvari’s film career has made great strides since her Slums Of Beverly Hills days. Whether she plays a prudish choir girl in American Pie, an intriguing seductress in American Beauty, a dirty mouthed cheerleader in Sugar and Spice, a sexually open artist in Six Feet Under, or a perky tennis player in Rumor Has It, Suvari is her own kind of It Girl.

Suvari’s latest character as Catherine Hill Bourne is a mixture of many of her previous roles, marking the evolution of her acting career. In our exclusive interview she gives her take on the production behind the adaptation of one of Hemingway’s raciest novels. “It’s very sexual, and people don’t necessarily know what to do with that, how to market it,” Suvari told Uinterview exclusively. But for Mena, filming the sexual stuff was nothing short of a day’s work. “I’ve done things like that before, and I don’t look it at it like that,” she says. “What captivated me was the story, as a whole, and this woman, [my character] Catherine’s journey.”