Jeff Vespa/WireImage.comJordan Ladd has a pretty good way of spinning Grindhouse's less than stellar opening weekend box office into something positive. She thinks directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez did just fine, thank you very much.
"I don't see it as a failure," Ladd told me yesterday on the phone. "Those guys are outsiders. I think the fact that it isn’t number one is almost cool. It's punk rock. These guys have made their careers playing outside the system."
And Ladd has been around that system all of her life. Her dad is actor David Ladd and mom is former Charlie's Angels pinup Cheryl Ladd. Jordan, 32, has made a nice career for herself doing the indie thing in movies like Cabin Fever.
Ladd (seen on the far right in the pic above singing "Happy Birthday" to Tarantino at the Grindhouse premiere) could have become another child-of-Hollywood statistic, but she managed to keep it together. "When I was in high school I used to go to the clubs, and of course that's exciting, because you're breakin' the law," Ladd said. "You want to drink before you can and get into places you can't. But once I started acting professionally, I really didn't want to do the Hollywood nightlife thing."
She may not be hitting the clubs and bars like starlets like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Mischa Barton, but it was a stiff drink that got Ladd through her Grindhouse callback for Shanna, the bad-girl part she eventually landed in Tarantino's half of the terror double feature.
"I was so nervous, I brought a little shot of vodka with me," she said. "I had to. I was thinking I would go in, bust it out and go home. But I had to wait four hours to get in to see him, so I wasn't buzzed at all. We had a great time with Quentin playing both Jungle Julia and Arlene and me as Shanna."
Funny enough, she and Quentin first met when she auditioned for an episode of CBS television's CSI that he was directing. "It was a very dramatic role that I was schticking on and making jokes," she said. "I just couldn't believe I was auditioning for Quentin. Needless to say, I didn't get the role."
Before the interview ended, Ladd brought up my coverage of the Grindhouse premiere a couple of weeks ago. I reported that Ladd, who will next be seen in the Hostel sequel in June, refused to put out her cigarette even when her publicist told her there was no smoking in the party tent.
"I was going to bust your balls a little bit on what you wrote," she said. "But then I reread it, I felt like an old Hollywood broad. It sounds so Bette Davis. And that's what I want to be!"