Minnie and her fingers

March 11, 2007
BY DOUG ELFMAN
Chicago Sun-Times
Dahlia (Minnie Driver) puts a needle to her arm. She's fresh out of prison and crying on the floor of a glorious house she and her gypsy husband kinda stole in a rather unsavory way.
Driver, a Brit-turned-L.A. surfer and onetime student of a Paris finishing school, loves the juicy part of eccentric, Southern Dahlia enough to work 17-hour days on the set of the new FX drama "The Riches."
"Dahlia -- she's just a crack addict, man," Driver, 37, says. "She loves her kids. And she could kill 'em. And she could love 'em. She can't cook to save s---. She likes to f--- in cars. It's all so far away from who I am."
Driver's dedication shows in Dahlia's hardened and taut face. Dahlia is nowhere near glamorous here. You get a feeling for Driver's gritty acting approach when she talks about her favorite actresses, Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet.
"They're real," she says. "I know they all look gorgeous on the red carpet, but I'm telling you, they wouldn't stop to fix their hair in the middle of a scene, or worry about whether their bum looked big. ... They're actresses, not celebrities."
Like Blanchett, Winslet or any actress, Driver is called on to do sex scenes. In "Riches," these are meant to be funny or touching, not lascivious. This is fine with her.
"If it's like crazy washing-machine sex like in that movie 'Showgirls,' " she says, "I don't think I could do that."
One thing that fascinates me about her Dahlia performance is her fingers. Dahlia fiddles with digits when nervous, plucks at a squeeze-stress ball as if it were a spider's prey and tucks fingertips into her pants when at rest.
I ask her about her finger acting, and she laughs at me -- at first.
"That's the oddest question," she says. "You know what? I play the piano. I play the guitar. I come from an incredibly physically articulate family.
"That squeeze ball did a lot of acting for me," she says. "You can say things with your fingers that you can't say with your mouth, like, 'Doug Elfman is weird.' "