Ashley's interview

Interview, August, 1996 by Ingrid Sischy

ASHLEY JUDD: I'm an exhibitionist. [laughs]

IS: No, actually, the opposite.

AJ: I will remember that day for the rest of my life. I wish I'd had a third eye, so I could have seen what was going on all of the time from the outside.

IS: Since I was on the other side of the camera, I got to watch you all day. And with your statement that you wish you'd had a third eye, you've just hit the point I want to make: I am really struck by how aware you seem to be of other people, how curious, and how genuinely interested you are in them and in all kinds of things.

AJ: Thank you. That is a lovely compliment and it is deeply felt. And the first thing I do is bounce it back to my mother [Naomi Judd, the country singer], because she always encouraged my sister [singer Wynonna] and me to have a genuine interest in other people. My mother has said that she is proud of me, not because I can act, but because I know how to act, as in how to behave. She will appreciate your statement.

IS: Was there a father around when you were growing up?

AJ: Sporadically. I was at an advantage that came from a seeming disadvantage. While I was rather bounced around on the occasions when mother couldn't really keep me with her, sometimes I ended up living with Daddy. It served me very well because I had a touchstone and a base with him that is the foundation for my relationship with him as a grown-up. And I've also had granddaddies for whom I have the most inordinate affection. We spent our summers with our grandparents in Kentucky. They were such a blessing. Who knows what I would be if I did not have my grandparents. Our mother loves us beyond love, and she worked her butt off at raising us well. But the contribution of both sets of grandparents is rock solid. My sister and I can sit around and talk for months about every nuance of Mamaw and Papaw [Ciminella]'s house, every nuance of Nana and Papaw Judd's house. People have poked fun at me before for the way I talk with all my heart about my grandparents. They have no idea what they're getting into when they blow off about that.

IS: Tell me about the effect of being bounced around.

AJ: Someone could lament, "Oh my gosh. This girl went to twelve schools in thirteen years," but I don't. Somebody once asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, "Me, but more so." And by that, I meant that I wanted to continue to have the variety in my adult life that I was privileged to have as a child. I happened to have been born in Los Angeles and I have accrued the most time in Kentucky. My family has made its home in Tennessee since 1979, and we also did a couple of years in Marin County [California]. There's a marvelous synchronicity in my life despite having moved around a lot. In the end, I graduated from the same high school in eastern Kentucky to which my mother and aunt and uncle went. I really believe that I'm designed to be an actor with the immutable facts of this lifestyle - it seems as though what could potentially have been a hardship has actually been sugarcoated for me because of all my experiences.

IS: Can you trace back to when you knew you wanted to act?

AJ: I always had an imaginary life. I had fairies and built houses for them. And when I was in third or fourth grade, going to school in Marin, I remember walking across a field after school to I think it was a yoga class, if you can believe that, and -

IS: A yoga class in third or fourth grade?

AJ: That's Marin for you. Anyway, I remember wanting to look at the world and experience things like the girl in the book that I was reading at the time did. I don't remember the title of it, I just remember that she was in a rather extraordinary circumstance, and I wanted to receive the world the way she would have. I'd look at a bush and wonder, How would she feel when she looked at that bush?

IS: So you had begun your life as an actress?

AJ: It wasn't like a stage play or fluttering around the room saying, "Look at me, I'm going to perform for you." For the most part it wasn't about "presentation."

IS: It's Interesting that you say that because when I watch you act, I'm impressed that it's not "showy." There's always a sense of some strong internal understanding of the characters that you're playing. But keep going with how you got to today. Were you trouble in school?

AJ: I would say for one or two years of high school I was on the verge of getting into some trouble, or going in the wrong direction. It happens when you get hormonal and crazy. I didn't, at times, have a lot of supervision, and it's good that I ended up being so protected despite some of my actions.

IS: College?

AJ: I went to the University of Kentucky - I didn't get in anyplace else. It was the best thing for me. I would've gotten lost elsewhere. I wasn't solid enough. At UK I learned a lot about my own strength and self-reliance. Instead of simply reacting to curve balls, I was throwing some really nice pitches.

IS: Were you talking out loud about wanting to be an actor?

AJ: It was never something that you stated out loud. Wanting to be an actor was embarrassing, unlike being a nurse or a fireman or something. There's no sanctioned definition of acting. What comprises it is mysterious. What it takes is elusive to define. I knew I had all this stuff inside me, all these urges and impulses, and this love for it. On the outside, being an actor appears to be something really different from what I felt it was internally, and up until I actually busted the big move to California, I was waxy that acting consisted of having your picture taken in front of a good restaurant in Los Angeles.