Living the Dream: Liv Tyler is The Rake's Issue 98 Cover Star

Exposition in a magazine interview is not hugely exciting at the best of times — ‘Actor X walked into the diner wearing his Blue Jays baseball cap and tossed it onto the table as he sat down, as if to say, This is my spot’ kind of thing. In the Zoom era, such an example might, strangely, be classed as riveting — until the person looking back at you on the screen is Liv Tyler. 

Liv arrived while I was having a chit-chat with her publicist, one of those grandee publicists whose indispensability allows them to create lifelong relationships with their clients, and he has been with Tyler since Armageddon, which was released in 1998, when Liv was 21 years old. 

Today, at 47, she retains the signature smile that would make even the most cynical misanthrope feel there was something worth living for. This is an actor who has been described as having chased her career much less than it has chased her, and judging by her location for our conversation, you can understand why. 

She is in her house in California’s Ojai Valley, where she has set up her life on three and a half acres of land with her children, both the biological and botanical. She is embarking on a new vocation during a hiatus from acting, and tends to tangerine groves and olive trees (more on the pertinence of this later). For someone who says she hasn’t done an interview in four years, she feels she is in a good spot for reflection. “My whole life, I have always wanted to live in the countryside,” she says. “We had two chickens but one got eaten... There are real animals up here, like, mountain lions, bobcats, coyote, rattlesnakes, bears.” 

The rustic American dream was finally realised after a stint living an English pastoral existence during the pandemic. “Covid changed things and put them into perspective,” she says. “When it came, we were all in the English countryside, David [Gardner, her ex-partner] and I, and the children. It was the first time ever, I thought, that I had no homework to do; I always felt like there was something I hadn’t done and I was going to get into trouble [for it]. It made me think about the things I was passionate about, and I had just done a T.V. show in L.A. where I was away from the kids for six months, and it didn’t feel right. I love acting so much in the moment, when you’re connecting with the crew and the people you work with, but when I got home and we were in that life-or-death situation [of the pandemic], there was no question where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be doing. I was getting so much more pleasure out of ironing the sheets or changing the bed. So having wondered where my passions lay, I started having these ideas.” 

Everyone was like, ‘Who are you?’ I was the hot one of the moment. Then there were dips.

Her path into showbusiness may have felt like a fait accompli, and given that she is the child of three parents from that world — an unconventional number, consisting of her father, Steven Tyler, the Aerosmith frontman; her mother, Bebe Buell, a great muse; and her legal father Todd Rundgren, the music multi-hyphenate — it all makes perfect sense. “When I was younger I thought I would be a singer or in a band when I grew up, because I think in song all day,” she says. 

It was her mother who suggested she might find her way in acting — her mother, she explains, saw in her a level of empathy and a commitment to observing others that lent themselves to the art. 

What is exceptional about Liv, which you do not see as much of these days, is just how young she was when she got started in the industry. With echoes of Brooke Shields and Bo Derek, she had been working as a model from the age of 14, when she was still at high school, and she was 17 when her debut feature film, Silent Fall, was released in 1994. The rate of fire did not abate: she had two further roles over the next year, working, for example, with the director James Mangold in Heavy. 

Her breakthrough performance came in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996), which was filmed in Tuscany and necessitated her being whisked away from school and friends. There is a steady stream of people to remind young actors how fickle the industry is, and how chances are not always plentiful, so there is a pressure to seize every opportunity. “I started working as such a young teenager,” she says. “I have had managers before say to me, ‘Say yes to everything, it is not all going to be good but one thing is going to be great’. Which I find really hard, as I try to put 150 per cent into everything.” 

As we know, young talent is a fuel for Hollywood, but often, too, the young artists are not given enough preparation for the consequences of fame. Liv says, “I had no tools in my toolbox then, and honestly it did scar me, it was quite scary for me. I am working on that now, trying to unlock where the anxiety comes from. It is really physical; I have fainted before. I remember being at a press conference in Cannes for Armageddon and sitting up there with all the guys, and they [the media] were just asking them questions. Then one person stood up and asked me a question, and I went into a tunnel. I remember looking at Ben [Affleck’s] and Bruce [Willis’s] faces — afterwards they were like, ‘You went white as a ghost’. I imagine it is as simple as being a young girl and not have a coping strategy.” 

With hindsight Liv recognises it wasn’t altogether fair or healthy. “Everyone was like, ‘Who are you?’ — they wanted me, and I’m the hot one of the moment... Then there were dips, and now I [have] noticed that giving myself a break and a chance to grow and be the mother I always wanted to be has been the best thing I have done for myself.” 

I can be judgmental with myself — I am not classically trained, didn’t study acting, and learned on the job.

This fear never put her off the industry, however. She mentioned in an interview at the Oxford Union that she nerds out on set, making sure she visits the sound and effects departments to absorb their work and the all-round process of filmmaking — all grist to the mill for her. In fact, it helped her grasp the business in a way that no education at R.A.D.A. or U.C.L.A. could provide. She says, “I can be quite judgmental with myself — I am not classically trained, didn’t study, and learned on the job. But learning on the job for me was... Well, my first directors were Bruce Beresford, James Mangold and Bernardo Bertolucci. I am a sponge, and I am very observant. It all so becomes a part of me that it is in me completely. I could switch in and out if I had to because I know the people so well.” 

The aforementioned Armageddon was the first big-budget film she featured in. It was directed by Michael Bay, and the theme tune, I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, was sung by her father. The film was a vast success, with more than half a billion dollars made worldwide, outstripping the other smash hit of 1998, Saving Private Ryan. Tyler was a pin-up of the age (on this you can trust someone who was at a preparatory boarding school at the time of Armageddon’s release), and the best was yet to come. While many career decisions can be judged with hindsight as smart moves, few could be as patently elegant and everlasting as Tyler’s casting as Arwen in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the first instalment of which was released in 2001. Oddly enough, this was the same year that the sexually charged One Night at McCool’s was released — it is extraordinary to think it was the same actor playing both parts...

Read the full interview in Issue 98, available now.

Hair Stylist: Marcus Francis at TMG
Make-Up Artist: Lisa Storey at The Wall Group
Manicurist: Ashlie Johnson at Forward Artists Production
Special thanks to Copious Management