The performances of both of these women placed among our top nude scenes of 2001. Miner placed 6th, Phillips 19th. That separation doesn’t reflect any difference between their performances other than the fact that Miner was then in demand. (She dropped out of sight for a while when she married Macaulay Culkin.)
The movie is all but forgotten, and these two women are now generally far from the spotlight.
Rachel is still working, but she now auditions in her wheelchair. If I ran into her in the supermarket, I probably wouldn’t recognize her.
I have no idea what Bijou Phillips has been doing since 2014. It’s fun to recall what director James Toback said about her: “Bijou Phillips — you never knew what the fuck she would say or do next. There is no line between her unconscious and her articulation of it and her behavior. She is a genuine psychopath. I say that with affection and admiration, because she’s also incredibly smart and talented, so she knows how to amuse and how to get and hold attention. If she were just a psychopath, you wouldn’t want to use her; you’d just be bored. But she is always kind of amusing and interesting, and if one thing isn’t working she has a good sense of it, and she just starts on something else.”
Rachel Miner
Bijou Phillips
I got really confused reading the article. It said she was “ex-Michelle Bauer” which apparently was the character she played in Guiding Light. I thought it meant that she was also called “Michelle Bauer” who was a B-movie star who was frequently nude. So it was a “what the shit?” moment there…