In a loft under the Brooklyn Bridge, dance music blares, a photographer approaches Lili Yaylor for a touch up. She grins, bears it and gives the camera her most steely Valerie Solanas stare. But this isn't the way we like to envision the much-adored maverick thespian. Shouldn't she be in an East Village coffee shop, smoking a cigarettte, and saying things like, "I told Oliver Stone to go fuck himself." (as she famously told Premiere in 1996)?
This Liili Taylor - a dynamic mix of toughness, fragility and coquetish allure - and a little older, a little wiser, and a little more complex than the person we've come to know throughout her rise from fringe star - in roles as diverse as a wannabee nun (Household Saints), a vampire (The Addiction), and the militant feminist Solanas (I Shot Andy Warhol) - to widespread TV fame as moralistic vegetarian villain in the past two seasons of Six Feet Under. She appears more careful with her words - less of an angry young rebel and more of a self-productive savvy professional.
Speaking about what she calls the "lens meat" status of the actor. Taylor tactfully admits, "If were living in 1400, I'd just be doing my little plays in the back of a little wagon and the audience would throw tomatoes at me. But I happen to be in this century and there's a whole level of commerce that goes with it. It's a reality and walking in that reality and I'm just trying to make the best of it.``
As one of the brightest and wittiest elements of John Sayle's latest ensemble drama Casa de los Babys - the story of six Western women adopting babies in a Latin American country - the Chicago-born Taylor knows it's part of her job to indulge the media. And yet, while speaking with her, I get the feeling this consummate talent has better things to do. For one, she's playing the excruciatingly emotional role of Selma, made famous by Icelandic singer Bjork. And she's also juggling a few indie films for the fall.
Despite her busy schedule, Taylor is excited to talk about Casa de los Babys. She plays Leslie, a New York book editor who is at a point in her life in which she realizes, says Taylor "The relationship thing isn't working out, and she's really at peace with raising a kid of her own." Leslie has one of the film's most precious moments of dialogue: after a young Latino boy on the beach flirts with her, she sharply retorts, "I've got socks older than you."
While Casa del los Babys producer Lemore Syvan says Leslie is a lot harsher than Taylor herself, the character isn't much of stretch from the "Lili Taylor role" that has defined the actress in the past. But Taylor says she took the part because of director Sayles, the independent maverick (Lone Star, Limbo, Passion Fish) who has worked outside of the studio system since Taylor was acting in high school productions of Once Upon a Matress and The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
"What made this fresh for me was John," Taylor says. "He wrote a one-page biography of the character, handwritten on a legal pad, which I loved. I felt like I was there at school learning from a great director. It was one of the quietest sets I've ever been on." she continues, despite the film's low budget and tropical temperatures. "Any stress he totally kept from us."
The role of a would-be single mother is also close to Taylor's heart. She played a teen mom in Girl's Town, Jim McKay's 1996 indie that garnered Taylor an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best actress. Today she says she can more easily identify with motherhood. "It could be a real option for me," she says. "There are these questions. Do I want to do that? And am I up to that? So it's much more real for me now."
Getting to the reality of any role is what Taylor so ably accomplishes, whether it's as tangible as a struggling woman or as overbalanced asa frenzied kidnapper (in Ransom). To gett to the core of a character, Taylor says she prefers not to use the Method, the famous acting technique that plumbs the depths of an actor's real life memories for emotional truth. Instead, she says, "I'm in service to the character as opposed to in service of my memory. I just say ' I know how she feels. I can relate.'
For the pure physicality of her perfomance- think of the brutish swagger of Solanis in I Shot Andy Warhol or the brooding grad student in The Addiction - Taylor relies on an array of acting tools. One, she says, is to think of an animal comparible to the character. "Rabbits are a favorite," she says, hopping with energy herself. For The Addiction, she says her animal was "a mishmash of a hawk and a lion," and for Solanas "another predator," but, she clarifies, "injured, like a wounded hawk or eagle."
This image of the wounded predator may also define Taylor's most widely performance thus far, as the recently disappeared Lisa Kimmel Fisher in Six Feet Under, HBO's smash Sunday night drama. The role of Fisher gave Taylor an unprecendented level of mainstream attention. "I was shocked. I didn't know that she would evoke such a response,." she says, referring the repressed bohemian who tormented the Fisher family. "You know, I live in New York. I walk the streets, take the subway, sit on the stoops, so I'm open to feedback." But she got more impassioned feedback than she expected. Taylor says with a laugh, 'I want to strangle you,' let's say it was quite intense. The collective chord the show hit, which I still don't quite understand, is fascinating. I've had a great adventure there, but I'm glad it's over. People really get into that show. On Monday's I didn't get to go out for a little while."
Though she's now accosted on street corners, Taylor isn't experiencing an explosive level of stardom. "What I'm having it just a career," she says. "I've realize, 'Jesus I've been doing this for a long time' and 'OK, I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life, if I want to.' So I just see myself as continuing to do work that I hope goes on." She adds, without a beat, "To thine own self be true."

The article is accompanied by a full front page color photo of Lili, from shoulders up, with her head cocked slightly to the left- Lili Taylor gets tough in John Sayles Casas de los Babys; a full page+ color photo of Lili in a 'Taylor made dress suit' with hands on hips- Taylor Made; a small color photo of Lili as Leslie from Casas de los Babys.- In John Sayles Casas de los Babys, Lili Taylor plays a sardonic single woman who travels to Latin America to adopt a child.