Career takes off for 'Aviator' actress

Kelli Garner Calabasas actress Kelli Garner, who worked with Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's Academy Award-winning movie "The Aviator," was one of two actresses to receive the Rising Star Award at the Calabasas Method Fest independent film festival earlier this month, and she also won the Best Actress Award at the festival for her work in "Dreamland." But the 22-year-old said one of the highlights of her life is that she's been a part of the local community.

Garner was born in Bakersfield, grew up in Thousand Oaks and went to T.O. High School, and has lived in Calabasas for the last three years.

"I love it out here," Garner said. "One of the reasons I really loved getting the Rising Star Award at The Method Fest was because for the first time ever, I felt really connected to the community. The mayor was there and everyone from the Chamber of Commerce was there, and I got to meet everyone. I feel very connected to Calabasas. I feel like a resident and I feel like I belong here."

Garner was named a rising star, but she doesn't feel like one, she said. "I don't really feel like I've hit fame." Fame is certainly not her goal, she added. "There's no goal. There's no stopping."

Garner said she's very shy, but lost a lot of her shyness when she saw Jim Carrey in the role of Fire Marshal Bill on TV's "In Living Color."

"I thought it was the most genius character, and I used to go around as a little girl imitating it," Garner said. "That's when I started coming out of my shell."

Garner was discovered at age 15 in an unusual setting.

"I was at a friend's bar mitzvah," Garner said. "My friend had been an actor-I think he had done some TV spots and things like that. So I was there for his bar mitzvah and I was dancing around, and his manager came up to me and asked me if I was interested in being an actor. I said no at first because I was a soccer player and I thought I was going to be the next Mia Hamm."

Eventually, Garner called her friend's manager and told him she was interested in acting. "And the rest is history," Garner said.

Garner's first audition resulted in an Eggo Waffle commercial. In 1999, she got a role in a short film called "Architecture of Reassurance." In 2001 she was in TV's "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" and in the same year she got a role in her first feature-length movie, "Bully." In 2002, she was in TV's "Grounded For Life." Work kept coming her way and still does.

Garner didn't get a chance to go to college due to her acting career. Instead of learning her craft in school, Garner learned from personal acting trainer Kevin McDermott. She still works with him. Without McDermott, Garner said she doesn't feel she'd be the same actor.

Garner said she does, however, have some regrets about not going to college, but she feels she's experienced a bit of what college might have been like.

"In doing theater in New York and living there for five months, I had a close kind of dorm-like situation with the eight people that I was up on stage with," Garner said. "I feel like I've gotten an interesting and a different idea of college."

Garner said she's had some wonderful experiences as an actor. Of the many joys of the work, Garner especially loves the process of building a character.

"There's so much freedom in that," Garner said. "Nobody can tell you what's right or wrong within your own character's point of view. And that's a really beautiful thing to me."

Garner also loves seeing her finished films because they're like time capsules of the entire experience, she said. No other career offers that reward, the actress added.

In her most recent movie, "Dreamland," Garner went to New Mexico and "became another person."

"I have to shut off my whole life," Garner said. "That's another one of the fun parts. You get to forget everything that you are and every worry that you have and you start new. You're living in somebody else's shoes."

While being presented the Rising Star Award, Garner watched a compilation clip of many of her roles.

"It was so interesting to me because I was watching myself as all these different people," Garner said. "It was like seeing all my best friends in one room. All those characters are so close to me. They're such a part of me."

Actors like Gary Oldman, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who become totally different people in their roles, inspire Garner.

"I really love actors who can kind of get rid of themselves and completely go into a different character," Garner said.

Olympic athletes also inspire Garner, she said, because they're like superheroes. If she could work in another profession, she'd choose figure skating.

"It's so poetic and beautiful to be able to convey emotion without speaking," Garner said. "That's one of my biggest things as an actor, which is to not rely on the lines that a writer gives me."

Aside from acting, Garner writes songs and plays guitar. She said she has no immediate plans to break into the music business.

"I think I'd have to fine tune that area of my life before I would share it," she said.

Of all her roles in movies, on TV and on stage, the most difficult role Garner said she has played was in a stage production called "Dog Sees God," in which she portrayed a mean girl. It was tough to tap into such a rough character, but she nailed it, she said.

Garner's most exciting role was when she played Faith Domergue in 2004's "The Aviator."

"Martin Scorsese is one of our best directors of all time," Garner said. "To get to work with him at such a young age, and in such a beautiful role, was scary."

When Garner received "The Aviator" script with Scorsese's name on the cover next to DiCaprio's, she thought, "Yeah, right." But she did the screen test anyway. Like Domergue in the movie, who dresses up to suit Howard Hughes' desires, Garner dressed up to look like the character.

"I went to an optometrist and said, 'Give me dark contacts,'" Garner said. "(Scorsese) can't see that I have blue eyes or he'll never buy me. . . . I remember before I went in to do my screen test, I could hear Martin Scorsese and I could hear Leonardo DiCaprio in the next room. I was starting to sweat."

Garner, half blinded from the dark contact lenses and half dizzy from fright, tripped on her way into the screen test.

"But I think that's one of the reasons why I got the role," Garner said. Pretending to be someone else the way Domergue pretended to be older and more sophisticated seemed to be something that Scorsese liked.

Though Garner gets discouraged during difficult times, she has always accepted challenges and succeeded.

"I'll get confronted with something like 'Dog Sees God' or with Martin Scorsese, and I'll freak out in my bedroom and have panic attacks and cry and say, 'I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this,'" Garner said. "But every time, I end up getting out there and discovering this whole new world and a whole different side of myself. . . . I don't want to ever stop doing that. I want to keep scaring myself."

And that's the future as far as Garner has planned it. She said she doesn't have dreams of being the most famous or richest person in the world. She said she's a simple girl who loves where she lives and loves what she does, and she just wants to continue life as it's been going.