Falling prey to enemies within

HAVING secured her movie star status with a string of films -- including “Kiss the Girls,” “Double Jeopardy” and “High Crimes” -- most often short-handed as “women in peril” pictures, Ashley Judd has more recently seemed to reach a certain armistice with Hollywood, acting less frequently in favor of spending more time on her charitable service work.

Which raises the question -- applicable to the growing class of once-ubiquitous actresses of a certain age now appearing on-screen less often -- does spending time not acting change the process of acting?

“No,” Judd says. “Because what it takes is the same, just a willingness to surrender and to have the courage to allow whatever is going to happen between another actor and the camera and me to happen without interfering with it.”

In William Friedkin’s “Bug,” an emotionally punishing and psychologically disorienting study in paranoia, co-dependency and delusion, Judd plays Agnes White, a waitress in a small-town bar with a haunted past. Her performance begins in the same downbeat, naturalistic vein as her recent turn in “Come Early Morning,” seeming to assay an unglamorous life of mundane, workaday reality. But as “Bug,” which opens Friday, ramps itself up and her character becomes increasingly convinced of an insect infestation, Judd’s performance twists and turns in fantastic ways, until she seems to become an otherworldly creature unleashed.

A study in paranoia

JUDD was not familiar with “Bug” until she was presented with the screenplay by Tracy Letts, adapting his play (which also can be seen until June 3 at the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood). Friedkin was signed on, as was actor Michael Shannon, set to reprise the role he originated onstage: a drifter who blows into Agnes’ life and attaches himself like a parasite to its host.

Shannon’s character is the catalyst for her freefall descent, locking them into a desperate death trip. Once he convinces her that he has been implanted with some foreign organism, she soon believes she has been infected as well. Much of the film is simply two people together in a motel room.

Friedkin had met Judd socially a number of times, at various dinners and the like, and was taken with her intelligence and poise.

“I always felt that she was better than a lot of [her] roles,” he says. “Simply because there aren’t that many great roles for women and very few that are written for women stars.”

Though she may not seem the most immediate candidate for the role, Friedkin quickly seized upon the idea of Judd playing Agnes.

“This is something as a director that you have feelers for with actors. It doesn’t often occur, but you feel this person, because of what they’ve done before or in meeting them, you get a sense that they will understand a character.”

The film’s emotional climax comes when Judd’s character turns herself over completely to the bitter emotions roiling inside her and in a long, connect-the-dots monologue, entwines herself into her companion’s theories of conspiracy and delirium until she triumphantly declares, “I am the super mother bug!” The sequence is all the more harrowing for the extended takes used by Friedkin, allowing the actors to snake their way toward some dangerous emotional precipices.

“For me,” says Judd, “what I look for is to do a take and have very little if any memory of what just happened. That’s the sort of take where I’m satisfied and sated and I walk away thinking, ‘Whatever happened, I’m OK with it.’

“To me that’s good -- I wasn’t in control, I wasn’t plotting and planning, I wasn’t designing a neat little performance with perfect expressions. I had an experience, it was dynamic, I don’t remember it -- that’s what I’m looking for.”

‘Tense or edgy’

FRIEDKIN recalls that her transportation, the sense that she was someplace else, was palpable. “That happened quite often,” he says, “mostly in the more tense or edgy situations. I kept the atmosphere and the tension on the set so high during the final sequences that you would be afraid for her, you literally were afraid watching her go to where she went.”

As the film progresses and Agnes’ descent into madness and paranoia becomes more complete, a physical change seems to come over Judd as well: As her eyes dart frantically, her body seems to vibrate with a furious energy and her hands twitch and contort themselves. She begins to seem kind of, well, buggy.

The evolution of Judd’s gestures through the course of the film provides an insight into her performance style. During preproduction and rehearsal, she will think about the most realistic responses, to a tick crawling on her arm, for example, and then extrapolate them outward to the story’s more far-fetched outer reaches. The intent is that the movements become second nature, occurring unconsciously at the appropriate moments.

“And I believe I’ve got bugs, so I would be itching. I intuited that, I made a decision to commit to it and then I just trusted that it would happen at the right time in the right way.”

As for whether she creates specific gestures to go with specific lines of dialogue, her response is immediate. “I do not plan. And please, fire me if I ever do. Ban me from the stage and screen and send me home. Because it’s boring.”

Her current vantage point would presumably give her a unique, and possibly renewed, perspective on her days in those “women in peril” pictures. As to whether those films satisfied her creatively in the same way as something such as “Bug,” Judd is diplomatically circumspect.

“I don’t have a perspective on it right now,” she says plainly, “but I’ll get back to you if I do. I don’t really look back all that much. You can’t put your foot in the same river twice.”