  Isabelle Fuhrman plays the little queen of mean in Orphan, a movie Leonardo DiCaprio co-produces. DiCaprio discovered Fuhrman online in a taped audition. |
LOS ANGELES -- Isabelle Fuhrman is a dark-eyed, preternaturally articulate pre-teen who, unlike most girls her age, is looking forward to being hated.
"If America hates me, I've done my job," says the young star of the remarkably atmospheric (and surprise-laden) thriller Orphan, about a nine-year-old Eastern European girl named Esther, whose adoption by an already-troubled family leads to darkness and mayhem. Orphan opens in theatres on Friday.
"I mean, the full job is I want them to start out feeling sorry for her, but then start saying, 'Whoa, she's so mean!'"
It seems to be working. "Already," the 12-year-old Fuhrman says, "a lot of people I've met who recognize me from this movie expect me to be some freaky child who's weird and who walks around giving this glare. But I'm not."
Leonardo DiCaprio, for one, saw the potential for freakiness in the relative unknown child actor -- from 10,000 miles away. DiCaprio is a producing partner in the film, which co-stars Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga as the unsuspecting adoptive parents.
"Leo was making Blood Diamond in South Africa," says fellow producer Joel Silver. "And the way you can do casting now is there's a protected website called CastIt, where they can put up all the people testing for roles. And Leo called me up early one morning and said, 'I've seen this girl, she's fantastic!' And we hadn't even seen it yet.
"He just said, 'She's the one.' And he was very specific about it, because being a former child actor himself, he's very conscious of what that involves, and he was always concerned this girl not be affected by the process. It's a very sophisticated movie, but he was very conscious that she be focused."
He didn't have to worry about that. Fuhrman, who has acted from age seven over the initial objection of her parents, went at the role with the dedication you'd expect of someone trained in the Stella Adler method (which she is).
"I was observing a lot of people. I was making fun of my mom and her friends when I was watching them. And I was at a restaurant with Vera and I was watching these women. And they kept looking at me, like, 'Why is this person looking at me?' And I was looking at how they tilted their heads or crossed their legs. And I was watching Vera a lot onset, and it just all worked."
Farmiga says she believes "just watching" is part of Fuhrman's nature, and will make her an actress to watch.
"It goes way beyond just this part," Farmiga says. "She was always asking why. 'Why do people do this?' or 'Why do they act that way?' I think she really wants to understand why people do what they do, and it really serves her well."
The voyeurism is part of the story. In Orphan, Sarsgaard and Farmiga play John and Kate, a troubled couple who'd recently miscarried a baby, and nearly lost their youngest daughter Max (Aryana Engineer) to an accident related to Kate's alcoholism. The strange but deft Esther soon learns sign language to "bond" with the hearing impaired Max, intimidates the brother Daniel (Jimmy Bennett), exploits Kate's weaknesses and ingratiates herself with John.
"The idea, really, is they're not stupid, but that Esther's that smart," says writer David Leslie Johnson. "It is one of the things that you fall into with the 'evil child' movies, is 'How is that all these adults are being outsmarted by this child?' But Esther is just really that smart. She's Hannibal Lecter smart."
There's even an element of female empowerment for Fuhrman, whose career thus far has been marked by voicework and episodic guest spots in shows such as Ghost Whisperer.
"Most evil characters are males, not many are females," says the actress, who is far too young to have seen The Bad Seed. "The Good Son, The Omen. There aren't really many bad little girls in movies.
"I mean, there was The Exorcist. But I never saw that movie, and probably never will. I'd be too freaked out."
