4
Aug

Style Spotlight on: Margarita Levieva-aka Lisa P. from Adventureland

Margarita Levieva as Lisa P. in Adventureland

If you don’t know who Margarita Levieva is, you will soon! She’s starring opposite Ashton Kutcher in the movie “Spread.” And we predict we’ll see a lot more of her in the future…

“Margarita Levieva’s sultry slow-motion entrance in the summer-job comedy Adventureland, writer-director Greg Mottola’s follow-up to Superbad, is a sight to behold. Accompanied by the seductive groove of The Rolling Stones’ “Tops,” Levieva’s character Lisa P. paralyzes all male onlookers as she struts through an amusement park while savoring a snow cone. Although the Russian-born actress has little in common with the gum-chewing, hair-flipping Tilt-A-Whirl operator she plays in Adventureland, which is set in 1987, Levieva has made an equally strong impression on the press in New York, where she now is based. In 2005, New York magazine ran a full-page close-up of Levieva as part of its “50 Most Beautiful New Yorkers” feature. And last year, when New Yorker film critic David Denby reviewed Noise, a film in which Levieva played a Russian philosophy student opposite Tim Robbins, he wrote, “I would watch her in anything,” noting that she displayed “a fervent intelligence the likes of which we haven’t seen in American movies for years.”

Levieva (pronounced leveeva) is a former world-class rhythmic gymnast who grew up in communist Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. She immigrated to the U.S. with her mother and twin brother when she was 11 years old. Although she loved performing, she passed on an opportunity to study dance at New York’s Laguardia High School and went on to study economics at NYU, paying for her education by working as a fashion buyer. Ultimately, she committed to acting and was accepted into the Meisner Training Program at the William Esper Studio. In 2006, she starred in the Fox series Vanished, and the following year she played tomboyish Annie Newton, a lead character in the teen supernatural thriller The Invisible. The Sunday before Adventureland’s release, Levieva appeared on an episode of the NBC drama Kings, and she currently can be seen on Broadway in Impressionism, starring Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen. I spoke to Levieva by phone a few hours before an evening performance of Impressionism.”

Excerpt taken from undertheradarmag.com. Read the rest of undertheradarmag.com’s great interview with Margarita Levieva!