Jo beth Jo - Crazier Than Thou?

Jo Beth Jo – Crazier than thou?

By Walter Neff

Originally appeared in "You Weekly" October 1999

She’s been called the ‘girl who broke up Underlife’ and ‘the crazy one’, but no matter what you call her Jo Beth Jo is really quite a character. Her charm and appeal are something that instantly wins you over, and her looks are always quite stunning. Walter Neff caught up with Jo Beth in a ‘strange’ moment.

She strides into her suite at LA's Four Seasons Hotel, bundled away in a long dark trench coat and jeans. Underneath are a white shirt and a green scarf. Her hair is tightly - no, make that painfully - pulled back in a bun and her face is full of make-up, and dark fifties glasses, drawing attention to her bee-stung lips.

The effect is of a woman who is A) dressed from the laundry basket after a hard night on the town; B) failed to pay her gas bill and just been cut off; or C) doesn't give a damn because she knows she has Hollywood at her feet. Guess which Jo Beth Jo is...

Jo’s position has been cemented with the B-movie Santo Frente A La Muerte which sees her swiping blows with Mexican Legend Santos and (as she puts it) her “new found squeeze” Johnny Vanguard.

"I've been very fortunate to find roles that I fit in at this time," Jo says, settling down. "If I hadn't found Santos, I don't think I would have worked at all... I can't even think about it.

"After that whole Underlife thing, I was pretty much at my wits end and a bit shell-shocked and so I was going to take time off. But then I read this thing called Santos and I had to smile. The character was just a clean, blue-collar girl under a mask fighting off a bunch of guys. Thank God. For me it was like this little part in this light film. It's certainly bigger than any of my work."

Undeniably sexy at any time, today the 24-year-old actress presents an odd combination of candor and reticence.

Throughout our conversation, sentences and thoughts not only collide and meander, but also take the bus downtown and return again (picking up a few additional passengers along the way), never quite arriving at their final stop. Suppose you were to ask Jo about - oh I don't know - Johnny Vanguard?

"I've not seen Johnny in so long," she laughs. Hang on. Isn’t Vanguard your ‘current squeeze’? I skip this for a minute as she continues.

"There was this thing the other day on TV. Some weird psychic was matching people up according to their signs or something: `And this person will match this person." And I'm watching going: "Yeah, that's me." And there I was sitting there in my own little world covered in food in my room..."

The world she wandered into in the mid 1990's, Underlife, Spencer Lees and Johnny Vanguard, is something she strangely keeps silent on. Ask her about the Underlife split, and her responsibility in the whole event and she just says "I was looking at the classifieds today and I was thinking about truck driving. I honestly was! Just for the hell of it! They were teaching it and would actually pay you to learn. So I don't know why I stick with acting," she laughs, but Jo's got no plans to throw in the acting game just yet.

"For now I just... I guess acting is everything to me. I mean, I probably wouldn't stick with it if I was doing the same character for years. But I was just clinging on as “part” of a band only a few years ago, and now I'm going to get in a corset and a mask and go to Cuba and find my squeeze. Thank God I haven't lost my mind yet."

Push her about Johnny Vanguard and she's all coy and smiling, "Yeah, I mean I think it'll be an amazing day when we get to a point in our lives when we both have the same story to tell. I don't know if it'll ever happen. I really want him to do something more in film and to play something crazy, some character with a moustache or something, I desperately want him to do that, I want to do that with him..."