Free Stallion, Free Spirit

>by Marshall Heyman

We’ve heard of model-slash-actress and actress-slash-singer, but California’s own AMBER TAMBLYN is the first actress-slash-poet we’ve ever met. We dispatched MARSHALL HEYMAN to try and figure out what makes Tamblyn tick.

When the actress Amber Tamblyn walks into the Rose Café in Venice Beach for an early breakfast, the hostess gives her a big hug. They talk about the cross country road trip Amber just returned from, and discuss the unfortunate sunburn on Amber’s back, incurred doing outdoor yoga the day before—so today she’s wearing a hippie-buttoned sweater, to hide any visible redness.

It’s no surprise that Amber’s so at home in this coffee bar/health food restaurant/gift shop; it’s a quintessentially beachy kind of place, and Amber lives the metaphorical hop, skip, and jump away. She’s resided in the area for all of her life. Her father, Russ Tamblyn, an actor who is perhaps best known for his performance as Riff, the leader of the Jets, in the 1961 classic West Side Story, but also appeared opposite his daughter in a few episodes of Joan of Arcadia, and her mother, the singer Bonnie Murray, still live in nearby Santa Monica, where Amber grew up and went to high school.

“I’ve never lived anywhere but Venice,” Amber says, sipping a cup of coffee and ordering a spinach omelet with a side of tomatoes. “You’re 45 minutes from anywhere you need to be in Hollywood, but you don’t have to have anything to do with it. People by the beach are so much calmer and happier and kind to each other. It feels so away from it all. I don’t know where the clubs are. If I go to one, I feel like I’m visiting, that I’m from out of town. I can play celebrity for a night.”

Read the entire story in the August/September issue of Foam.