Gretchen Mol: Happy to Take 2 Steps Back

Gretchen Mol has been spending a lot of time in the past lately.

Her role in the new television police drama "Life on Mars" pushes her back to 1973. And her latest film, "An American Affair," stretches back even further, to 1963 and the age of John F. Kennedy's Camelot.

In truth, she says, the past is where she has spent "most of my career."

"I mostly do period films," she adds. "I'm not sure exactly why."

Surely it has something to do with her look, a melding of cherubic innocence and pinup-style seductiveness that seems reminiscent of some hazy yesterday. That let her slip believably into a Marilyn Monroe-inspired Kennedy paramour for the Cold War-era Washington of "American Affair."

And if yesterday is the territory to which she has been relegated, well, Mol can live with that.

"You have so much more information with a little distance," the 36-year-old actress explains. "You get all the stuff that's going on socially at the time, and you can use that to explore who your character might be."

There was plenty of social context to explore in this instance: Mol plays a tormented woman caught between her Kennedy entanglements and the tightening screws of her ex-husband's CIA enforcers, plumbing her incessantly for information on the president. Witness to it all is a Catholic schoolboy who lives next door and has less than angelic designs on his glamorous neighbor.

"I sort of loved that she was in over her head in this world and that she was able to find some kind of pure relationship with this young boy -- that she could kind of be her purest self with him," Mol says by phone from her New York home. "But even that had a sort of tainted quality to it, because his own agenda got in the way."

Mol pushed hard for the part. She auditioned and was offered the role but then found herself with a conflict when filming for "3:10 to Yuma," the Russell Crowe western in which she had a small part, was scheduled for the same weeks as "American Affair."

"I really had to beg them to work out the schedule . . . and do this whole song and dance," she recalls. "It's so hard to find good roles, and they get snatched up by a few great actresses."

As with any independent film, Mol wasn't sure that this one would ever see the light of day -- or of a big-screen projector -- but the opportunity seemed precious enough to render that irrelevant.