Taylor Momsen breezes into a Manhattan diner like a benevolent banshee, her pale skin and long blonde hair shock against her all-black silhouette. She’s just come from a makeup trial, lids dusted with iridescent shadow glow against her blue eyes. She orders a Coke Zero with a straw, curling her long fingers around the pebbled plastic tumbler, sometimes talking and sipping while chewing a wedge of white gum, making her smart, seasoned demeanor seem at times endearingly girlish.
It’s near Halloween, and, as her friend fondly points out, it’s Halloween year round for the Pretty Reckless frontwoman; the band’s newest single, “For I Am Death,” perfectly reflects the hard, dark side that earned them platinum status.
When asked what first comes to mind when she thinks about Christmas, without hesitation she says, “Grinch,” of 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Ron Howard-directed, Jim Carrey-starring, live-action feel-good film where, as Cindy Lou Who, Taylor’s performance encompasses the story’s whole heart. Six years old at the time, Taylor’s portrayal is precocious and brave, ponderous and idealistic, a mischief-maker who creates change for the better. “I am Cindy Lou,” Taylor says now, so true for all the aforementioned character traits, but also for her enduring belief in magic.
After years of requests, the Pretty Reckless finally covered the sweet song Taylor sings in Grinch, “Where Are You Christmas?”, and released it in October. It wasn’t until the 2020 COVID lockdown that Taylor and her band decided to finally play the song, surprised by how it made them feel.
The experience sparked a holiday EP, Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas, four original songs bookended by two versions of the remade Grinch classic. The record, she says, is a “full-spectrum story that also tells the journey of my life with a Christmas spin,” touching on all the feelings only the holidays can bring. “It’s a very emotional record. It’s also completely fun. It should bring a giant smile to everyone’s face, which is the end goal.”
And Christmas is her time for dress-up, out of character from her usual vampiric aesthetic. The album’s back-cover art shows Taylor as a grown-up, modernized Cindy Lou, with a whole back story that melds with Taylor’s. “My thought was…if I really was that character and grew up in New York with the life I’ve lived, what would that character look like?” Adult Cindy trades her fuzzy slippers for furry platform booties, ruffles popping out at the top. The final image is a fun Grinch seek-and-find, with a Grinch doll on the floor to the left, and, on top of a pile of packages, her original sculpted blonde wig.
Since Grinch, Taylor’s remained close with the makeup artist on the film, Oscar-winner Rick Baker, the keeper of the elaborate hairpiece who allowed Taylor to borrow it for the shoot. “Our manager Chris actually flew the wig from L.A. to New York holding it on his lap because it’s a one-of-a-kind artifact — every hair was individually laid. It still had the original snow from the set on it.” She describes the sense-memory experience of unboxing the wig as “surreal,” the prop snow with its distinct scent taking her right back to childhood.
It took some time, she tells me, to be able to look back and fully embrace the acting career she began building when she was only 2 (after a successful career in commercials and feature films, her last acting job was on the series Gossip Girl). “There’s two versions of me,” she says. “Because I started working so young, there’s the super outgoing side, where I was very talkative and very performative.” She describes going out on date night as a child with her parents, getting bored and talking to people at other tables.
Now, as an adult she’s a self-professed introvert, feeling the extrovert side was something she adapted to early on. “I’m good at parties, I’m good at events, I know how to do that, but it’s a hat that I have to put on. I’m very shy. That’s the thing people probably don’t assume about me.”
“Thoughtful,” “sensitive,” and “sweet” are descriptors she uses to define her younger self. “I was always the type of person who wanted to break up the fight and wanted everyone to get along. Genuinely very Cindy.” Those are traits, she thinks, Ron Howard may have recognized to cast her as the fearlessly idealistic Cindy Lou Who. “I was saccharinely sweet,” she says, with a laugh. At only 6, and relatively new to reading, Taylor had to memorize the script audibly. So, by the time she was actually shooting, she’d memorized the entire script, not just her parts. They would have to stop filming because Taylor was mouthing other actors’ lines. Verbalization is a learning mechanism she utilizes to this day to process information.
Though Taylor’s childhood memories are selective, she knows several things for sure: her fellow actors, mostly comedians, were so kind to her. And the stunts were “kid heaven,” most of which (minus the shooting her out of a garbage can near the end) she did herself.
She’s a believer that every experience, exactly the way it was, forms who you are. “It all led to here,” she says. “And I love here.” It’s a full-circle moment, one she spent many years running from, even “hating,” but now “learning to love that again in a new way, in a new perspective, I think it’s really special.”
She’s a sentimentalist, holding onto cherished items from childhood; traveling a lot as a child, she found comfort in things she could carry with her. Once she stopped growing, she says, she used clothing as a means of marking her personal history. “I can pull out a T-shirt from my drawer, and I can tell you where I was when I got it, what I was thinking when I got it, what headspace I was in, what tour that was, what happened that day, where I’ve worn it since,” she tells me. She’s organized and stored her precious things, recently contemplating what to let go of, calling herself a “hoarder” of memories: “It’s hard to get rid of history.”
Some of those cherished items include the Grinch costumes she was allowed to keep, which she remarkably wears (with some creative styling) for the new album promo shots. Most people wouldn’t even think of trying to fit into a costume they wore when they were 6, but Taylor thought: “I wonder if I could fit into these dresses…and sure enough, I can zip it about half-way. They’re really short but not inappropriately short. You add a little crinoline underneath, and it does the thing. The only thing I couldn’t get through was my arm because I have muscle now.” Whatever didn’t quite work was covered with a cape. Regardless — 25 years later, 32-year-old Taylor is wearing the original costumes from Grinch. (It’s worth noting that Taylor’s character wore padding under her costume in the film.)
Openly revealing she had to go through a dark period to get to where she is now, Taylor seems to be experiencing her own personal renewal. “I am having a renaissance,” she says. “I feel like I’m in a very good place. I made a very calculated decision to be what I call breezy…just be breezy with life, let it flow. Stop fighting things so hard. That doesn’t mean don’t fight for your vision — I would lay down my life for my art.” This “be like water” attitude, she says, along with “laughing at everything,” is her secret. “Life’s hard. If you can’t laugh at a situation, especially a bad situation, you’re gonna drown in the bad side of it.”
Though she says she’s not the type to sit down and watch a Christmas movie (“I’m a horror-movie chick”), it’s almost as if she’s living in her own. The themes of her personal journey follow a traditional morality play’s character arc. This chapter, for Taylor, is the walk-off-into-the-sunset part of her story. What’s different this year is she’s just found out she’ll be in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, atop the Macy’s Rocking Horse Toy Float. “All those classic Christmas movies, they have a heart to them that’s so relatable to everyone in the world no matter where you’re from or what your life is like, there’s a centerpiece of…love, of acceptance, of family…that’s blatantly human that everyone can relate to.”
In each of these stories there has to be a monster to battle. “That’s life,” Taylor says. Sometimes the monster is within yourself, as is the case with the Grinch. “All it takes to break through your armor is having one person who sees you. In the Grinch, it’s Cindy Lou Who. In life, that can be anyone.”
And as for a Christmas Carol-type of ghost knocking on her door? She believes in energy and has tried really hard to summon spirits, but so far no visitors. (And definitely no Jacob Marley.)
“If you’re open to it, you’ll probably have more experiences than someone who isn’t,” she says. “I try to remain open, but I’ve yet to have some ghost come knock on my door and say, ‘What’s up?’”
