Many people felt uncomfortable after learning the real life story of the actress behind Angela Hayes in American Beauty (1999). “I was not being loved. I was just a body.” — Mena Suvari on surviving s*xual abuse, acting, and American Beauty. Suvari was first r@ped at age 12 by a friend of her older brother. He then told other people at school that she was a “wh*re”. She was so ashamed, she denied that it had happened. “That sucked the life out of me. I think that was just excessive confirmation that no one was going to save me, no one was going to do anything for me.” As a teenager starting out in Hollywood, she was repeatedly taken advantage of by a predatory manager before entering the ab*sive three-year relationship with the technician. One of her business advisers, in his mid-30s, who started having se× with her when she was 16. “I didn’t have anyone telling me, ‘That’s not right, that person shouldn’t be doing that with you’.” At her first modelling shoot, she says, “everyone was raving about how I looked 18. But I was 12.” she said angrily “What was communicated to me was that I was an adult, therefore I can act like an adult.” While filming America Beauty (1999), Mena Suvari described an "unusual" and "eerie" experience with Kevin Spacey while filming the 1999 movie American Beauty. Between filming scenes, Spacey took Suvari into a side room on set that had a bed, where they lay very close to one another. Suvari stated that Spacey was "gently holding" her while they lay there. She described the interaction as "very peaceful but weird and unusual". However, Suvari mentioned that Spacey did not make s*xual advances in that room, and she trusted him on set at the time. Suvari noted that years of ab*se made her uniquely prepared to play the hyper-s*xualised Angela Hayes. She stated that film sets became a strange refuge because she already knew exactly how to perform and dissociate. She wrote, "Oh, you want me to be s*xually attractive? Done."