Poker Face - Jennifer Tilly

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27 September 2006

Poker Face - Jennifer Tilly

She's taking the men on at the tables and beating them at their own game. Actress turned poker player Jennifer Tilly explains what it takes to come out on top.

In 1994 Jennifer Tilly almost won an Oscar for her role in Bullets over Broadway, but this year she won the W Series Golden Bracelet, the biggest poker prize there is, and announced that it was better than an Oscar.

The explosion of Online Poker and poker on television has made the card game mainstream business, and it's celebrity following has lent it glamour. But it's pokers burgeoning popularity among women that has perhaps been its most surprising evolution, and Tilly is its poster girl. She insists it wasn't because she was tired of playing sexual arm candy in second rate movies that she turned to poker. "But you know, I've been acting for all these years, and after you turn 35, it slows down a bit. So why not embrace a poker life?"

You get the feeling that acting now comes second place to the game. She has taken a role in a prime time American television series, but says: "I never wanted to do television. Indentured slavery was never my dream, but I though I should do it before poker took over completely."

She started playing cards as a child. Her dad taught her when he was still married to her mother. When he died, he left her all his poker books with special passages underlined, but he had been banned from playing the game for several years by her stepmother. The most recent catalyst, however, has been dating the professional poker player Phil Laak, known as the Unabomber.

All professional poker players have a guise, a persona, that just happens to be his - the sweatshirt, the glasses, the expression.

Tilly gushes about him. "He's the smartest guy I've ever known. I've been seeing him for about a year. We met at a tournament. When we finally hooked up , he taught me about poker. I thought I was a poker player before, but I realised I didn't know anything. These guys, they live a crazy life."

Top poker players compete in tournaments in exotic locations, often using corporate sponsorship to pay their entrance fees, which can be up to $25,000. "Phil and his friends are all borderline genius," says Tilly. "A lot of them are dotcom millionaires; one of them is a master of artificial intelligence. But what all of them share is none of them wants to live a normal life."

Think of Tilly's onscreen personas and they have always been a little crazy. The squeaky voiced gangsters moll in Bullets, the sullen, druggy stripper who doesn't dance in Dancing at the Blue Iguana and the lipstick lesbian, all trussed up with Gina Gershon, in Bound.

"In many ways, poker is a similar process to acting. When I played a stripper, we shopped where strippers shopped, wore perfume that strippers wear. You become that character. I was traveling around poker players. They are sleep deprived, they eat badly, they write articles for poker magazines, they learn a chip trick. It took me months to learn how to shuffle chips. If you're doing all these things with poker players, you become one."

She and Unabomber are now permanently on the road. "I try to go everywhere with him. He's wild, unpredictable, funny. His energy bounces off the table. We're inseparable. If I'm with him on the road I just write articles for Bluff magazine about the poker lifestyle, about how I was the tag along who wanted to be a poker player. But I never thought I could be this good. Now I've won the bracelet, I have to rethink my identity."

The Golden Bracelet is the holy grail of poker. With it comes endless opportunities for web site endorsements - they will pay your tournament fees if you just put their logo on your shirt.

For Tilly it's not about the money - in a recent ladies' championship she won $158,000 - it's about being good at it. "An addictive gambler is addicted to the feeling when they lose, and I really enjoy the feeling of winning. If I'm losing, I don't play for a while. I'm never, 'I have to keep playing because I have to make back the money I lost.'"

That probably makes her good at it. That, and the acting perhaps? "Actors are trained to have very mobile expressions, so you have to do the opposite of that," she says. "When I played the World Series poker, I had my sunglasses on and my whole face empty. The first day was 17 hours of play. I didn't even talk, because when you talk it can be a tell; I pretend I don't hear if people talk to me. I used to shuffle chips, but then I realised that could look nervous as well, so I just became really, really still and expressionless. It took me a long time to get to that point. Phil is the opposite. He's very energetic, chatting all the time."

"As an amateur you have lots of tells you don't even realise. Tiny things. The sunglasses are because your pupils dilate if you are excited or nervous. I always make sure my chips are stacked in $1,500 piles, because if you've got a really good hand and you start fumbling with your chips, your hands will shake, so you have the chips counted in advance and make all movements as small as possible."

Intense, huh? "The thing that was weird when I was winning the tournament is that I could tell what people were thinking. I could get into their heads; I knew ff they were bluffing. I knew if they had a hand. I knew if they didn't, but thought I didn't either, so they were raising me because they thought I was bluffing."

What does she wear? "I always wear the same because it's easier. Jeans, T-shirt, cowboy boots and a belt that used to belong to Johnny Cash. Some women like to wear really sexy clothes - that's their persona. I try to dress like a man, because I want to be empty of all sexuality. I'm not interested in being the sexy girl of poker."

Tilly was born in California, but when her parents split up, her mother took her and her sisters, Meg and Betsy, to Canada to live like hippies. She rebelled, longing to join the Girl Scouts and have a cream soda instead of bohemian hand me downs. Her mother bought their clothes from the Salvation Army, and Tilly would have nightmares that they once belonged to the popular girls at school. The result was that as soon as she became successful she filled her wardrobe with Dolce and Gabbana. "I went to a psychiatrist to see if I was a shopaholic, but he didn't think I was as I could pay my bills."

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