“When I was younger, and just newly being looked at, it was very difficult for me.”

Juliette Lewis explains how early stardom prepared her to play a chair in new body-swap movie, By Design

"When I was younger, and just newly being looked at, it was very difficult for me."

By Mike Miller

Mike Miller

Mike Miller is the executive editor on the movies team at . He previously worked as a writer-reporter for PEOPLE and TMZ.

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February 13, 2026 1:00 p.m. ET

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Samantha Mathis, Juliette Lewis, and Robin Tunney in 'By Design'. Credit:

Courtesy of Music Box Films

- Juliette Lewis discusses her new role in filmmaker Amanda Kramer's *By Design*, in which she plays a woman who swaps bodies with a chair.

- Lewis says she related to her character's desire to escape her own body.

- Kramer breaks down what made Lewis so perfect for the role.

For Juliette Lewis, playing a woman who turns into a chair wasn't as big a stretch as it might seem.

The star joins forces with iconoclastic filmmaker Amanda Kramer (*Please Baby Please*) for this weekend's *By Design, *a hilarious, subversive spin on the body-swap genre that has much to say about objectification, identity, and self-worth — themes that felt acutely relatable to the actor.

"When I read this script, I needed it," Lewis tells *. "*I had such a hunger for something [like this]. It was so wildly inventive. Nothing you could possibly prepare yourself for, and some of the narration and monologues spoke to me on such a deep level. Like, I cried."

In the film, narrated by Melanie Griffith, Lewis' Camille becomes infatuated with a beautiful chair she discovers while window shopping at a high-end furniture store with her two best friends. When a stranger buys it before she can get the money together, she makes a desperate wish to become that which she can no longer possess. An ordinary, single woman with a simple, routine life, Camille craves to be desired in the way she desires this singular piece of furniture. That longing to transcend one's own identity hit close to home for Lewis.

Juliette Lewis as Camille in 'By Design'.

Courtesy of Music Box Films

"When I was younger, and just newly being looked at, it was very difficult for me, and I actually didn't know how to find the escape of it," she admits, before adding, "Well, actually, I escaped in playing people. So I do understand the wanting to be othered, wanting to be another, and that was my skillset, that's what I knew and understood."

Through storytelling and "inhabiting other skins" in her roles, Lewis found that release. She was "never satisfied," she says, until she lost herself "so completely" in her work.

At the same time, as a young woman struggling to come to terms with her newfound fame from films including *National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation*, *Cape Fear*, and *What's Eating Gilbert Grape*, she longed to be like other teenagers — so much so that she even dreamed of changing her name.

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"When I was a kid, I wanted to change my name from Juliette to Tammy," she says with a laugh. "Because somewhere in my kid's mind, Tammys were normal and popular, but Juliette was not."

After nearly four decades in the spotlight, Lewis feels more comfortable in her skin, both professionally and privately. "Now it's not a big deal, and I see the humanity in others, and I don't feel stuffed in by it," she says of her fame. While she still enjoys the escape she finds in her work, she adds, "It's only in midlife that I'm like, 'Oh, maybe I'll play a little bit of myself here.'"

Betty Buckley and Juliette Lewis in 'By Design'.

Courtesy of Music Box Films

While Lewis sees pieces of herself in Camille, Camille doesn't actually spend much time as Camille in the film. When she swaps bodies with the chair, her consciousness is transported into the furniture, leaving her human body in a state of catatonic repose. This presented some unique challenges for Lewis as a performer.

"It became — I think I speak for Amanda and myself — this sort of perverse pleasure, or I would say a subversive pleasure, of how to have me doing nothing. And when we say nothing, we mean some kind of magic that exists where you're in orbit, you're in this nether world, but you're present," she explains. "As an actor, I had to resist the urge to emote more than I should; that's where we would lose what we're doing. And that became such an exciting process. And there was a game of trust with Amanda. She would tell me yes or less, or this or that; we would make shapes."

Still, Lewis says she prepared for the role like she would any other. "I approached it the same as any of my work, which is that I'm always striving for transcendence," she says, adding with a laugh, "That's all. Total transcendence."

For some of the film's more dramatic moments, like when Camille reenters her body, Lewis adds, "There's all these different choices, and you have to connect it with something real. And so I connected it to when my dad came out of heart surgery, or if someone lost the feeling of their limbs and they're just able to inhabit a limb again. And so one by one, we come alive in that. It's the ultimate make-believe, and that's what has lived within me since I was a kid,"**

Mamoudou Athie in 'By Design'.

Courtesy of Music Box Films

Recalling shooting that scene, when Camille is forced back into her body, Kramer says she could "not believe" the performance Lewis gave. "I was like, *Where do we go from here?* I mean, it was everything."

Though Kramer admits she started the day feeling a bit intimidated, seeing Lewis at work "calmed my ass down, because when we got that performance, it was like lock and key, shut the film. We thought whatever happens from here is just gravy."

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Throughout the shoot, Kramer saw Lewis tap into an energy that, she says, helped make her a star. "As a young, young woman, one of the things that made her so great right out the gate was that she had this guilelessness, this honesty, this sincerity, this earnestness," the filmmaker explains. "And it is why the early films are so chilling because you have these cynical adult actors around her, and she is just like, *You can't touch me.* And it's incredible."

That presence, she knew, made Lewis the perfect choice for Camille. "I remember thinking, if we can get Juliette, not back in time, but to that guilelessness, that earnestness, that sincerity, we'll have a Camille unlike anything that I could get from any other actor," she says. "And she went exactly there. Her absolute truth and her honesty and her earnestness are what make her so devastating."

*By Design* is now in theaters.**

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