Amber Valletta is talking sex, fetishes, bagels. It’s early morning in Santa Monica, so the marine mist is yet to burn off the Pacific Ocean, and she is rushing along, chatting about her latest film. ‘My husband’s been thrown in jail and all my options of making a living are out the window and what happens to me might as well be prostitution…’ until suddenly, ‘Can I get a bagel, plain, no onions or tomatoes, just the ham and cheese, toasted?’
Minutes later back at home, Valletta’s son, Auden, who is nine, gets his breakfast bagel. His mum has just returned after two weeks away promoting Gamer, in which her screen husband, played by Gerard Butler, is a death-row prisoner forced to take part in an online death match game manipulated by other people, while Valletta, also forced to be an avatar, is coerced to play out other people’s fantasies – so, in some ways, not all that different to a 20-year career in the online fashion business.
Valletta, 35, who landed her first Italian Vogue shoot aged 15, comes from the big-sky country of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the corn grows as high as an elephant’s eye. While possessed of the ice-cool online fashion beauty of a Hitchcock blonde, her manner is still Midwestern warm. Her real-life husband is Christian McCaw, who played volleyball for the United States at the Sydney Olympics and is now a building contractor. ‘What is it with guys?’ she laughs. ‘He’s a brilliant cook but he has this aversion to going to the grocery store, and they’ve been living off, I don’t know what, boxed macaroni!
I don’t even want to think about what they’ve been eating…’
Valletta is an odd one out in several ways. When she appears in US Vogue, as she still does, often, no one makes a fuss about how ‘old’ she is. Having come into the business just after ‘the supes’, and perhaps because her arrival coincided with that of both Kate Moss and Carla Bruni (Sarkozy) who between them drew every paparazzi lens, she has avoided some of the constant scrutiny. Yet she has had stints as the face of models Prada, Jil Sander, Donna Karan, Chanel, Gucci, Versace, Stella McCartney, Calvin Klein Eternity and Elizabeth Arden
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