Whenever I read about you turning down big-budget films like Legally Blonde to maintain your indie cred, I think, Why does Chloë hate money?
[Laughs] Well, it wasn’t the Reese Witherspoon part — let’s set the record straight — it was the Selma Blair part. But I was offered a Joe Orton play off-Broadway, What the Butler Saw, which I thought would be more challenging. I guess I didn’t realize the full potential of Legally Blonde at the time, but now I love those films — they’re hilarious.

Selma Blair interviewed you some years later for Interview magazine. Was the fact that you turned down her role an elephant in the room?
Aw, no, that stuff happens all the time. And so many girls have been offered parts that I’ve ended up doing, and I see them all the time — like the girl [Mia Kirshner] that got fired from Kids, which was the reason I got the role. Those are the breaks.

What attracted you to Monet, the apartment-flipping lesbian, on Will & Grace — Edie Falco as your sugar mama?
I was a huge Will & Grace fan! I loved Sean Hayes, and I just wanted to try a sitcom and see what that was all about. But what’s funny is that after I appeared on the show I could never watch it again. It lost the magic. We shot for two days, and the first day I was doing my quiet-whatever kind of acting that I do, but then I was like, If I don’t turn it up 10 notches, I’m just going to blend into the walls. So the next day I went in rip-roarin’ and ready to go, trying to ham it up, but it’s really hard to ham it up next to that cast.

You played Jessica Lange’s lesbian assistant in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. Were your characters lovers?
Oh, I forgot that! Yeah, it was extremely nuanced, but they were totally lovers. I just saw her walking her dog on Fifth Avenue and she said “hi” to me, and I was so excited. Frances Farmer!

You also kissed girls in the Lemonheads video for “Big Gay Heart.” When lesbians hit on you, do you break their big gay hearts gently or shoot them down quick?
I have to shoot ’em down quick. [Laughs] They always want to buy me drinks, but I’ll be like, “Save your money. I get free drinks here.” It doesn’t happen all the time, but it may happen if I go to certain gay spots — like on Saturday night, when I was at this super-lesbo party [Choice Cunts] downstairs at Santos Party House. It was fun.

You’ve said that people thought you were a lesbian while growing up in Darien, Conn. Why do you think that was?
I was a tomboy and went through a lot of different phases. When you shave your head and pierce your nose during your junior year in high school, that’ll do it. But you didn’t need to do much back then.

In a 2000 New York Times profile, you said, “I’ve questioned issues of gender and sexuality since I was a teenager, and I did some experimenting.” Did you mind that some people branded you as “bisexual” after that?
There were a lot of articles that made reference to that, but at this point I couldn’t care less what people call me. I still kiss girls occasionally, but I wouldn’t say I was bisexual.

Could you ever see yourself in a relationship with a woman?
Probably not, no. I need more meat and potatoes — with more of the meat part, I guess. [Laughs]

When celebrities like Lady Gaga, Fergie, and Ke$ha have discussed being bisexual or having bisexual tendencies in recent interviews, they’ve often been accused of doing so just for attention or to seem cooler. Has bisexuality become fashionable in Hollywood?
No, I wouldn’t say it’s fashionable. You have a lot of gay power players, but when it comes down to it, Hollywood is more homophobic than anywhere else. And I would never say something like that just to seem more interesting — that’s just the reality of who I was — but our society is a lot more forgiving of women than it is of men when it comes to that sort of thing.