[Article] Interview: Naomi Watts, actress

Published Date: 02 November 2010
By Nancy Mills

I'M NOT especially comfortable playing damsels in distress," Naomi Watts says. "I like to play women who appear to be that but, at the last minute, show they're anything but."

When Watts read the screenplay for Fair Game, which is about Valerie Plame, the undercover CIA agent whose career was destroyed by a 2003 White House press leak, she was interested. There was a problem, however.

"I'd had my second child on 13 December," she says, "and the e-mail about the movie came to me on 26 December. My friend (Jez Butterworth), who wrote the script, sent it. I told him, 'I'm not really reading anything right now. Give me a few weeks. I'm nursing my baby.'

"He was very smart," she continues. "He said, 'Just read ten pages today."' She read those ten pages and couldn't stop.


"I knew I had to make the movie," Watts says. "I wanted to know how any person survives that kind of fight when most people would avoid it or come undone.

"Valerie managed to maintain her marriage and dignity while losing her career and lifestyle. That was deeply impressive to me. I wanted to get into the mindset of a woman whose courage was that great."

The two women have subsequently become friends. "We e-mail a lot," Watts says, "and Valerie talks about how awkward it is going out there on red carpets and getting dressed up. It's so not how she planned her life.

"But a mind like hers should not be put to rest," the actress adds. "She's still an active woman and very smart. She's got things to do and things to say, although I think she would like to have her career and her previous life back."

Fair Game, directed by Doug Liman and co-starring Sean Penn as Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, is based on two memoirs: Plame's Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government and Wilson's The Politics Of Truth: A Diplomat's Memoir: Inside The Lies That Led To War And Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity.

Although 42-year-old Watts says she was prepared emotionally to take on the role, she wasn't sure she was ready physically. "I was in my most maternal state," she says, "so I didn't feel tough.

"Doug wanted to see a tougher side of me, so he sent me off to boot camp. I did paramilitary training. It was fun at the time, and also very scary and very intense. Valerie did two or three years' training – I did three days."

Nevertheless, she says, it had a strong impact. "I had a course in self-defence, where up to five people were fighting me at once," she says. "I did shooting stuff and car-ramming, with no helmet or fastened seat belt. I set off explosives. Doug wanted to see I had that toughness in me."

Did she?

"I feel like I'm a fairly fragile person," she admits. "It's pretty easy for me to get upset or emotional, but not tough or angry. Having said that, I think I've survived certain situations that have made me tougher and made me pull through. Even this whole thing about being an actor – that took a long time. I don't feel like I had thick skin, but the fact that I stayed there knocking away at it must make me resilient."

That must come in handy for a woman coping with two toddlers, boys born only 18 months apart.

"I do feel like Superwoman," she adds, laughing. "But if I'm not working – and that's about six months a year – I'm with them all the time."

Having recently put their Los Angeles home on the market, Watts and her partner, actor Liev Schreiber, live in Manhattan with their sons, three-year-old Alexander and nearly two-year-old Samuel Kai.

"We live our lives the same as anyone does," she says. "We don't control it, calculate it or plan it too much. We walk out the door with wet hair or come home sweaty from the gym.

"Some days cameras are there waiting," Watts concedes. "But there's a good code of ethics in New York. When I was in Los Angeles and pregnant, the paparazzi wouldn't leave me alone."

Since becoming a mother, the actress says she has changed her priorities. "Family comes first," she says. "I used to put more blood, sweat and tears into my work. The hours are intense and the demands are intense, but now I clock off. No longer do I stay up all night taking notes or sweating over the scene the next day. I get home, and it's the kids.

"Some days I'm impressed with myself that I got it right," she says. "Other days ... how many mistakes can you make?"

She sighs. "Sometimes I feel guilty that I'm not doing (my work) the old way," she admits. "I wonder if I'm doing as good a job."

Watts met Schreiber when they were both cast in the period drama The Painted Veil in 2006, but since then their careers have followed separate tracks. Lately Schreiber has been seen frequently on the stage, allowing him to stay in New York while Watts is off filming.

"We're talking about working together again," she says. "I'd love to do a play with him, although that would be very scary, because he's so brilliant."

Meanwhile, Watts has completed the psychological thriller Dream House with Daniel Craig – "I play a friendly neighbour," she says mysteriously – and is currently shooting The Impossible, set during the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.

Still under discussion is a possible remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Birds. "It sounded like a good idea," Watts says, "but the script's not there yet. I'd love to have been a Hitchcock blonde. A few directors I've worked with have been heavily influenced by Hitchcock, so I feel like I've gotten close."

The actress also hopes to play Marilyn Monroe in a film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel Blonde. "Everyone thinks, 'Ooh, Marilyn Monroe,"' she says, "but it's not a glossy picture. It's quite dark, but a great story."

The two actresses would seem to have little in common, apart from their hair colour, but Watts sees more to it. "I get her fragility, definitely," she says.

Born in England, Watts had an unsettled childhood. Her parents split up when she was four and she spent her early years moving around Britain with her mother and elder brother, Ben. Her father, a sound engineer who worked with Pink Floyd, died when she was seven. When she was 14, the biggest dislocation of all occurred: her mother moved the family to Australia.

"My grandmother was Australian," Watts says. "England was very difficult then, and Australia seemed like the land of opportunity. Believe me, it was a horrible thing for a 14-year-old to go through. I couldn't tell you the agony. But in hindsight I'm so thankful, because I developed an intense peer group."

Watts' interest in acting came from her mother, whom she remembers playing Eliza Doolittle in a community theatre production of My Fair Lady. It took a while, however, to get her own career going, in part because she wasn't the typical aspiring actress.

"I wasn't a get-up-on-a-stool-and-sing-a-song kind of girl," Watts says. "I'm more the person who wants to observe than be the observed. I've always been in the shadow of my big brother. He was the gregarious one. I followed him and wanted to be him."

Acting lessons eventually led to Watts' debut in the Australian film For Love Alone in 1986. Later she appeared with another up-and- comer, the young Russell Crowe, in the Australian mini-series Brides of Christ.

A major role in Flirting alongside fellow rising stars Nicole Kidman and Thandie Newton inspired her to move to Hollywood, but it was another decade of struggle before she broke through with a dual role in David Lynch's twisty Mulholland Drive.

That led to her first big hit, The Ring, and 21 Grams, which earned her an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. Since then she has enjoyed A-list status, starring in such films as King Kong and Eastern Promises.

"I feel like I was a late bloomer," she says. "I was definitely older than most when things got going."

She thrives on the challenges of difficult material, and has something of a reputation for onscreen grimness.

"People assume that, because they see it up on screen, that might be who I am," she says. "Maybe that's my outlet. In real life I'm a light person. I don't get depressed too often.

"But I am interested in dark things," she adds. "I'm not afraid of them. We all have a dark side. It's a matter of whether you want to embrace it or not. I'm willing to explore it, but it's not going to eat me up."

Fair Game is released in the United States on Friday, and in the UK early next year.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 31 October, 2010