by Carley Crawford, The Daily Telegraph, National Features
Nov 25, 2010
SHE grew up in Australia, but Naomi Watts has never felt more American than she does these days.
"I've lived in three different countries, but the most years have been in America," she says.
"I don't plan to live anywhere else right now. My children are American, Liev's American, I have great fond memories of living in Australia and England and I feel equal parts Australian and English."
But Watts adds that her teenage years in Sydney, where she moved to at age 14 and became friends with Nicole Kidman, will stay with her forever.
"I have an American sensibility but my formative years are what shaped me."
The British-born Watts now lives in New York's trendy West Village with her actor partner Liev Schreiber and their two children, Samuel Kai, two, and Alexander, 3 1/2.
She has cultivated one of those exotic international accents - part Australian, part British and part American.
Not that you would know it watching her on the big screen.
Her latest appearance is in the political thriller Fair Game, the true story of a CIA agent whose cover was blown by a White House leak.
Watts plays Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked by White House adviser Scooter Libby, jeopardising her top-secret field operations.
Watts and Plame bear a striking resemblance to each other in real life, and the pair did the red-carpet rounds promoting the film in the US in recent weeks.
"The thing about Valerie is that you learn very quickly that she's not someone that wears her heart on her sleeve," Watts says.
"She's an emotionally-driven person who was a brilliant covert agent and that's who she is to this day.
"She's very calm, reserved, quiet and warm, but you don't get her all at once and she's not easy to read. At times playing this character it was very difficult to get my head around. I'm much more fragile than Valerie and much less courageous."
Based on Plame's book Fair Game, the film is loyal to Plame's perspective. That is, that the White House hung her out to dry to justify the claim Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Sean Penn, well known for his left-wing political activism, plays Plame's ambassador husband, adding weight to the movie's political overtones.
Yet director Doug Liman insists the film plays to no agenda.
"This didn't start as a politically-motivated movie, this started with me being into a screenplay," Liman says.
"Fair Game is about courage and patriotism and the ability to speak out against our government without the fear of reprisal which is one of the foundations of our country."
On questions of whether Penn's presence serves as political statement, Watts is direct.
"He's also one of the best actors in the world, living or dead," she says.
With credits ranging from Peter Jackson's King Kong to chiller The Ring and gritty drama 21 Grams (which won her an Oscar nomination), Watts is no stranger to hard work.
But she has never worked harder than she did on Fair Game - filming began when her son Sam was just three months old.
"Basically I had a baby on December 13, I read the script in late December and we were filming by February," she says.
"The timing was terrible and my baby was waking up two or three times a night and I almost had a break down on the set. I'd literally had three hours sleep in some cases."
She found herself asking Liman questions such as: "The baby can have milk when we're done with this scene?"
Beyond the grind of shooting in the US and far off locales including Cairo, Watts underwent training at a real CIA facility in Virginia.
The idea was to toughen her up so she could play the role of a career spy.
"The training was intense," Watts says.
"They'd make us turn towards the wall if the identities of the other people there were supposed to be concealed."
She was shown gruesome torture scenes, shown how to detonate bombs, kicked in the shins by one instructor and even told to ram a car without wearing a seatbelt.
"I was handcuffed and put in a trunk and you have to get out."
All this as her maternal instincts were at their peak.
"I was allowed to have my baby every few hours so I could feed him," she says.
But spy games are not all action and drama.
"It looks cool and fun and sexy and risky," says Watts, "but there's a lot that's day-to-day as well."
3 comments:
It's nice to hear that she's planning to have her Christmas vacation again this year in Australia where she says is where her root is.
Aussie responses so far are positive.
Thank you for Naomi.
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