Mar 07, 2011
Interview: Naomi Watts
While it must feel like a lifetime, it’s been a decade since the Australian actor’s lead role in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive rescued her from the hand-to-mouth existence that most actors must endure. “It became a career after that moment,” she reflects. “Before, I was an actor for hire. It was work here and there. It was always a struggle.” Even Mulholland Drive threatened to implode; originally filmed as a TV pilot, it was rejected by network bosses only for Lynch to regroup his actors, shoot extra footage and turn it into what critics later proclaimed as the film of the decade.
For Watts, it was the break she’d so deserved after 10 years of thankless toil in an industry that was ready to spit her on to the trash heap. When Mulholland Drive was unveiled in Cannes she was 32, with a CV littered with forgotten films, soap opera bit-parts and shattered expectations. How apt, then, that Lynch cast her as a naive actor who arrives in Los Angeles with hopes and dreams of becoming a star. It’s certainly tempting to think of the blonde-haired and blue-eyed Watts landing in Hollywood with the same innocence, only to see her soul crushed by the harsh realities of trying to forge a career in such a fickle industry.
“I’ve had my great moments and terrible moments in LA,” she says, smiling. “There were times where I so often thought about throwing the towel in, feeling frustrated. There’s so much competition and it’s so hard to shine when you’re being told who you are – too young, too old, too serious, too funny. Whatever. Basically, you start believing that, and losing that confidence in yourself. The reason we’re actors is that we don’t have the strongest identities anyway. We love to attach ourselves to other identities. But I felt like I was losing a sense of who I was. I was unhireable.”
One minute I was sitting with a gun and the next I was breast-feeding my baby
She remembers vividly a conversation with her agent, who told her several casting directors had said she was “too desperate” when she went for auditions. “I was like, ‘No s***, Sherlock. I am!’ It was terribly upsetting. I was told the feelings I was making the casting directors have – I was too intense or was worried about my age. It was a low point.”
If anything encapsulated her pain, it was the 2005 comedy Ellie Parker, in which she played the titular actor, who hustles her way through auditions as she searches for a shred of dignity. It may have crawled into cinemas long after Watts had left that phase but the anguish Parker goes through was all too real.
Indeed, Watts seems destined to play the performer. In the same year as Ellie Parker, she starred in Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong as Ann Darrow – a 1930s actor who uses all her vaudeville skills to placate the film’s monster ape. Perhaps more intriguingly, she’s just signed on to play Marilyn Monroe – the ultimate symbol of the doomed celebrity – in Blonde, an adaptation of the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. “It’s a huge pressure,” she admits. “We all feel we know her. So iconic, such an extraordinary life. I’m scared about taking on that role.”
Even her latest turn, in Doug Liman’s Fair Game, has an element of performance about it. Her first real-life role, she plays CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose covert existence was destroyed when White House officials reputedly blew her cover to discredit her left-wing husband.
Watts sees a connection with Plame. “She does that going out into the field, assuming personas and different identities. The difference is, if I mess up, I could get panned by the critics. If she messes up, she could end up with a bullet in her head.”
Fair Game focuses on how the scandal nearly cost Plame her marriage, destroyed friendships and endangered lives. Sean Penn plays her husband Joseph Wilson, whose criticism of the US justification for war in Iraq in 2003 was followed by the leak of Plame’s identity – allegedly by CIA insiders.
Plame made herself available to Watts, though was unable to give up any juicy state secrets. “That information is classified,” says Watts, laughing. “But really the information I focused on was who she was as a person, as a mother, as a professional, as a wife, and how she dealt with everything that she almost lost. I was focusing on her strength and her ability to walk through this unbelievable challenge that upset her whole life overnight.”
It’s evident that Watts is in full admiration of the steely Plame. “I’m a lot more fragile than she is. She’s clearly someone with a thick skin. To me, she seems almost invincible because she’s so powerful.” The film is based on the memoirs of Plame, who says: “It’s an accurate representation of what we went through and it tells the story, hopefully as a cautionary tale to public officials who would seek to use their office for their own partisan agenda.”
The training Watts endured at a boot camp in Virginia came as a shock. Ordinarily, mastering such skills as handling a handgun and ramming cars without a seatbelt or crash helmet might be all in a day’s work for an actor. But just a few months earlier, Watts had given birth to her second son, Samuel. “For the first few hours I was like, ‘What on earth am I doing here?’ One minute I was sitting there with a loaded gun and the next I was going back to my trailer to breast-feed my baby.” Fortunately, she had her partner – actor/director Liev Schreiber – close by. “He’s a hands-on dad,” she says.
Watts met Schreiber on the set of 2005 period drama The Painted Veil, and they’ve been together ever since (though have no plans to marry). Compared to most Hollywood unions, it seems a caring, sharing affair, having undertaken a pact to divide the childminding. “You have to take turns a little bit, which we have just done,” she says, pointing out that she stayed at home last year while Schreiber did a six-month Broadway stint in Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge. “You have to be conscious of other people’s needs in a relationship. Communication is key. We have kids, we have careers, [so] there’s a lot to work out in our relationship. And we get through it.”
As with anyone, parenthood has changed Watts. But what is surprising is how much time she’s taken out of her career. After giving birth to her first son, Alexander, in July 2007, she’s been on an extended sabbatical. Bar a small role in 2009 thriller The International, Fair Game is the first time we’ve seen Watts on screen for four years, since she was terrorised to within an inch of her life in the traumatic home invasion story Funny Games.
“Yeah, you go away …” she says. “You worry it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind. But I guess I got a lucky break. I did worry for a while but I’m so absorbed with my children, this is what I’m doing now. Then I got back into it.”
What it means is Watts is no longer driven by the desperate desire to dominate Hollywood. Having scored an Oscar nomination for her role as a grief-stricken mother in 21 Grams (again with Penn) and won the lead in an A-list blockbuster like King Kong, it was as if she no longer had anything to prove. All of a sudden she needed a more gratifying constant in her life.
“No-one keeps you in the moment like your kids do,” she says. “It’s all about the moment. It’s not about the planning of the next day, the next hour, or what happened before. It’s always here and now, and I love that. We’re not in the moment enough, I think. I think every human being is guilty of that a little bit. The moment is what matters more than anything.”
Certainly, this is not the Watts of a few years ago. Maybe it’s the thin physique – there’s something bird-like about her – and the permanent worry lines that have left their mark on her forehead, but she always struck me as a rather anxious creature, one who might fall apart if you offered so much as a cruel word. Even now, she’s eager to please. But there’s something different about her, a confidence that comes from having realised her adolescent Hollywood dreams. The desperation those casting directors smelt on her has long since evaporated, along with the anxiety that she may never “make it”.
Even the biological clock ticking ever louder has been silenced – a topic that relates directly to her other new film, Woody Allen’s latest effort You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. A typically quicksilver romantic comedy from the veteran director, it features a glittering cast – everyone from Sir Anthony Hopkins to Antonio Banderas to Slumdog Millionaire star Frieda Pinto. Telling a series of interweaving stories that all deal with infidelity, Watts plays the hyper-emotional Sally, who is desperate to become a mother just as her marriage to failed novelist Roy (Josh Brolin) crumbles.
These days, Watts is the polar opposite to Sally – for she has the career and children in equilibrium. “But I still went through all that to get it,” she says. “Well, probably not quite so much. But I can relate to Sally.” She blushes for a second. “I’ve had periods of my life where I’ve behaved like Sally but hopefully I’m not like that any more!” Not that she’s embarrassed to admit it. “Things happen later in life – families, marriage and children – and I think women start to panic a little bit, at the point when they’re in their mid-thirties. The panic bubbles up and explodes if it’s not dealt with.”
The London-set film also brought Watts back to her country of origin. As her Anglo-Aussie accent hints, she was born in Kent, though her journey to the other side of the world was one laced with trauma.
When she was just four, her mother Myfanwy, a Welsh-born antiques dealer and amateur actor, separated from her father, Peter Watts. A sound engineer for Pink Floyd, fans will know him for his manic laughter that can be heard across the band’s seminal Dark Side Of The Moon album. But by the time Watts turned seven, her father has died, aged 30, from a suspected drugs overdose. “He lived the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and died young,” she would later say. “There was a lot of sadness when I was a child but there was a lot of love, too. Mum had to struggle a lot to bring us up and I have enormous respect and admiration for her.”
It meant an itinerant lifestyle, forever moving around the UK – at one point living with her grandparents in Wales – until her mother settled on relocating to Australia. Watts was 14 at the time, her brother Ben (now a well-known photographer living in New York) just a year older. Settling in Sydney wasn’t easy. “It took time to feel like I fitted in,” she says.
Acting was her saviour, having first been inspired years before when she saw her mother on stage as Eliza Doolittle in an amateur production of My Fair Lady. Once in Sydney, Watts signed up for acting classes, and – bar a brief, unhappy spell modelling – never looked back. It was during this time she befriended Nicole Kidman, long before she would marry Tom Cruise and become one of Hollywood’s best known stars. In one of her earliest screen roles, Watts appeared with Kidman in 1991’s Flirting – though their career paths were light years apart at that point.
Just a year after Kidman had met Cruise on Days Of Thunder, Watts was left to watch her friend’s career go global, while she scratched out a living on Australian soap Home And Away. When she did move to Hollywood, Kidman was working with such luminaries as Jane Campion and Gus Van Sant, while Watts was starring in 1995’s flop blockbuster Tank Girl, which almost singlehandedly buried her career. Yet Watts claims she was never jealous of Kidman’s success. “Like you are with any of your friends, you try to be as supportive as possible,” she says.
Last year, she wrapped Jim Sheridan’s forthcoming psychological thriller Dream House, with Daniel Craig, and tsunami drama The Impossible with Ewan McGregor. This year, she’s signed on to J Edgar – Clint Eastwood’s biopic about former FBI director J Edgar Hoover, alongside Leonardo DiCaprio – before taking on what may be the defining role of her career, Marilyn Monroe. Out of sight she may have been – but clearly not out of mind.
Yet there is no career path mapped out, she promises. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t put much planning into it. The material comes to you. I know what I’m going to be good at. And I’m careful in my choices.” Of course, she can no longer take any script that comes her way. “I used to say your decisions about choosing something are about the director or the script – and all of those things are still true. But now the most important thing is: ‘Where does this shoot and how long for?’ because I have a family now. It’s all about how do we make this work in our lives.”
With her children offering her the stability she’s craved across two decades in the volatile world of showbiz, it helps that her fame and fortune has come late in life (at least in comparison to most Hollywood stars). “Success coming to somebody too early can be a negative thing. I worked hard and paid my dues in Australia.” So how does it feel now she has found success? “It’s good because you appreciate where you are,” she nods. No longer the wannabe of Mulholland Drive and Ellie Parker, it seems Watts has got all she wants. At least for now.
2 comments:
good stuff.
To the biiter Aussies, she said: "I worked hard and paid my dues in Australia".
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