MIRA SORVINO HITS BACK
The star of spy series ‘Condor’ plays a powerful woman on and off screen
The actress is a powerful woman, both on and off screen.
As a mother of four children and a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador working with survivors of human trafficking, Oscar-winning actress Mira Sorvino has used her nurturing instinct to protect those around her. But when she spoke publicly in 2017 about sexual harassment and career discrimination and became an original voice in the #Metoo and Time’s Up movements, she stood up for herself. “We are getting to a point where we are embracing more authenticity,” says Sorvino, 50, “and if that means being exactly who you are and with all of your feelings and all of your thoughts, and if you express yourself in a different way than a man would publicly, I think we have to make room for that in the world.” Now, as relentless investigator Marty Frost, Sorvino brings that strident energy to spy series Condor (starting Thurs., June 7 on Stan). Before the premiere, she spoke candidly to WHO about family, career, and sisterhood.
First, there was the novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady and then the 1975 Sydney Pollack film Three Days of the Condor. What is it like to do a serialised adaptation?
I think it’s fascinating and very timely. And it’s fresh—it’s not a carbon copy of the original film. It’s tailored for today. It’s got the same shape, but it’s really different in terms of the topics it’s discussing.
Your character wasn’t in the original film. Why did you want to play her?
I seeing age like who her a lot are because of playing women she’s command these complex. days, positions I women think we’re in of my television shows, but they’re generally very, very cold. I think this character underneath the surface is very hot-blooded. She’s very emotional and she’s always straining to keep it all buttoned down, but she’s got so much going on and a lot of it is really connected to the Bob Partridge character, the William Hurt character because they had had an affair in the past and he went back to his wife and kind of punished her for it, kind of exiled her. And this has affected her entire career and really, in a certain way, bent her psyche, I would say.
Talking about being complex, you’ve been an integral part of #Metoo and Times Up. Did that affect your career?
You know, wonderfully, I got Condor before any of this happened. I’ve been working steadily all of my adult life, just perhaps a little bit more low profile, like last decade. But I have to say, when I did speak to The New Yorker and did speak to Ronan Farrow, I did think that perhaps my career would disappear. I really wasn’t sure what would happen. I think each one of us grappled with that choice to speak or not to speak because it seemed like there was a very high potential for a backlash and blacklisting. We didn’t know that there were so many of us.
Did you find power in coming together?
Sexual misconduct, I think, has really always been with us. It’s a thrilling moment to see that we are now loud in such force and such unity that maybe things will change in our children’s generation.
So, looking back, it was worth it to speak out?
People are abused often make and in a dent this molested world in that and and in some raped if we small can so way, and if we can ease the suffering of future generations and make it impossible for predators to do what they do and get away with it with impunity, then this has all been worth it. All of the sturm und drang of it and the personal pain and fear of it. It was all worth it.
Aside from activism and acting, you parent four kids—mattea Angel, 13; Johnny Christopher King,12; Holden Paul Terry, 8; Backus. and Lucia, How 6—with would your you describe husband, them? Christopher
My kids are a blessing. They’re so kind and beautiful and talented and wonderful. They’ve made my life so gloriously happy. So, they’re generally good, you know, like all
kids, they fight with each other. Like all kids, they will sass us, or they will push the limits.
Any examples?
Like today, we had a little sleepover and my husband found that they had pulled out the pool cover and were running across it, which expressly we’d been told would destroy the pool cover and break it, and we’re like, “Stop, stop!” But, you know, little things like that. I mean, so far, we’ve been really lucky, knock wood, that all their infractions have been minor ones and in general their instincts, they’re kind and they’re really loving.
The same can be said of the bond between your husband and your dad, Paul Sorvino?
So we had met end of July in 2003, and by September he had asked me to marry him and I had already said yes. So we were engaged a month after we met. Sometimes, you know, you have these things that happened, but we didn’t tell anyone because he knew they
would freak out. And in December, my father says, “Ah, Mira, um, you know, if it were to be that, uh, Chris asked you to marry him, and if you were to have said yes, I would, I think that would be a very good thing.” So he was very positive. He loves my husband like a second son. My brother Michael is his son, but Chris has really been adopted by my father.
Aside from Christopher, in this age of Time’s Up, do you have a support system, like Ashley Judd, perhaps?
Yes, there is definitely a support system. There are email chains, there are Twitter messaging groups. There are phone calls between us. We see each other at events. I called Ashley for some advice the other day. We saw each other at the Time’s Up thing in New York. We went to the Oscars together. Ashley and I have known each other forever. We did Norma Jean & Marilyn together for HBO in 1996 and we never knew that the other one had been harassed by Harvey.
When did you find out?
This [northern] fall when her story came out and my story came out, like, five days later. That was the first I knew about her situation and she mine. Because this is not the kind of thing … and that’s the thing that I don’t think everyone really understands. People are like, “Well why didn’t everyone speak out earlier?” When these things happen to you, they’re very unpleasant. You don’t know that there’s this giant group of other people who eventually will experience the same thing.
You did tell people, though?
I did tell everyone I knew at the time, including Quentin Tarantino, who is talked about in The New York Times, and my publicist, and my agents and everyone. No-one said, “Oh, this is sexual harassment. You should go to a lawyer or you should report this to the police.” Everyone just kind of listened to me sympathetically. No-one suggested that I do anything about it. And so I just kind of put my head down and just kind of soldiered on with my life. I didn’t understand what options I had and no-one suggested them to me. And I was young and naive.
How did you react when you saw Harvey Weinstein on TV, arrested in handcuffs?
People think that we would all be like whooping and jumping up and down. I was ... [ pauses] I want to choose my adjectives carefully. I was gratified, I suppose, to see that Harvey was actually facing the first steps of the criminal justice system that hopefully will eventually convict him and punish him for the crime of rape and that he’s being treated as a criminal. Although he’s been given privileges. The fact that he was able to go home on bail when the next person up in line in the same court had to spend the night in jail because of a $195 unpaid weed fine. So obviously he has privilege that still follows him because of his money. But it just made me sad.
It’s been more than 10 years since you did the miniseries Human Trafficking. You have since become an advocate for victims?
I’ve been the Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on Human Trafficking since 2009 through the present. We’re releasing a video that I did about airline employees learning to know the signs of human trafficking and becoming watchdogs on the ground and in the air. I have devoted an enormous amount of time to lecturing about this and trying to change legislation. I’ve had some laws passed that were somewhat due to my influence and I consider myself to be a victims’ and survivors’ advocate.
“I just kind of put my head down and soldiered on”