The mother of all roles
Naomi Watts enjoys the challenge of being ‘messy’ in The Glass Castle
Naomi Watts doesn’t mind playing messy. In fact, her roles as an addict in 21 Grams and a desperate tsunami survivor in The Impossible earned her best actress Oscar nominations.
In the film version of Jeannette Walls’ bestselling memoir The Glass Castle, Watts delves into the shambles of a character who’s a neglectful mother, an enabling wife and an obsessed artist.
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the movie features Brie Larson as Walls, who must deal with her dysfunctional past as part of a poverty-stricken family headed by unfit parents: That’s Rose Mary (Watts) and Rex (Woody Harrelson), a drunk damaged by an abusive childhood.
On preparing for the role: “The script and the book were right there for me to reference. I felt it was a story we could connect with, because we all have crazy members of our families and we’ve all been affected by powerful events in our lives.”
On multiple discussions with
the book’s author: “If a question would come up, we would have a back and forth on email, or sometimes it was a conversation that went both ways where she would talk about her family and I would talk about my family.”
On the co-operative atmosphere
while filming in Montreal: “If you create a team like (director) Destin did with Woody and Brie, and then give us this material that stands on its own, we all knew we would bring something to the film that would be a little different.” On her style of method acting: “Woody approaches his work in a similar way that I do. Immersing yourself makes it lively and sometimes you run into the magical and surprising moments going off script. But when we did, Destin was always respectful of assessing if it worked.”
On the suggestion that the mom’s
the villain in the story: “That wasn’t how I wanted to play her in the movie, not that I have anything against playing bad guys. I think people were quick to judge the mother from the book and how she parented, even though what Rex did was fairly awful.”
On Rose Mary’s positive aspects
in the film: “The flip side is the mom instilled in the kids that they had to learn to take care of themselves. And I guess I would say (Rose Mary) did have this joie de vivre and creativity, and she did make sure the kids were reading books and embraced who they were.”
On using Rose Mary’s real works
of art in the movie: “Some of them were rented and some of them were purchased. The ones that were rented were too expensive to fit the movie’s budget.”
On selecting less glamorous but
more challenging roles: “I don’t want to get bored, and I always want to stretch as an artist. And that means playing things that scare me a little bit.”