For Janney, playing a loser finally made her a winner
LOS ANGELES — Since the world devoured Allison Janney’s brilliantly acidic performance as Tonya Harding’s abusive mother in I, Tonya, she has won nearly every major award she’s been up for, including a Screen Actors Guild award, a Golden Globe and a Critics’ Choice prize.
This is the 58-year-old’s first Oscar nod (best supporting actress).
“I kind of thought maybe this moment had eluded me in my career, that I just wasn’t getting the kind of roles in films that were giving me, getting me recognition,” Janney reflected recently at the Oscars nominees’ luncheon.
And it’s all thanks to her longtime friend, screenwriter Steven Rogers, who had the idea to seek out the life rights to Tonya Harding’s story and insisted Janney was to play LaVona Golden. Janney was thrilled.
“I’ve played a lot of mothers in my life,” Janney, who stars as a recovering alcoholic on the CBS sitcom Mom, said. “But never anyone to the degree that this one was messed up.”
Rogers, who used accounts of Tonya Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly to inform the screenplay and story, never actually met LaVona Golden while he was writing the script. Harding told him that she didn’t know if her mother was dead or alive (she is alive and continues to deny abuse allegations).
“It’s a pretty hard character and I hope the reason he wanted me to play her was because I would try my hardest ... to find her humanity,” Janney said. “... She’s a woman who gave her whole life to her daughter. Every penny she made went to her daughter’s skating. She sees herself as a woman who tried her hardest to give her daughter a better life than she had. Those scenes helped me find her humanity, helped me find what made her a human being, not just an on-the-page monster.”