After four decades, Laurie Metcalf on verge of stardom
NEW YORK: Actress Laurie Metcalf does not do fancy. Her boxy white handbag hails from Target, “my favourite place to shop.” In a cosy Theater District cafe, she appears in a blunt-cut bob, jeans, sneakers, an oversize sweater, without a dab of makeup, a glint of jewellery.
Metcalf prefers to work the same way, not letting artifice — “a shell” she calls it — distract from the work. But she is in the midst of an Oscar campaign. The strategy involved would give George Patton pause. So she consented to doing a glamorous photo shoot a few days before the interview. On her one day off.
“A dream job is to walk right past hair and makeup” and sail onto the stage or set, says the critically acclaimed actress who, at the age of 62, finally finds herself on the cusp of mainstream stardom.
“I would win in the contest of who’s had the best year,” she admits of her moviestheatre-television hat trick: an Oscar nomination, the first in four decades of acting, for her performance as the exasperated mother, Marion, in the film “Lady Bird.” A 2017 Tony Award as returningNorain“ADoll’sHouse, Part 2.” A nine-episode revival next month as beleaguered Jackie in “Roseanne,” the role she last played in 1997 and that snared her a trio of Emmys.
“I’d like to think that it’s karma,” says Metcalf, one of the earliest members of Chicago’s illustrious Steppenwolf Theatre, where she performed in dozens of plays. “I’d like to think that, having treated every single project as the most important one in that moment, and having worked your a** off, and given 150 per cent to each one, that maybe there’s a little payback.” She raises a glass of pinot noir in a toast to her marvellous year.
“It feels like ‘What the hell took everyone so long? What have you been looking at?’” says Jim Parsons of ‘The Big Bang Theory,” where Metcalf has a recurring role as the pious, shade-tossing mother of his character, Sheldon. “She brings it every single time at an intense, always fascinating, realistic and grounded degree.”
The Oscar nomination arrived the day Metcalf began rehearsals for the upcoming Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.” (She accepted the role before even reading the Pulitzer Prizewinning play — her now warped, water-stained, scribbleinfestedcopyperched by her elbow on the cafe table — for the opportunity to work with co-star and British acting titan Glenda Jackson.) This will be her first time attending the Academy Awards. She says, “I watch the Oscars in my pyjamas like everybody else.” It has been a strong movie season for female characters of a certain age who exhibit grit, raw emotion and little makeup. “For me, it’s not new,” Metcalf says. “That’s my literal comfort zone.” She was raised in Carbondale, Illinois, home of Southern Illinois University, her alma mater. After graduation, she joined an extraordinary group of talented actors and directors at Steppenwolf, including Gary Sinise, John Malkovich and Jeff Perry, who became her first husband. “In the beginning, because we were all the same age and there weren’t many plays that we could all be in and be the same age, I would be John Malkovich’s mother in ‘True West,’ then his 13year-old niece in ‘Fifth of July,’” she recalls. The plays and ensemble were terrific. The income was not. “I was always a secretary in the early days, before we decided we were brave enough to join Equity and see if this thing has any legs,” says Metcalf, who quit temping at age 28. The next year, she appeared in Steppenwolf ’s New York production of Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead” to rapturous reviews. A “tour de force” declared the New York Times.
She went on to become primarily a stage and television performer. Her first movie was “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985), a performance that still displeases her. “I guess you could call it a glamorous role,” she says of her role as the sisterin-law of the lead, played by Rosanna Arquette. “I felt like I was playing a caricature.”
She can’t recall her last movie role before “Lady Bird.” It was “Stop-Loss,” a decade ago, one day’s labour. She has no personal publicist.
After a glass of wine and appetisers, she will consult with a stylist — “a word I never thought would come out of my mouth,” she says, flicking it like a piece of indeterminate foreign food — for the Oscars luncheon in Los Angeles that Sunday. “They knew that they had to get me one. They did not trust me at all to put myself together.”
Designer Christian Siriano, a fan who’s now a friend, offered to create the gown for the Oscars ceremony. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like,” says Metcalf, who didn’t even specify a colour for a dress that will be seen by a massive global audience. “But I trust him.”
She prefers to concentrate on the work. When she’s in a play, she runs through the entire script before each performance. “It’s boring and lonely,” she says, “but I feel if I don’t do it, even on a two-show day, something bad will happen.”
Her preference is for new plays. She is that rare actor who admits to harbouring zero interest — none! — in tackling Shakespeare.
“It sounds blasphemous,” she says, in a near whisper, “but I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. I like contemporary, bare-boned writing. I don’t like having the language that I barely understand get in the way of me interpreting it over to an audience. It’s this barrier that I don’t want to have to attack.”
She appears to have never earned a bad review. Her “Lady Bird” performance revealed “a remarkable combination of grit, vulnerability and panicked concern,” raved The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday. “One of the great stage actresses of our time,” noted The Post’s Peter Marks last spring.
“Three Tall Women” director Joe Mantello once said of her that “I will go anywhere anytime to work with you again.” More than three decades ago, she was the second actor cast on “Roseanne,” after the title character and creator, Roseanne Barr.
The producers, said Barr via email, “told me that she was the greatest actress they had ever seen, and I came to agree with them!”
“Lady Bird,” directed and written by Greta Gerwig (nominated for both directing and original screenplay Oscars), changed everything. The role of Marion, Metcalf believes, came her way at the suggestion of impresario Scott Rudin, producer of “Doll’s House” and now “Three Tall Women,” the architect of the Metcalf renaissance.
Awards season “has been this ride for the last couple of months,” she says. “I’ve gotten to meet a lot of actors that I’ve never gotten the chance to meet before. Willem Dafoe, Sam Rockwell, Octavia Spencer, Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins. It’s like we’re in the same class. We’re having a shared experience.”
“I’m trying to enjoy the moment. It’s going to go away,” she says. Despite the accolades and nominations, she doesn’t have another movie lined up after her three-month Broadway run.
“I’m not worried about it. Fortunately, in the theatre, there are many roles to age into,” she says, before rushing off to meet the stylist she never imagined needing. — WPBloomberg