Interview:
At 32, she was unhireable. At 48, she is unmissable. Naomi Watts, star of Netflix series Gypsy, talks lucky breaks, bad reviews and therapy to Tom Lamont.
Naomi Watts –
starting over as a single mum
“Armchair or sofa?” Naomi Watts wonders aloud, trying to decide where to put us both in her London hotel room. The 48-year-old has spent a lot of this year and last playing a therapist for the TV series Gypsy and did a good deal of sitting in armchairs for that. She takes the sofa. “This works.”
The day Naomi was born, her mother once recalled, the midwife took one look and declared the baby would grow up to be famous. “How many newborns did she say that about?” Naomi smiles. In her case, it took a while – the actor did not get her break until she was 32 – but the prediction came to pass and Naomi has been established as a Hollywood reliable for years. Long enough to have seen the skinny boy who played one of her sons in The Impossible, Tom Holland, grow up to become this year’s muscle-ripped Spider-Man.
Sitting in front of Naomi today, it’s hard to believe she isn’t still 32. Her cheeks are youthfully pink-touched, she wears an ankle-length cream skirt that takes a bit of marshalling on the sofa. Otherwise, she’s all minimalist chic: bare arms, stitched black top.
We talk about her new Netflix show, which is, perhaps surprisingly, her first substantial work for US television. In Gypsy, she plays Jean Holloway, a New York therapist who practises cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and starts to feel so suffocated by her life she fakes new identities in order to insert herself into strangers’ lives.
“Gypsy’s all about wanting the things you don’t have,” says Naomi. Gearing up to play the therapist, the actress drew as far as she could on her own experiences of treatment. “I’ve definitely done periods of time in a therapist’s office,” she says. “Got some proper help at points of crisis.”
To drill deeper, she shelled out for sessions with a CBT therapist. “Four hundred dollars an hour,” she says. Did she expense that to Netflix?
Naomi laughs quietly. “I should have, right? But then, what they say is, you don’t get anything out of it for yourself if you’re not the one paying.”
She explains that there are lots of considerations that lead to her accepting a job, but a basic, selfish question is key: what will it help me to understand about myself? “There has to be a point of doing it,” she says.
What was she hoping to better understand about herself with this one? Naomi raises an eyebrow.
Her expression reads: you sure you want to go there? “Well, okay,” she says. And perhaps it’s something about the clinic-configuration of the furniture, but Naomi wastes no time before plunging headlong back into her childhood.
“I went to nine schools in England, a lot of reinventing myself. ‘How do I get into that group? How do I get accepted? Who should I be? Who do you want me to be?’ That’s part of where the Gypsy world taps into my life, that constant reinvention.”
Her mum and dad, Myfanwy Roberts and Peter Watts, or “Miv” and “Puddy”, were young when they became parents. Very cool. Miv modelled and Puddy was the sound engineer for Pink Floyd. (He narrowly missed his daughter’s birth in
1968 because the band was touring Scotland.)
Among the few photographs Naomi has of this era, there’s one in which she and her parents are on a beach in St Tropez with Pink Floyd, all wild hair and skimpy swimmers. She recalls being a kid who craved the opposite. “I’d had enough of cool. I didn’t want cool. I wanted my parents to wear three-piece suits and tweed, not leather pants.”
Her parents divorced in 1972, when Naomi was four. “And then my dad died [in 1976],” she says. He was 31. Miv has said it was a heroin overdose. Naomi doesn’t go into details, but talks about how Pink Floyd responded.
“When he died, my dad hadn’t saved money and I guess my mum didn’t have any,” she says. “I think they gave my mum a few thousand dollars to help get things underway. A lump sum, to help. It was kind that they did that.”
The moving around started in earnest after that. “Mum really had to find her feet, try to find a career.”
Every time Naomi was tipped into a new playground, she says, she would stand on the fringes and try to work out what role – what accent – would get her admitted to the group.
When Naomi was 14, it was decided the family would emigrate to Australia. “I was gutted.” Her mum sweetened the pill by promising to pay for acting lessons and that was enough to get Naomi on the plane. She found their new home on the North Shore of Sydney “a culture shock. I remember driving past my school, the first week we were there, and seeing how high the hems were. The kids had drawn on their uniforms and they had weird haircuts. I’d come from a school where it was socks to the knees.”
She met a teen Nicole Kidman, who was part of a gang that would go out drinking. Later, the two became closer, when they were cast together in 1991’s Australian comedy-drama Flirting. Naomi remembers them gossiping for hours on overturned milk crates, waiting on scene changes. She had done some modelling by then and filmed a few episodes of Home and Away, but in the mid-1990s, Naomi was cast in the Hollywood movie Tank Girl and moved to the US.
It wasn’t quite the new beginning she had hoped for. “Unhireable” is how she characterises herself in those days. Casting directors would phone and, with sing-song good cheer, tell her she’d fluffed an audition because she wasn’t sexy enough, funny enough, something enough. In 1998, Naomi provided an “additional voice” for the children’s movie Babe: Pig in the City. In 2000, she flew on her own money from New York to LA to audition for a director who seemed subdued. When Naomi checked, she saw he had his eyes shut.
“Looking back, I know why people weren’t hiring me,” she says. “I went into auditions thinking, ‘What version of me do they want?’” Naomi was in the playground again, only this time the chameleon act wasn’t working.
Not long after, she was in New York and she got a call. David Lynch was casting a new thriller, set in Los Angeles. Her response was, “Nah”. “The last time I’d flown to LA for an audition, the guy had his eyes closed. I’d decided I was never going to do it again.”
The casting director explained that Lynch had picked out Naomi’s photo from a huge pile and there weren’t many others in contention. “My odds were better than usual,” she says.
Lynch cast Naomi as a lead in Mulholland Drive, playing a young actress attempting to negotiate a creepy, Lynchian version of Hollywood. When the movie was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, critics slavered. “Things came to me very quickly from that point,” she recalls. Director Alejandro Iñárritu put her in his shattering film 21 Grams in 2003 and Peter Jackson, just free of Middle Earth, cast her opposite the ape in 2005’s King Kong.
Naomi recently worked with David Lynch again, guest-starring in the reprise of his TV drama Twin Peaks.
Naomi’s partner until recently, the actor and writer Liev Schreiber, has also enjoyed success – in the Emmynominated TV drama, Ray Donovan. When Gypsy was offered to Naomi a year ago, she decided to go for it, in
I know why people weren’t hiring me.
part because “I’d seen up close Liev doing Ray Donovan. Lots to do with the logistics.” Gypsy was shot in New York, Naomi explains, where she lived with Liev and their boys, 10-year-old Sasha and eight-year-old Kai. Taking on the TV show would allow everyone to stay in “one place”.
Given Naomi’s upbringing, it doesn’t take much to figure out why staying in one place might appeal.
“I have kids in school,” she says. “I can’t go on the road at the drop of a hat now. Some actors do homeschool their kids, but it was important to Liev and me for them to have regular relationships with friends.”
Last September, Naomi and Liev announced their split after 11 years. She has since said they remain on good terms and are co-parenting well.
Judging by Naomi’s Instagram, you wouldn’t know they had ever broken up: birthday wishes are exchanged; Father’s Day is celebrated. Has she tried to be a more conventional parent than her own?
“Of course, definitely. Routine is a big part of it,” she says. “Obviously, Liev and I are actors – there is some moving – but we’ve really tried to keep the boys in the same school. Give them structure, boundaries.” She can guess at the psychology underlying this. “Everything’s a reaction.”
In recent years, Naomi has seen the best and the worst of reactions. The Impossible, a 2012 blockbuster about the Indian Ocean tsunami, earned her an Oscar nomination for lead actress. Diana, the 2013 biopic about the late Princess of Wales, is considered to be one of the worst films of that year. (The wig-and-costume panto aspect of Diana was too much even for Naomi to overcome.) Then she was in the film of 2014, Iñárritu’s brilliant comedy Birdman, playing a theatre actress opposite Edward Norton.
Nearing the end of our interview, Naomi takes out her phone to show me a black-and-white picture of a handsome young man, shirtless, sitting with friends. Some are just about recognisable as members of Pink Floyd, but only the young man in the middle can see they’re being photographed and he grins at the camera. “I just stumbled on this,” Naomi says.
A Pink Floyd fan approached her a week ago, she says, carrying the picture in an envelope. “You’ve got to understand, I’ve got maybe three photos of my dad and maybe two memories. And all of the photos of him are out of focus or he’s a speck in the background.” When she opened the envelope and saw Peter Watts beaming, she burst into tears. It was the first time Naomi had seen her dad smile with such clarity.
We squint at the image, admiring that wicked glee on his face. It makes a strange end to a journalistic encounter, and when Naomi stands up, she gathers me in a clumsy hug. “God,” she says, “I feel like I’ve had therapy.” The actor must be thinking of those $400-a-hour sessions she paid for as part of her research because she adds, “and for free! Um, I guess I’ll owe you?”