After a hiatus, Michelle Pfeiffer returns in ‘mother!’
NEW YORK: When Michelle Pfeiffer first read Darren Aronofsky’s script for “mother!” she had an understandable initial reaction.
“I thought: What the hell is this?” recalls Pfeiffer.
Aronofsky’s film is not in any way typical, nor is the kind of project you would expect a longabsent actress like Pfeiffer to join as her first big-screen performance in five years. The film, intentionally shrouded in mystery, is a wild and weird odyssey by one of the movies’ expert conjurers of dark, surreal dream worlds that suspend its viewers — and often its performers, too — in a vividly atmospheric state of paranoia.
“You do not even know, really, how to talk about it,” says Pfeiffer, as if throwing up her hands, in a recent interview.
But one of the many mysteries worth pondering in Darren Aronofsky’s allegorical thriller is a simple one: Why do not we see Pfeiffer more often? The good news is that “mother!” represents the start of what may be a kind of renaissance for the 59-year-old actress, whose steely beauty and cool, piercing intelligence remains just as devastating.
“I am really excited to be back,” says Pfeiffer. “Especially having worked with these exciting actors and these directors who I so admire. The most exciting for me is all of these really talented people that I am able to do movies with.”
Along with “mother!” which Paramount Pictures will release Friday, Pfeiffer co-stars in Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming, more oldfashioned mystery “Murder on the Orient Express.” She has joined the cast of the “Ant-Man” sequel and earlier this year premiered the Sundance Film Festival entry “Where is Kyra?” in which she plays a woman struggling to survive in Brooklyn on her ailing mother’s income. She also received an Emmy nomination for her cocktail-drinking, chainsmoking Ruth Madoff in Barry Levinson’s HBO movie “The Wizard of Lies.”