Rachel Griffiths
I’m lucky to be just good-looking enough
‘Alcohol can turn you into a monster – or a pit of hate’ ‘I have never had anyone suggest I alter my body or face in any way’
emember that businesswoman a few years back who put her success down to the fact that she wasn’t that good-looking, but goodlooking enough?”
I do, and I think I know where Rachel Griffiths is going with this. “Well, I really got what she was saying,” explains the 47-year-old actress. “I’ve never been beautiful enough not to be taken seriously. With me, it was always a case of: ‘Well, she clearly hasn’t got here on her looks, so we’d better give her some credibility’.”
I suspect the credibility would have come regardless. After all, it’s thanks to Griffiths that Rhonda Epinstalk – Muriel’s rambunctious sidekick in
Muriel’s Wedding – remains memorable 20 years after the release of the film. And most will agree that she all but eclipsed Emily Watson’s Jacqueline du Pré as the cellist’s seething sister, Hilary, in the 1998 biopic Hilary and Jackie. Certainly Griffiths deserved her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for the part. But it’s true that in the Melbourneborn actress’s film and television roles – the latest of which is the sexually liberated Sirene in
Indian Summers, Channel 4’s epic costume drama, which began again last week – Griffiths’ looks have never overshadowed her talent.
“I honestly do think that good looks can count against you in this industry,” she shrugs, having placed a hilariously high-maintenance breakfast order with our unflinching LA waitress (“four-minute eggs with gluten-free toast, double-toasted and cut into soldiers – and no potatoes. Americans need to understand that potatoes are not permanently married to eggs”).
“I used to look at how many movies Charlize [Theron] got and think: ‘How many chances is this girl going to get? We’re never going to see anything different. Then she comes out with Monster and shame on me!” Griffiths cries, breaking into one of those big Aussie mouth-to-hairline laughs. “Because I totally blonde-shamed her. Basically, I just couldn’t take anyone as pretty as her seriously. Now she is one of my favourite actresses; just phenomenally inspiring.”
It’s probably easier to let go of petty professional jealousies when you’ve never stopped working yourself. And Griffiths – the daughter of an art consultant – hasn’t suffered a single dry spell since completing a drama and dance degree at Victoria College, Rusden, in 1990.
“Of course, I’m very lucky for that,” concedes the actress, who divides her time between Melbourne and LA. “But when I made the move to television, the roles in film were getting much less interesting. They were not well written, complex or unconventional, whereas in TV I was being offered things like [the role of Brenda Chenowith in] Six Feet Under. I didn’t see back then what a turning point it was for television. It was only when my mind switched back to Brideshead
Revisited and Jewel in the Crown that I understood how extraordinary TV could be.”
Given how much she loved the Eighties miniseries, it’s easy to see why Griffiths flew to Penang at short notice to join the cast of Indian Summers – another sweeping, cinematic drama set in the twilight era of the British Empire, in which she plays the Maharaja’s mysterious and wilful Australian mistress. “She’s either on opium or hash all the time. But I’m so clean that even smoking the fake tobacco kind of took me there,” laughs the mother of two.
Although Julie Walters has been hogging the praise for her portrayal of Cynthia Coffin, Griffiths was bowled over by the young cast members – Olivia Grant, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Jemima West – “who are all lovely Oxford and Cambridge-level smartypantses,” she laughs, “which means that they got into the script in a completely different way to me. So we may be the oldies in the show but we’re not necessarily better.”
That’s because the notion that actors necessarily improve with age is, she believes, a fallacy. “And actually that’s the most frightening and depressing thing when you watch yourself back: not that you’ve aged, but that maybe you’re not any better. I mean, was the dying Olivier any better than the 22year-old Olivier?”
These are meatier discussions than those one usually gets into in Hollywood interviews, but there’s a bluntness to Griffiths and a refusal to toe the line that makes her views refreshingly unpredictable. Despite having had no cosmetic work herself (“and by the way I have never had anyone even suggest that I should alter my body or face in any way – and I think that’s because my thing is authenticity”), she refuses to sneer at actresses who have. “There are some very fine American actresses I’m not going to name who clearly have had work done and I still admire them hugely: it hasn’t affected my enjoyment of their work at all.”
She won’t, like many in her industry, pretend to have enjoyed Ricky Gervais’s controversial performance hosting January’s Golden Globes (“I find him mean and I don’t like watching him, because I don’t like snark”), and despite being a member of the Academy herself, Griffiths tells me that if this year’s Oscar nominations proved anything, it was that “when you have an organisation that is made up largely of over-60 males, you’re going to get a warped funnel. But it shouldn’t be a funnel where the odds against women and minorities are stacked. Which is why I think the voting process should be changed, and that you shouldn’t be allowed to nominate unless you’ve seen a minimum amount of pictures. Because I suspect most Academy members nominate before they’ve even seen most of the films, and I certainly don’t think that a lot of voters sat down to watch Straight Outta Compton. But I think the Academy are working hard to deal with these issues.”
Griffiths’ next project takes her back to Australia to work with Jane Campion on the second series of the award-winning Top of the Lake. But it’s her return to the big screen in Rebecca Daly’s Mammal and Mel Gibson’s
Hacksaw Ridge, alongside Andrew Garfield, that is being heralded by the industry press.
“Working with Mel was really exciting,” she says. And from his appearance at the Golden Globes, it would seem he’s been welcomed back into the fold? “Well, there was a big public stoning on that one,” Griffiths sighs. “He’s been sober a long time now but there are people who think that drugs and alcohol liberate your true self. I’ve never believed that. I think that drugs and alcohol can just turn you into a monster – or a pit of hate – but that doesn’t mean you have to sit at home hiding. Mel’s a great director and I think he is on the path to making those amends.”
Indian Summers, Channel 4, Sundays,
9pm