Annette Bening returns to ACT for discussion series.
Fourtime Academy Award nominee will be first theater icon in discussion series
In numerous interviews and award acceptance speeches over the course of her extraordinary acting career, fourtime Oscar nominee Annette Bening has made a point of publicly mentioning how meaningful, both personally and professionally, the years she spent at American Conservatory Theater were as a young actress in the 1980s.
Bening studied at ACT’s conservatory fresh out of San Francisco State University and then spent three frenetic, wildly creative years in ACT’s core company, performing backtoback plays in repertory on the Geary Theater stage.
When she reflects back on that formative ACT start — before her breakout 1990 role as a hustler in “The Grifters,” before her marriage to Warren Beatty ( whom she met filming “Bugsy” in 1991), before having four children and learning to balance family life and fame — Bening speaks of her deep gratitude for those early San Francisco experiences that helped her become the versatile, adventurous actress she is today.
Bening is scheduled to be in virtual conversation Friday, Nov. 20, with ACT Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon, as the first speaker in the theater’s new series of indepth discussions with theater icons.
Bening, 62, recently spoke at length with The Chronicle by phone from her home in Los Angeles about first falling in love with the magic of the theater, staying open to creative risk, and why having “strong female characters” is a misguided goal for the industry she adores.
Q: You’ve been involved in getoutthevote efforts, and we’re talking just days after the election results were reported. How are you feeling?
A: I’m ecstatic. There’s a huge amount of work to do, obviously, but I’m so relieved and happy. So many people around the country worked so hard to get out the vote. We built new kinds of coalitions by doing so much of this virtually. I did a phone bank in Omaha, a real battleground, the day before the election, and it was so gratifying seeing all these people who really care and were willing to give their time. The LGBTQ community all over the country really got activated. If there’s one thing that Trump did, he activated a lot of people.
Q: How have you and your family been weathering the pandemic? Do you have kids back home, or is it an empty nest?
A: My kids are all out, and everyone is safe and healthy, so I feel very fortunate. And my parents are still well. I’m going to see them next week. They’re in San Diego, 94 and 91. They celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary during the pandemic, if you can believe that!
Q: Reflecting on your career path, you’ve said before: “I didn’t choose acting, it chose me.” What did you mean?
A: My ninthgrade teacher from Pershing Junior High in San Diego took us to the Old Globe to see “The Merchant of Venice” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and I really loved it. I loved the feeling of being alive in the room with the actors speaking and seeing the sweat on their faces. I remember the sound of their voices, the whole ambiance.
Little did I know that “Two Gentlemen” was directed by Allen Fletcher, one of the formative forces at ACT ( the company’s first conservatory director). In his production, all of the props were played by people, so if there was a painting in a room, it was a person standing there holding up a frame. I loved all the theatricality.
From then on, I kind of stumbled my way along, following my interests until I was at San Francisco State and I began to think, “I really want to do this. I want to be a classical theater actress.”
Q: As an acting student at ACT in your 20s, were there any especially powerful lessons you learned early on that have stuck with you?
A: Part of the training from the very beginning was about teaching you to follow your impulses, to do what your instinct tells you to do. Of course, that was also woven into everything else they were teaching us about how to build a character. You learned to think about the person’s entire life, and also about what happened right before you walked into the room: Do I have a headache? Am I elated? Exhausted? You can use all these suggestions to help yourself in the scene, along with following your impulses.
Every director I’ve ever worked with appreciates it when you come in and start doing what feels right for you, trying things and giving them something to work with, instead of sitting passively and waiting.
Q: Does that apply to movie work as well?
A: Absolutely. The other really important thing was about listening. I was admonished very early on after a scene that I wasn’t really listening or taking anything from my partner. And they were right. It was such a gift to have learned that.
When I go see ( plays or movies), instead of always watching the person talking, I also like to watch the person listening and taking in what’s going on.
Q: Have you always been comfortable taking artistic risks? You’ve been involved in some very successful projects, but I imagine others,
especially smaller indie films, were a leap of faith and you couldn’t have known on the page if it would work out. Do you go with a gut feeling?
A: I guess you can call it comfort with risk, but I think I’m sort of flattering myself by saying that. What I do is read things very carefully. You only get one first read, and that’s very important because that’s the only time you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the feeling you’re then trying to recreate for your audience.
Q: Do you think you’re drawn to playing women with certain traits? There’s a mix of steely strength, subdued anger and also fragility in some of your characters dating back to “The Grifters,” and more recently in your incredible performances in “The Kids Are All Right” and “20th Century Women.”
A: I guess there are certain things I try not to examine too much. I think one of the reasons writing for women has gotten better is because it acknowledges that women are flawed. It’s important to have more than strong female characters. It’s important to have nuance, because every woman who’s strong goes in the corner and cries sometimes, and every person who’s a mess has their heroic moments. The contradictions in people are what make us interesting, so getting into that always interests me.
Q: Is it more daunting playing an actual person, such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein in “The Report,” than a fictional one?
A: Yes. ... I wanted to do enough to suggest her so that I could just disappear, and you could believe it was her and focus on the story and the events she was such a key part of.
Q: Do you have a preference between overtly political movies that try to raise awareness around issues and imaginative ones that are untethered to any political realities?
A: A great story’s a great story. I felt really fortunate that (“The Report” director) Scott Burns asked me to be a part of making an important political movie that had guts to it and real heart, but I also believe in just delightful entertainment. I love a purely great escape.
As an avid audience member, I know that if something’s really good, I’m changed by it. It’s like being told a secret you thought only you knew, or being woken up in the most delightful way.
Q: I can hear your enthusiasm. Sounds like you still have the feeling that you’re part of a pretty magical endeavor.
A: It is magical in the best way. Theater has this wonderful combination of great intellectual rigor and incredible emotional depth, and movies are extraordinary for taking us into another world that we’d never be able to visit if not in this filmmaker’s hands. It’s an incredible gift, and I love it.
I’m really feeling the lack of not having that in my life. I can’t wait until we get back into the theater when we can be sitting close, smushed in together, and enjoying movies, theater or music, dance, ballet, symphony, opera, whatever it is. We’re all missing that.
It’s going to take a while, and we’re really going to need to support our arts institutions, especially the nonprofit arts sector across this country, which has really been suffering.