LAURA DERN
The Oscar nominee is having a Dern good run of late. From Star Wars, to Marriage Story, to a return to the Jurassic franchise.
From Blue Velvet to Jurassic Park, Laura Dern has made her mark in some of the finest films of the past 35 years. But even she didn’t foresee her recent purple patch – Star Wars, Twin Peaks, Big Little Lies, and now the mighty Marriage Story, and that’s before returning to the world of Jurassic. Total Film meets an actor on fire.
It’s the second day of this year’s Venice Film Festival and Noah Baumbach’s sublime Marriage Story has just landed. In the lush Excelsior Hotel, patrons buzz around downstairs trying to catch a glimpse of the cast; above them, on the first floor, Laura Dern marches with purpose in Total Film’s direction. In towering Louboutin heels and an arresting red and black-striped Dior dress, it’s as if she’s come in character, as Los Angeles divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw.
Chronicling the separation and increasingly painful divorce of a New York theatre couple, director Charlie (Adam Driver) and actress Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), Baumbach’s film takes a vicious turn when Nicole moves back to L.A. to live with her mother, taking their young son with them, and
is advised to get lawyered up. Enter Dern’s fearsome Nora, who comes armed with hugs, herbal teas and handkerchiefs for her clients and a barbed-wire baton for the ex-partners.
“I’ve been privileged to play some pretty unleashed characters,” explains Dern, “but what I love about Nora… as a champion of creating your narrative to make you the winner, which is the end goal – which is troubling about the business of divorce – she is stealthy and meticulous and careful with every word, and even the way she attacks. She in her own way is the opposite of the bear-like lawyer, but equally attacking and direct. She’s someone who would never lose her cool; she is so in control.”
If Marriage Story deals with the battle of the sexes, Nora delivers some serious broadsides for the feminine cause in one breathless monologue about the position of women in contemporary society, and what’s expected of them, in a powerful post #MeToo-statement. “The speech that Noah gave me the opportunity to do – it’s my favourite thing I’ve gotten to say in a movie,” says Dern who dubs it a “delicious Christmas present” gifted to her by Baumbach.
Like so many, Dern has been through divorce (her marriage to musician Ben Harper, the father of her two kids, ended in 2013). “I think that’s why the film is so moving, because everyone brings their own collective experience to it. We’ve all experienced the story of heartbreak and of learning how to communicate and live alongside people who you love who have also hurt you – whether that is in divorce, or with siblings or as a child of divorce between parents… I feel like we’ve known one role or another.”
As Dern rightly notes, Nora is yet another off-the-leash character to add to an increasingly distinguished collection, from the on-the-run Lula in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart to the paint-huffing wastrel in Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth and the Monterey mother who loses it all in HBO show Big Little Lies (which won her an Emmy). In person, she couldn’t be more different. Warm and welcoming, the 52-year-old blonde-haired mother-of-two is as far from a hellraiser as you could imagine.
Something must be clicking, though, for Dern is on a remarkable run since the first season of Big Little Lies. She played the purple-haired Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo in Star
Wars: The Last Jedi, put a face to a fan-favourite name in Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return as Agent Cooper’s previously never-seen Diane, and gave a wild turn in the recent JT Leroy as Laura Albert, instrumental in the 21st Century’s most scandalous literary hoax. She’s also currently serving as a governor of the Academy’s Actors Branch. So does it feel she’s reached a particularly special time in her life?
“I know… I’m having the time of my life, getting to do what I love!” she trills. “You wait your whole life as an actor, hoping for the time where filmmakers see you as an artist, through your body of work, versus a type. And I think it takes a long time usually to achieve that goal. And you hope that if you continue to play a myriad of characters in various genres, for filmmakers with very different styles and visions, that you might be seen as the artist who can mould into what they need.”
That multitude of genres looks set to continue shortly after Marriage Story with Dern featuring in Little Women.
An all-star adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel, featuring the likes of Meryl Streep, Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh, it also marks director Greta Gerwig’s keenly-anticipated follow-up to Lady Bird. “Clearly I like to keep it all in the family!” chuckles Dern, a reference to the fact that Baumbach and Gerwig are long-term partners. “I work for one family in this business!”
Dern plays ‘Marmee’ March, matriarch to all those little women and a role Susan Sarandon previously played in the 1994 version. “Greta digested that iconic piece of American literature, and it isn’t that she made it her own… it’s that she gave it back to Louisa May Alcott. That’s the way it felt to me. For me, it feels like the film that holds the radical revolutionary that Louisa was, and that is threaded throughout the book, and it is a love letter to artists trying to find their voice.”
It meant a second project in a row acting with Streep after season two of Big Little Lies.
“You dream of working with Meryl Streep,” she says. “It was amazing. All I know is it finished and I told her it was the saddest day ever and then literally two weeks later we were in Massachusetts [on the set of Little Women] together having dinner and I couldn’t believe that I was spending my year with Meryl Streep.” She pauses for reflection. “A damn good year.”
It’s about to get even better, with Dern recently announced for Jurassic World 3, reprising her most famous character, Jurassic Park’s paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler. “I’m very excited to see how it will all weave together, but I know it’s a deep intent both of Colin [Trevorrow] and the entire tribe, including Steven Spielberg, to pay homage to the original and where the franchise has gone from there. The idea of bringing back the original cast, in a really beautiful way, it sounds amazing… the idea of being back with Sam [Neill] and Jeff [Goldblum] sounds like a dream.”
At least she won’t have to keep secrets like she did two years ago. “I was shooting Big Little Lies, but couldn’t say anything about it; I was doing Star Wars and couldn’t tell anyone I was in it; and I was shooting Twin Peaks and I couldn’t tell anyone I was in it… I had to be very careful even with my own children at the very beginning, with Star Wars.” She was the “most boring interview ever”, at least for a while. “I’m sure I’m about to be boring again. At least people know I might be working with dinosaurs in the future, but I’m sure I won’t be able to say anything more than that!”
Thankfully, she can chat about Twin Peaks now. Dern and Lynch “spent a lot of time over cappuccinos” talking about her joining the Twin Peaks cast, but “it wasn’t until right before that he told me who he wanted me to be”. Of course, Dern as Diane made total sense. “We had already been a family and made Blue Velvet together, so David may have felt I was the perfect person, because I was in their psyche when they were making the original [Twin Peaks], and that feels like what Diane would have been for Agent Cooper.”
Dern was just 17 when she played the innocent Sandy in Lynch’s 1986 small-town psycho-noir Blue Velvet. It was, she says, “the beginning of a journey that at the time felt like a sacrifice”. Born in Los Angeles, the daughter of two acting legends, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, she’d already been on screen – notably alongside Jodie Foster in Foxes and Cher in Mask. But when Blue Velvet came, Dern was in college. “They said if I left, I would be kicked out. So that was a huge decision for me as 17-year-old. Scary. Independent film also didn’t pay.”
Yet taking risks was simply how Dern was brought up. “I definitely have been raised by two of the more boundary-less, brave and authentic artists possible in acting.” While her parents divorced when she was two, “I was really surrounded by people who were not focused on the likes of what we have now – the way celebrity is built and all that comes with it.” Remarkably, both her parents – now in their eighties – are still acting, with Dern’s father recently in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood.
Dern has also co-starred several times with her “extraordinary” mother, first appearing as a child extra in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (director Martin Scorsese shot her eating an ice cream cone, 19 times, and “jokingly” told her mother she should be an actress). They re-appeared together in Wild At Heart, and then Rambling Rose, becoming the first ever mother and daughter to both be nominated for Academy Awards (Dern’s second nod came much later, opposite her future BLL co-star Reese Witherspoon, in Wild).
In 2010, Dern and her parents were all awarded stars on the Hollywood Boulevard on the same day, symbolic of what an acting dynasty Dern belongs to. But it doesn’t follow that her children will take the same path. She cites the example of her godmother, the late, great actress Shelley Winters. “Her daughter was raised like me and became a surgeon. So you never know.” Maybe her kids will become divorce lawyers, like Nora? “Yes,” she says, chuckling, before a thought occurs. “I wonder if you play a divorce lawyer… if you can then represent yourself?”
MARRIAGE STORY IS IN CINEMAS ON 15 NOVEMBER AND ON NETFLIX FROM 6 DECEMBER. LITTLE WOMEN OPENS ON 26 DECEMBER.
‘You wait your whole life as an actor, hoping for the time where filmmakers see you as an artist, through your body of work, versus a type’