FEMALE INTUITION
As audiences embrace the second season of the award-winning drama Big Little Lies, Laura Dern is revelling in a role that marks a career playing multifaceted women.
Big Little Lies’s Laura Dern revels in a role that marks a career playing multifaceted women.
The second season of Big Little Lies tells some cold hard truths: misery loves company and so does tragedy. Just ask Laura Dern’s rather unsympathetic character, Renata. Formerly an outsider shunned by a clique of Monterey school mums, she’s in a quite different place in season two.
“Now she’s among a tribe,” declares Dern triumphantly. Sharing a sinister secret, Renata is now one of the group dubbed the Monterey Five, composed of Celeste (Nicole Kidman), Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), Jane (Shailene Woodley) and Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz). In the final episode of season one, these five women became complicit in covering up facts regarding the death of Celeste’s abusive husband and Jane’s rapist, Perry Wright (Alexander Skårsgard).
“All the women are suffering post-traumatic stress, but there’s also the bonding of the secret and the bonding of women walking through something together in support of each other,” Dern says of season two.
Renata is the powerhouse CEO who brings her boardroom skills – and tantrums – to her daughter’s school playground. It’s a role for which Dern earned an Emmy as well as a Golden Globe. Evidently, playing unlikeable sits well with her. “Oh, Renata’s adorable! I don’t know what you’re getting at,” she says with a laugh. “You know me, I only play sweet characters,” she jokes.
No-one does highly strung quite like Dern. In fact, she’s made an award-winning career of it with roles in Wild At Heart, Citizen Ruth, Certain Women and the HBO series
Enlightened. “I’ve played women who are perceived as a certain thing, but ultimately, they’re women who haven’t found the value in themselves,” she says.
Off-screen, she is a vocal supporter of the #MeToo movement. She revealed on The Ellen Show in 2017 that she had been sexually assaulted at age 14. Dern views the movement as having already made great strides for women. “Men and women are talking about their shared experiences as well as gender parity, pay parity, abuse of power, all these conversations that have been happening ever since [the movement began]. I think Big Little Lies [draws] such a parallel, because it deals with abuse and domestic violence, and within that theme, it’s talking about the fact that when you create a tribe, nothing can break it as long as you all stick together.”
Dern’s own tribe consists of her two children, son, Ellery, 17, and daughter Jaya, 14, whom she shares with her ex-husband, musician Ben Harper. She was previously linked to actors Billy Bob Thornton (who famously ditched her for Angelina Jolie), as well as Kyle MacLachlan, Nicolas Cage and Jeff Goldblum.
Born into Hollywood royalty, she was raised by actors Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern, and made her debut uncredited appearance at age six in her mother’s film White Lightning. The mother-daughter duo went on to perform in several movies together and made Hollywood history when they starred in Rambling Rose in 1991, becoming the first mother-and-daughter team to earn Oscar nominations for the same film.
Dern has always remained down to earth and attributes that to her upbringing. “I would say all roads lead back to my mother and grandmother, who have no patience for creating a life of celebrity. Nor did my dad, ever. It wasn’t just about being bothered by paparazzi, in their opinion, it was about staying honest as an actor.”
Given Dern’s high-profile romantic ups and downs, it’s quite a feat that she’s managed, mostly, to keep herself out of the tabloids. “In terms of daily life, there is definitely a way to try to keep it as normal as possible within a completely abnormal circumstance,” she says. “I’ve proven that.”
Season 2 of Big Little Lies is now screening on Foxtel and can be streamed on Foxtel Now.