I, Allison
Actress thought film acclaim eluded her — then came I, Tonya
Since the world devoured Allison Janney’s brilliantly acidic performance as Tonya Harding’s abusive mother in I, Tonya, she has won nearly every major award she’s been up for, including a BAFTA, a Screen Actors Guild award, a Golden Globe and a Critics’ Choice prize. This is the 58-year-old’s first Oscar nod (best supporting actress), though she has seven Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards (and two Tony nominations). “I kind of thought maybe this moment had eluded me in my career, that I just wasn’t getting the kind of roles in films that were ... getting me recognition,” Janney reflected recently at the Oscars nominees’ luncheon. And it’s all thanks to her longtime friend, screenwriter Steven Rogers, who had the idea to seek out the life rights to Tonya Harding ’s story and insisted Janney was to play LaVona Golden. It might not seem like the most flattering thing to have your good friend think of you as the chainsmoking, bitter, abusive and overall controversial matriarch to the most infamous figure skater in history, who tells her young daughter to “skate wet” after she pees her pants on the ice, and regularly hits her. But Janney was thrilled. “I’ve played a lot of mothers in my life,” Janney, who stars as a recovering alcoholic on the CBS sitcom Mom, said late last year. “But never anyone to the degree that this one was messed up.” Rogers, who used accounts of Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly to inform the screenplay and story, never actually met Golden while he was writing the script. Harding told him that she didn’t know if her mother was dead or alive (she is alive and continues to deny abuse allegations). “It’s a pretty hard character and I hope the reason he wanted me to play her was because I would try my hardest ... to find her humanity,” Janney said. “She’s a woman who gave her whole life to her daughter. Every penny she made went to her daughter’s skating. She sees herself as a woman who tried her hardest to give her daughter a better life than she had. Those scenes helped me find her humanity, helped me find what made her a human being, not just an on-the-page monster.” For Janney, the experience of disappearing behind this woman who never smiles and never apologizes was liberating. “My heart broke a little for her watching all these interviews because I could see under her denial, the hurt that’s there,” Janney said. “When someone says ‘I don’t care, I (couldn’t) care less that we don’t talk on the phone,’ it’s like, ‘of course you do.’” She even enjoyed the test of acting while trying to ignore the bird perched on her shoulder for the scenes where she’s talking directly to the camera. “It’s like the bird heard me and said, ‘Oh yeah?’ Let’s see if you can ignore me when I’m putting my head in your ear,’” Janney said. “I thought this is exactly the kind of humour that is perfect for this movie. I kind of loved it; as much as it was irritating me, it was also fuelling me as I was trying to get my side of the story across.” No matter what happens at the Academy Awards, Janney is just hopeful for what this might mean for her future in film. “Maybe this will break open my personal ceiling in the film world, that I might get more kinds of roles like these: interesting, challenging, important roles.”