Sharp and to the point:
Marti Noxon talks about her battle with addiction while working on the new SoHo drama Sharp Objects. Julie Eley reports.
Art mirrors life for the writer of new SoHo drama Sharp Objects.
Writer and show runner Marti Noxon didn’t have to look far for inspiration for her latest TV project about an alcoholic journalist battling her demons as she investigates the murder of two girls.
“I was actually struggling with getting sober again when I wrote this,” she says of the new SoHo drama Sharp Objects.
“Some of the things that I added were ripped from the pages of my own life.”
Based on the book of the same name by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects stars Amy Adams as reporter Camille Preaker, who returns to her hometown following her release from a psychiatric hospital after years of self-harm.
There she must not only unravel the mystery surrounding the deaths of two girls but also deal with her neurotic, controlling mother and the half sister she barely knows.
And all this while fighting to unravel the secrets of a past that set her on the path to self-destruction, cutting her body to release the pain of an abusive upbringing. The series also stars Patricia Clarkson (House Of Cards, Six Feet Under) as Camille’s mother Adora Crellin with Home And Away’s Eliza Scanlen as her sister Amma.
Noxon, whose work ranges from Buffy The Vampire Slayer to To The Bone, has been open about her battles with booze and bulimia, but admits working on the show stirred up painful memories, especially when it came to fleshing out Camille’s addiction.
“All of that stuff, it’s been part of my life at various times,” she says of Camille filling her water bottle with alcohol and carrying little bottles of booze in her handbag.
“I’ve been sober for a while again
“I’ve been sober for a while again now but I kind of wrote my way out.” – Marti Noxon
now but I kind of wrote my way out.”
A bit like therapy, TV Guide suggests. “No real therapy is therapy,” says 53-year-old Noxon, adding that work is “100 per cent” easier without alcohol.
“It’s a fiction we perpetrate on ourselves, this cycle of substance abuse, that it makes us deeper. The problem is the self destruction is so repressive. Ultimately, that’ll take you down.
“You see so many artists who never (conquer) those demons and, ultimately, they are not vital. When you are locked in any kind of self-destruction you’re sort of focused on self and I just love being available to the world.”
Less open to the world is Clarkson’s Adora Crellin, a controlling Southern-belle-style mother who rarely shows any emotion while needing to be loved to stay relevant.
“It’s a human emotion. I think that we’ve all struggled with love. Wanting love, needing love, will people love us?” says 58-year-old Clarkson. “I’m fortunate enough to have had the love of my family.
“I’ve never been married, I don’t have children, but I’ve had the love of some remarkable men in my life and I have beautiful, perfect friends.
“So I’ve had a lot of love, but I think it’s just a human nature to feel unloved, to feel unnecessary, to feel unneeded. No matter how much we have, I think it’s human nature to want more.”
And it’s that need for love that prompts Clarkson to say, “It’s quite shocking some of the things which happen in this story.”
She found inspiration for her character in past work and in her New Orleans upbringing.
“I grew up in the middle class on the West Bank but I certainly know southern belles, my god, having lived in New Orleans and seen and experienced all the stratas that exist in that city. Adora has an element of southern belle but it’s like southern belle and Annie Oakley.
“But probably playing Blanche Du Bois (in a stage play in 2004) aided me the most. The muscle memory came back and I needed it.”
Clarkson admits to being ‘fearful’ of the role but says it was important, “To come at her with as much love and humanity and light as I could muster before the sun sets on her, and it truly does set and all the walls come down, the facades drop.
“It’s quite stunning, but isn’t that what we want to see? Don’t we want to see the mighty fall? Don’t we want the layers to be revealed?
“I’m playing a woman that has an illness. It’s easy to judge her but I couldn’t. The only way I knew how to play her was as if she was perfect.”
And she concludes, “It was probably the duplicity that was the hardest thing for me to handle and just the stamina I would need for the part towards the end.
“And I did it all with heels and long, fake fingernails.”