Susan Sarandon: ‘I’ll probably never work again after this interview’
Hollywood lacks imagination, Hillary Clinton is worse than Trump Donald and porn is boring. Susan Sarandon takes aim.
SUSAN SARANDON IS HOLDING her phone at arm’s length, squinting at the screen and inelegantly prodding it as she writes a message. ‘It’s Ai Weiwei,’ says the Hollywood icon with the faintest hint of a knowing look. ‘He wants to meet up later.’
Then, the message to the artist finally sent, she takes off her thick reading glasses and looks at me as if to say, ‘I’m ready now.’ My first thoughts are: she looks very good for 70. And not the Hollywood, immobile, pneumatic-face-that-no-longer-moves good for 70 but a sexy, natural(ish),
I-want-to-look-like-that-at-70 kind of 70.
As far as I can tell, sending texts is the only thing she isn’t good at. She’s an Oscar winner for 1996 crime drama Dead Man Walking, a feminist icon since Thelma & Louise, Piers Morgan’s premier antagonist (last year she took him to task over his comments about an ‘inappropriate’ boob-baring outfit on Twitter) and a septuagenarian sex symbol (her exhusband Tim Robbins is 12 years her junior; her most recent boyfriend Jonathan Bricklin, who she split from in 2015, was more than three decades younger). She’s also a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, a mother-of-three and an environmentalist.
She also has a habit of getting herself into trouble. Last year, she caused uproar by declaring, ‘You know, some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately. If he gets in, things will really explode.’ One of Hollywood’s most famous liberals, and a Bernie Sanders supporter, she proceeded to endorse Green party candidate Jill Stein after Hillary Clinton, who Susan ‘turned against’ long ago, won the Democratic Party nomination.
Given that Trump is now in the White House, does she regret not backing Hillary? ‘No! No. No. No,’ she says. ‘There is something we have gained by him being President: it has made people a lot more involved. People are going to town meetings and writing letters, you haven’t seen anything like this since the ’60s.’
Surely, I press her, anyone would have been better than The Donald – even if that meant voting for Hillary. Plus, a staunch feminist, didn’t she want to see a woman in the White House?
‘I think that’s really insulting to women. Am I supposed to support Sarah Palin? Or any woman that runs? Am I not supposed to look at their record, or who’s paying for their campaigns? I’m an environmentalist against fracking; she’s been selling fracking all over the world. I want a $15 minimum wage; she says that’s impossible. I don’t want to go to war in Syria; she does. I’m sorry, but I expect more.’
The backlash was bad, but she’s used to it by now. ‘I’ve had death threats about my views. In the lead-up to Iraq it got very, very serious. There were things about my kids in the papers that weren’t true; a teacher at my nephew’s school in New Jersey talked about knocking my teeth out. The worst thing is you’re separated from your tribe. People are afraid to associate with you or sometimes even look at you. They don’t want to be labelled un-american. It’s scary and very hurtful.’
We’re sitting in her Berlin hotel room to talk about a somewhat less likely role: in the campaign for Mercedes-benz’ new electric car, Concept EQ. For it, she chose to be shot alongside her ‘protégé’, 37-year-old film-maker Bryn Mooser. The pair, who are part of the car company’s #mbcollective of creatives, have worked on humanitarian causes and previously made a film about the 2015 Nepal earthquake together.
‘If it had been a regular luxury car, I probably wouldn’t have been interested,’ she says. ‘But it was sustainable, and I was intrigued that they are starting to think that way. Plus, I liked the idea of giving a platform to Bryn.’
She feels passionate about using her platform for the right causes. ‘I’d rather use my celebrity than be used by it,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of demands on you and your privacy; you’re judged, you’re talked about. I don’t pretend to know anything but, if people care so much about who I’m sleeping with, then I might as well tell them about things, like a woman who is struggling to keep her orphanage open.’
One thing she does know a lot about is Hollywood and, after nearly five decades in the industry, she’s pleased to see more women working in film. But she bristles at the idea that she should support everything made by a woman for that reason alone: ‘Just because there are more female directors, it doesn’t mean that they are all great. Just because you’re a woman, I’m not going to support everything you do. I think that’s really patronising towards women.’
Her vision of feminism, it seems, is
being able to judge women – politicians, directors, writers, actors – on the same playing field as men, their gender irrelevant to their work. ‘Real equality means that you can have assholes that are women as well as men,’ she snorts.
Either way, there’s still a long way to go, and she’s disappointed Thelma & Louise didn’t bring the feminist sea change many hoped for when it was released in 1991.
Then she laughs: ‘I don’t actually look towards Hollywood as being the vanguard of any real change. Hollywood is not political, it’s economically driven. Hollywood wants you to be young and slim, to have lots of followers on Instagram.’
Her disillusionment is blatant. ‘Decisions in the film industry are now being made from dispassionate places. From economic places. And that leaves out the magic, doesn’t it? I’ll probably never work again after this interview comes out. But most of the businessmen running these studios have a lack of imagination. Being John Malkovich would never get made today. I don’t even know if Thelma & Louise would get made today.’
She’s much more enthused about her latest project, Feud, an eight-part Ryan Murphy-directed FX series depicting the battle between Joan Crawford, played by Jessica Lange, and Bette Davis, played by Susan. It’ll be on BBC Two later this year.
‘I’ve been asked to play Bette Davis my entire career, but this seemed more in-depth,’ she says. ‘She’s so well-known and so exaggerated that it really, really frightened me. And because it frightened me, I thought this is the time to do it. I also just really liked her. She was very work-orientated. She didn’t see herself as a movie star, she saw herself as an actor and she worked until she dropped.’
Has she experienced female rivalry like theirs (when Crawford died, Davis quipped, ‘My mother told me never to speak badly of the dead. She’s dead… Good.’)? She shakes her head. ‘I think the generation above me still thought their power base was male and tended to align themselves with men and not with women. And sometimes even be aggressively against women. But I’ve never come up against that. All the powerful women I know support each other.’
I reckon Susan’s brilliant fun when she’s off-duty. She’s au fait with the Berlin clubbing scene, I learn, and at a dinner the night before our interview, she laughs a lot, sampling the food with her son Jack and his girlfriend. They’re at a loss when dessert, a pavlova, arrives: she’s never heard of it (‘Is that egg white?’) but thinks it’s delicious. I’m pleased there’s at least one thing I can claim to have more knowledge of than Susan Sarandon.
At 70, she refuses to cover up: to dinner she’s wearing a black suit and a low-cut black lace camisole by the designer Prabal Gurung. Her only rule is, ‘If my children are OK with it, I’m OK with it.’
I suspect, like Bette Davis, she has every intention of working until she drops. Her next plan? Making feminist porn once she turns 80 to show young men and women what real sex looks like. ‘It troubles me that so many young kids have everything on their phones, and they’re seeing porn as the example of how they’re supposed to act as a man or woman. It’s so violent and not interesting. They are sexualised and have to live up to these strange standards – that’s a huge burden.’
Her phone pings: Ai Weiwei is waiting, and Susan is once again consumed by writing a response. As I leave, I run into Bryn the Protégé. What’s it like working so closely with her? ‘The thing about Susan is that she never, ever gives up,’ he says. ‘She has the life not to have to do all of this, but she keeps doing it. She struggles with what people say about her, I’ve seen it. But she overcomes it every time and she will keep going – no matter what.’
Hillary, Hollywood, Piers Morgan: you’ve been warned. Susan Sarandon appears in Chapter Two of the #mbcollective Fashion Story, launched at Mercedes-benz Fashion Week Berlin