HAUNTED BY ANN’S ROLE AS A MUM IN TORMENT
ANN DOWD arrives just in time for tea and we ‘reluctantly’ agree to share a bottle of LaurentPerrier, even though I confess that I’ve been a boring, good boy recently; rarely touching a drop of booze.
‘Have you?’ she says, aghast, adding: ‘I haven’t. Full disclosure!’ Her natural warmth reminds me of her performance in a film called Mass, which I’m haunted by. I saw it for a third time at the London Film Festival recently.
The script, by Fran Kranz (who also directs) is beautifully written. Dowd describes it as ‘this story about four people going through the unimaginable’. A teenager has died in a high school shooting. Dowd plays the shooter’s mother, Linda; her face a mask of grief and loss.
Fellow castmates — Reed Birney as her husband Richard; Martha Plimpton and Jason Isaacs as the parents of the dead boy — met to read through the script, then scattered for a few weeks before regrouping to spend three weeks filming in a church in Idaho. Dowd, 65, has three children. Raising them has not always been easy; but, as she points out, ‘the great gift for actors is that at the end of the day, we don’t go home with the consequences’. She adds, softly: ‘My children are alive, thank God.’
Dowd, who has won awards for her cattleprod wielding enforcer Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale, has been acting since she switched career paths — she was studying to become a doctor — when she was 18. I’ve been watching her on stage and screen for years, but Linda is her best role.
■ The picture will be shown in cinemas and on Sky Cinema early in 2022.