TAKING THE LEAD
Helen Mirren, Brie Larson, Cate Blanchett and more talk frights and delights of acting.
An eclectic group of actresses behind some of the year’s most intriguing films, including rising stars and established performers alike, gathered this month to talk with The Envelope about their films, their personal approaches to work, and their industry.
Participating in the conversation were Cate Blanchett, from the 1950s lesbian love story “Carol”; Brie Larson, from the imprisonment drama “Room”; Helen Mirren, from the art saga “Woman in Gold”; Charlotte Rampling, from the marital drama “45 Years”; Saoirse Ronan, from the immigrant tale “Brooklyn”; and Lily Tomlin, from the intergenerational comedy “Grandma.”
Here are edited excerpts from the free-f lowing conversation moderated by Times film writers Rebecca Keegan and Mark Olsen in which the actresses discuss the roles that hit too close to home, the secret alchemy of working with directors and how they know when to say “no.”
‘You can’t not bring who you are to a role. You can’t efface work that you’ve done.’
— CHARLOTTE RAMPLING
Keegan: Helen, you recently played gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in “Trumbo.” We’re in the L.A. Times building, which is where she worked. How do you think she would handle an actors roundtable?
Mirren: She’d certainly be wearing a hat … the difference would be that none of us would be relaxed because we would know that we had to obey not just what Hedda was requiring of us, but what our studios were requiring of us. I presume we’re all much, much freer than any of those actresses.
Blanchett: No, I was bought many, many years ago. Cheaply. Fifty cents.
Keegan: It seems like there is more of an expectation of actors to share more of their personal lives now, perhaps, than there was then. Saoirse, how do you strike that balance between wanting to be able to preserve something for yourself and also share a little bit of who you are?
Ronan: I started when I was very young. Even from the age of 12, the only thing that was important was actually the film, and that was the only thing that I was ever going to talk about. Naturally, as actors, we’re very, very open, we’re very emotional and so it’s easier to kind of be expressive.... But for me it’s important to protect my life outside of work.
Mirren: Who here has a Twitter account?
Larson: I just got one three months
ago.
Blanchett: Is that because of the gorilla? [Larson is shooting “Kong: Skull Island.”]
Larson: No, it was actually, weirdly, my choice. I never had social media and then suddenly I felt like … any time I did tap into the Internet … it was so much negativity — and nothingness — I thought, well, perhaps I can be part of a group that’s maybe pushing it in a different direction.
Blanchett: I remember, years ago when I first came to Los Angeles, a friend of mine, a female director, was wanting to make a very small, low-budget film, and she presented a list of actresses that she wanted to approach, and the studio executive rolled out this piece of paper with a calendar of events, and there was this chart with a list of actresses and the tick against what events they’d been to. Larson: That exists?
Blanchett: They were wanting to cast these women based on their photographability. Now there’s a request that you open yourself to social media so that your profile is high.... You’re a commodity, you’re a brand, and that you’re expected, now, to brand yourself … it’s a changing landscape.
Keegan: Lily, in “Grandma” you’re kind of getting yourself out there — you are wearing your own clothes and driving your own car —
Tomlin: Right, that was budgetary. [Laughs]
Keegan: That’s a part that was written expressly for you. How do you think about the difference between the character you’re playing and the real you?
Tomlin: I‘m sort of late to that kind of starring role. I’ve been a costar and so on, but I’ve rarely led a film. It was very low budget, and [director] Paul Weitz was a friend; I’d done “Admission” with him.... I’m known for creating these very extreme characters, very different one from the other, and different voices and everything, not that I didn’t approach them as an actor — I did, and I do — but this movie, it just rolled off my back. I thought, “Well, maybe I’ve tried too hard in the past, to be a different person.”
Olsen: Charlotte, your director on “45 Years,” Andrew Haigh, liked the idea that both yourself and your costar, Tom Courtenay, had been working so long that the audience would have all these images of you from your past. Did that affect your performance?
Rampling: You can’t not bring who you are to a role. You can’t efface work that you’ve done … there is an identification that people will automatically make throughout.... They do, as we grow up and grow on through films, they follow us …
Blanchett: It’s the difficulty of returning
to a place that you know inside out, and playing a role that is really enmeshed with your own identity. There’s a challenge in that.... The membrane between you and the character is so thin.
Ronan: It’s terrifying.... To come along and be so used to playing somebody else completely different to you, and feel like … you’re acting, you’re working, you know. And with [“Brooklyn”], I couldn’t get my head out of the fact that I was feeling all these things every day that this person felt, you know? It takes your head a second to manage all of those emotions. I felt completely out of my depth for the first little while.
Larson: I had the same thing with “Room.” It wasn’t until a month before we started shooting and I remembered that when I moved to Los Angeles at 7 years old, it was me and my mom and my little sister, we moved into a studio apartment not much bigger than Room, in the movie. We had no money, we were living off of instant noodles. My mom had no idea what she was going to do; her life was completely uprooted. And yet, she created this world for me and my sister that was so rich, so full of imagination, and it gave me chills when I realized that I was going to have the opportunity to relive my child-
hood from my mother’s perspective.
Keegan: Only about 4% of studio movies are directed by women. Helen, is there anything that, in your position, you can say or do about that?
Mirren: I’m so on both sides of the fence. On the one hand, I think it should just be how brilliant, how talented you are — but then you can’t get to be talented if you’re not given an opportunity to work. If you’re never given the experience of making a film, how can you get to be a great filmmaker?
Blanchett: Well, say, for example, the fellow who’s directing your amazing King Kong movie. He had that extraordinary film that came out a few years ago [“The Kings of Summer”], but he’s not widely known, he doesn’t have a track record for producing big-budget action film, but he’s got this huge film. Without those track records in place, would someone be prepared to take a risk [like that] on a woman? And if, God forbid, it didn’t work — and how many films have I been in that haven’t worked for one reason or another — if a woman does that it’s like, “Well, see.”
Larson: But then men sort of had a head start on us.
Mirren: They sure did, by a few billion years probably, absolutely.
Ronan: I think what needs to change is having more films that consist of female interaction. We’re all women here. We’re having an intelligent conversation.... You see it in “Brooklyn” and we’re so proud of it, that there’s so many scenes that just consist of women, and it’s entertaining, and it’s funny, and it’s heartfelt, and it’s sincere, and hopefully people learn something from it. I think, in that way, our mind-set needs to change.
Blanchett: But also, when I saw “Brooklyn,” half the audience were men, half were women — and both enjoyed it. And it’s the same with “Carol.” It’s about two women falling in love but there’s a universality to it, and there’s something that somehow only women directors can direct films that have women protagonists, and only women will go see them. Women can speak to all of humanity....
Mirren: We have to teach 22-year-old-men that fact. That’s the only problem. Olsen: Lily, all through your career, whether from when your variety show, or a movie like “Nine to Five,” even a movie like “Grandma,” what do you see the relationship being between the social current and the message of the work you’re putting out?
Tomlin: Oh, yes, absolutely, as long as it’s human.... Not politics in some traditional sense, but has, the sensibility, expresses progressive ideas, yeah.
Blanchett: It’s a provocation, you know, your work is so provocative.
Tomlin: Oh God, I love hearing that
from you.
Keegan: Did you think of “Carol,” at all, as a provocation?
Blanchett: If the film had been made 10, 15 years ago, I think it would’ve been viewed — even if it had been made the same frame by frame — it would’ve been seen as more provocative. I think it’s timely. I focused on the relationships and the human aspect of the story because you can guide an audience, but you can’t make them have the conversation, you can’t tell them what to think about it. And that’s what I find really exciting about acting, and what I find tricky about being in film — it’s not till someone stops you in a supermarket and tells you they either hated it or liked it that you necessarily know that people have even seen it.
Larson: Most of my friends are musicians and they’re baffled by what we choose to do. They’re, like, “Wait a second, so you don’t edit your own stuff? You don’t get to choose what the poster is?” For us, our job is just to give everybody in postproduction all of the colors to paint with later.
Blanchett: But that’s why it’s so great to have that — I mean, we definitely had with [“Carol” director] Todd Haynes, it was Rooney [Mara] and Todd and I together. He was inside and alongside, and throughout the thing, so you think, well, “OK, we’ll do this five different ways because I know that when you get into the editing room, you will make a really great decision.”
Mirren: That’s why that moment of getting into bed with, or marrying, your director, that moment when you say, “OK, let’s go ahead,” it’s such an important moment.
Rampling: It is, it’s complete, the word is “surrender.” You have got to surrender.
Blanchett: Yes, you surrender but it’s not a passive surrendering. It’s like having great sex. You don’t know who’s leading.... And that’s where you have to be a little bit brave. You make an offer — and you go, “OK, it’s not that terrain, it’s that terrain.” Keegan: How do you know when to say no?
Blanchett: In terms of the creative conversation, I think it’s always better to say, “Maybe.” Or “Why?” OK, that’s a good reason to do that. Let’s try it.
Rampling: It’s never, “no.” “No” is useless in creation.
Mirren: Well, I’ve said no. I’ve said, “No, I’m not doing that.” It’s usually, it was related to — I felt that the writer or the director was demeaning women. I felt it was demeaning, or one-dimensional, or something like that. It would get my goat and I’d say “no.” But I have done a lot of very [laughing] demeaning things as well, incidentally. The people out there think, “What about that being nude in a van full of dead meat? That was fairly demeaning!” [Laughter]
Blanchett: Oh, that was extraordinary. Larson: You did that? Mirren: [Laughing] I did, I did, I did. I had to get very drunk to do it. Well, you know, it was art, that’s the thing.