Kathy Bates: 'I told Clint that after 50 years, I feel like I've hit the big time'
‘Oh, I’m a bumper!” says Kathy Bates as I reach out to shake her hand. A small fist comes towards me with a large, round, pink-rose ring on the middle finger. We bump and laugh and one of the truly unique American acting powerhouses of the past halfcentury beams back at me. She has a splendid smile, full of mischief and wisdom: a small and compact woman buoyed by that straight-up, unfeigned southern warmth that abides no matter where you encounter it. She fusses over me kindly, offering drinks – a world away from the nervous, shy, deeply rattled and easily hurt woman I have just watched in Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Richard Jewell.
Bates plays Bobi, the mother of the eponymous character, a security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Centennial Park, Atlanta, who discovered a backpack full of pipe-bombs, laid by whitesupremacist terrorist Eric Rudolph, minutes before it exploded. Although one person died and 111 were injured, Jewell saved countless lives by clearing the area before the bombs exploded. But within days he found himself under a nationwide spotlight as the FBI focused on him as their chief suspect.
For 88 days, he and his mother endured a press siege outside their shared apartment – and a vicious feeding-frenzy in the national media – until the FBI halfheartedly admitted he hadn’t planted the bomb. Almost a decade later, Rudolph confessed in a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty. Jewell enjoyed only a brief vindication though, dying of heart failure aged 44 in 2007.
Eastwood’s movie is about enormous pressure being brought to bear on people unable to handle it, and Bates and Paul Walter Hauser do sterling work to delineate the suffering the pair underwent. Hauser is a good-natured fool, a fantasist deluded about his security-guard role, claiming he is “lawenforcement” even as the FBI laugh in his face. Bates’ Bobi is all nerves and near-hysteria, absorbing every blow like a woman on the verge of collapse. But her final speech, the true emotional climax of the movie, burns with a righteous fury, even as the tears fill her eyes. Eastwood needed an actor of commanding stature to deliver weakness, then rage, then fragile strength, and Bates has deservedly earned the lion’s share of the movie’s acclaim.
On Monday, it earned her a fourth Oscar nomination; today she is pleased, and nostalgic for her first one, for
Misery, back in 1991, which translated into a win. “I arrived home two days before the ceremony. Literally only had enough time to put on the dress. Thank God it fit. The night was a dream come true. My fiance was worried I would lose, but when Daniel Day-Lewis had the envelope in his hands, in my mind I saw my name in it. Heard him say it. Sailed up the steps and forgot to thank my fiance and my mother, who deserved all my thanks sitting at home.
“This time is different,” she says, “because Richard Jewell is based on a true story. All we wanted was for Bobi Jewell to feel the film vindicated her son. I wanted her to like my portrayal of her. She’s waited 23 years for justice. I’ve never felt quite like this before. Whatever happens now, I’m just grateful the film will get more eyeballs.”
Bates’ voice breaks and her breathing shortens when she speaks about the woman she plays, and with whom she made contact long before shooting started. “It was my birthday the day we met. She baked me a pound cake. She had the Vanity Fair article the movie is based on, and the script, which she’d annotated with things like: ‘I’d never do this, I’d never call him that.’ She was very meticulous. It was obvious she’s still absolutely raw from this, even 25 years later. It still affects her, and it’s never going to change.”
Everybody loves Bates, but the movie – with its Trumpish overtones – has not escaped criticism. The enemies are the media and the “deep state”. The guy who gets off scot-free is Rudolph – I tell Bates that particularly disappointed me – and she seems to partly agree: “Rudolph was just evil, obviously.”
She also appears sympathetic to disquiet over Olivia Wilde’s character, Kathy Scruggs, the journalist who put Jewell in the headlines in the most negative way – and is the most venomous portrayal of a woman in an Eastwood movie for many years. Scruggs died of a drug overdose aged 42, which means she can’t defend herself against the film’s claim that she slept with an FBI agent (Jon Hamm) for the scoop.
“I was a little uncomfortable with