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Jennifer Connelly - Her Dark Material
By Tim Lewis
Esquire
September 2005
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Hollywood actress in possession of a serious career must be in want of a sense of humour. But no one told this one ????
“As you can probably tell, I take my work quite seriously.”
Yes, folks, it’s another Esquire exclusive. We can confirm, once and for all, that Jennifer Connelly – Oscar-winning actress, plausible candidate for world’s most beautiful woman and the definitive screen miserablist of the post-streep generation – takes her work quite seriously. Our subscription hotlines are manned and ready to take your call. Next month, if you’re lucky, we may drop another bombshell: have you heard that Colin Farrell likes a drink?
Yet, here’s the rub: sitting close enough to smell her perfume in a crowded, noisy drawing room in the London hotel Claridge’s, the 35-year-old New Yorker could not be lighter, frothier company. She is clever, imaginative and principled; perhaps the first time a Hollywood star has ever combined those particular qualities. When she talks about the preparation she puts into her roles, she does so with sufficient eyebrow motility to suggest that she has already pre-empted any weary scepticism. Actors never do that. Before the drinks order arrives, you will have already decided that she could actually be the perfect person to be married to – if only that damned Paul Bettany, the most likeable, least irritating British actor in some years, had not had the idea first. And when you inform her, “You are the definitive screen miserablist of the post-Streep generation,” she replies with a smirk, “Why, thank you.”
The black run started in 2000 with Waking the Dead (activism; the Chilean resistance; death) and has rolled on without remission until this year’s Dark Water (psycho-terror; secrets; suicide). In between, there have been despondent turns in the brilliant but relentlessly downbeat Requiem for a Dream (addiction; loss; lesbianism), the award-ravenous A Beautiful Mind (schizophrenia; conspiracy theories; loneliness) and the underrated House of Sand and Fog (melancholy; white-trash; disenfranchisement).
So what’s the deal? How is she not savagely depressed from playing these dark, haunted characters? “No, it’s fun,” she says. “It affects my happiness if I’m working on something that I’m not happy with. That’s depressing. But doing a scene, for example, where the character is expressing fears that she can’t be a good mother and she has to relive her mother’s violence towards her, that’s really fun. When you finish it, it’s exhilarating.”
Vadim Perelman, the director of House of Sand and Fog, describes Connelly’s commitment to a role as “almost insane”; other film-makers, including Dark Water’s Walter Salles, invariably use the word “fearless” in the first few sentences of describing her work. “Am I a fearless person?” she repeats back. “If you saw me in the first 10 minutes of any airplane ride, it would put that to rest.” Nevertheless, Connelly has shown that she is prepared to go far beyond conventional boundaries, from harrowing scenes of emotional intimacy to the graphic orgy at the climax of Requiem for a Dream, in which her heroin-addicted character performs with another naked junkie in exchange for drugs. “I’m not a prude and if I trust the director I will try different things,” she says. “I want to serve the story, so I’m not going to say, ‘Well, actually I don’t think I look good in that light.’ Maybe that could be described as fearless.”
Connelly certainly exudes remarkable self-assurance, which must derive in part from the fact that she has been making films since her early teens. Her first was Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, although her career went a long way downhill before its recent upturn. “It’s sort of an out-of-body experience looking back on myself,” she says, referring to movies that are largely memorable for lingering appreciations of her voluptuous embonpoint. “Some of those films are just embarrassing; I was so humiliated by my performance in Career Opportunities that I thought I would quit acting. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I even realised that acting could be a creative experience.”
Since meeting Bettany on the set of A Beautiful Mind, Connelly now operates a policy of one-film on, one-film off – taking turns with her husband to be “set bitch” and provide support for her two children (eight-year-old son Kai from a previous relationship and two-year-old Stellan). “At the end of the day, what difference does it make if you made 10 films or 18 films?” she says. “You made 10 films but you had a great relationship with your kids, or at least you did your best not to fuck them up irrevocably, or you made 18 and they don’t return your phone calls.”
Would she describe herself as ambitious? “I think I’m competitive,” she says. “I don’t know that I’m necessarily ambitious on my own but if you put me in the room with someone else who is going to do something, I want to do it too.” The trait seems ingrained; when she was growing up she juggled acting and modelling with the kind of academic results that would ultimately land her a place at Yale to study English literature. Here she also found time for an overachieving athletics career. It says much that her nickname in the university cross-country team was “Death Grip”, a reference to her limited natural ability but indomitable spirit. “I am obsessive-compulsive and a perfectionist,” she says, sheepishly, “I need to be more lazy; I am incredibly not lazy. I’m weirdly unlazy.”
In this respect, the laid-back Bettany may be a positive influence. He has a tendancy to refer to her as Drama Queen and sit around her trailer while she prepares for a scene, strumming a guitar and singing, “Oooh, look at me, my name’s Jennifer and I’m really quite depressed.” “Paul’s always taking the piss out of me for something,” she says. “But I am diligent and thorough and I just don’t like to multitask. I can’t read a book and run on a treadmill. I don’t like to be on the phone and play with the kids. Except having sex. I do like to read a book while having sex. And talk on the phone. You can get so much done. If the room’s dark enough, I like to do some online shopping.”
She may not be able to do anything about her driven personality, but Connelly is taking great pains to move her career in a fresh direction. “I don’t want to be taken so seriously anymore,” Connelly announces as our conversation winds up. “It would bore me and I think everyone else if I keep making the same kind of film.” Her new project is a satire called Little Children, which takes place in a wife-swapping, internet porn-abusing suburban community; that will be followed by work on the first script for more than a decade from Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen’s collaborator on Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan. “I would like people to see me as playful and fun, not a woman on the verge.”
Next stop today is the filming of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, her final engagement in Britain before rejoining Bettany at their home in Brooklyn. It seems only fair to warn Connelly of the host’s tendency for playfully goading his Hollywood guests, but she is unfazed. She actually seems to be looking forward to the experience. “Oh, I’m used to that,” she says, breaking into a smile. “I get it all day long.”
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