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Jennifer Connelly
by Alex Godfrey
Hot Dog magazine
2002
She’ll gladly mainline heroin, marry a maths geek and date The Incredible Hulk - just don’t make her talk about it. “I tend to act very bland in interviews…” Jennifer Connelly told The New York Times recently. “It’s a form of self protection.” All well and good, but it hardly makes for scintillating conversation. During the course of our interview she’s more guarded than a Madonna jog in Hyde Park, and closest she gets to an anecdote is telling me about the crazy time Ed Harris took his shoes off at a script reading for the forthcoming Pollock.
Holed up in an LA hotel, she’s here to promote this month’s A Beautiful Mind, in which she plays Alicia Nash, wife of Russel Crowe’s schizophrenic genius. “By the end of it, it was like an explosion,” she tells me of her A+ audition for the part.” I had wet tissues all over the floor.” Easy now…
Connelly threw herself into the role, which although generation-spaning and certainly meatier than Labyrinth, must have been a walk in the park next to last year’s Requiem For A Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s harrowing anti-addiction epic. For her groundbreaking portrayal of a desperate junkie’s tragic downward spiral, she hung out with heroin addicts; for A Beautiful Mind, she hung out with Alicia Nash, who was mainly interested in getting the gossip on Russell Crowe.
“She’s more intellectual than emotional,” says the film’s über-producer Brian Grazer of Connelly. “ She’s very serious. She’s not silly”. A barrel of laughs she may not be, but her role earned her a Golden Globe nomination, and next month she begins production on one of 2003’s biggest blockbusters, playing David Banner’s main squeeze Betty Ross in Ang Lee’s Hulk film. Unsurprisingly, she has little to say about it: “I don’t wanna… it’s a tightly guarded secret, I can’t really be specific. But it’s like a Greek tragedy, a psychodrama. It will incorporate the action elements that [Lee’s] so good at doing, but he really wants to explore the psychology. I think it’s kind of brave, and I like that. I like that he says ‘I’ve never done this before, and I’m not really sure how, but I’ve got all these ideas and I’m really excited to try.’ That I can stand up for.”
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