Sigourney Weaver’s “Terrifying, Exhilarating” New Hollywood Chapter - Vanity Fair

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The three-time Oscar nominee has everything from the timely abortion drama Call Jane to the Avatar sequel on deck this fall. “I’m shocked,” she tells Vanity Fair. “But it does make me happy.”

By David Canfield

October 25, 2022

Image may contain Sigourney Weaver Call Jane Master Gardener

If Hollywood success comes in waves, then Sigourney Weaver is currently riding a big one. The three-time Oscar nominee broke out with her iconic role of Ellen Ripley over 40 years ago in Ridley Scott’s Alien, before spending the next decade toggling between continued blockbuster success and greater acclaim in smaller projects like Working Girl and Gorillas in the Mist. She’s worked steadily, brilliantly, in the many years since, hitting more peaks (Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm) amid some quieter periods. Indeed, she didn’t have a single film credit from 2017 to 2019, save a cameo as herself in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, and COVID hit just after she got back in the groove with My Salinger Year, which finally released last year. But that didn’t stop Weaver; indeed, a surge in opportunity has led to an explosion this year, with three 2022 films already and more projects on the way—each showing different facets of Weaver’s singular versatility.

These movies have taken Weaver from festival to festival, season to season. The Good House, which hit theaters last month, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year and earned Weaver raves for her dynamic leading turn as a recovering alcoholic. Then in January, Phyllis Nagy’s ’60s docudrama Call Jane premiered at a virtual Sundance as one of the indie festival’s biggest hits—with Weaver and costar Elizabeth Banks drawing particularly strong notices as the brassy leader and wide-eyed newbie, respectively, of the underground abortion-access Jane Collective. That film hits theaters Friday, arriving with a whole new resonance in the aftermath of the end of Roe v. Wade.

That’s not all, or even half—Weaver is an imperious delight in Paul Schrader’s new film, Master Gardener, which premiered at Venice, and has a lot to tease about James Cameron’s Avatar sequel, The Way of Water, which she started working on way back in 2017—and in which she stars as a 14-year-old-girl. There’s more too. On this week’s Little Gold Men (listen below), we talked about it all—and what might come next.

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Vanity Fair: I’ve seen Call Jane twice. I saw it at Sundance, when we were in a kind of different world, and it hit me so much differently watching it again, after Roe v. Wade was overturned. I’m curious how you’ve experienced the movie pre and post, and if you’ve ever had that with a movie before.

Sigourney Weaver: I usually try to choose subjects that are close to my heart, and often the situation they may be describing is still going on. But I think Call Jane was especially important to me. I was alive before Roe v. Wade, and what’s missing in our big dialogue is just how much love and support and actual health care the woman needs, who’s in this situation. About a third of women now don’t have access to that kind of health care. But ultimately, I think Phyllis Nagy did a brilliant job taking you back into the experience of the woman. We see the procedure in a very discreet way. It reorients the argument away from politics to health care—which it is.

That’s the thing about the movie too, is it’s incredibly hopeful. That surprised me the first time I watched it, and it kind of knocked me out a little bit the second time.

It’s interesting—that’s a good point, I do think the movie is reassuring in reminding us that we are not helpless in this situation. Since Roe v. Wade was struck down, [there’s been] a lot of just absolute shock and alarm at the fact that these rights are stripped away. The movie just takes us back into a time when we were still in the same situation, but we were motivated to take action and come together, and we can’t look back. We have to look forward. The whole landscape has changed in terms of medication and everything else. The upbeat tone of the movie—I dare say my character is quite funny sometimes, and she’s very dry. There are actually a lot of laughs in the movie. So it’s a feel-good movie. It’s not a bleak movie.

Your character, Virginia, does not take no for an answer, which is one of my favorite qualities in a Sigourney Weaver character. It’s been true of a few of yours over the years. Is that an easy space for you to step into?

Well, sometimes I have a flamethrower. [Laughs.] That’s an interesting way to look at it. I love Virginia because she was unlike anything I’d ever played. A lot of women were somewhat sidelined in the anti-war movement because the men were the leaders. Virginia comes at this organization with all that pent-up energy that she never got to express and has really found her calling. She’s a very interesting leader. She’s good at listening—rare—and really wants to find solutions to some of the issues confronting them, like the access to health care for Black women, Latino, and indigenous, and LGBT women, which is a problem that existed then and still exists now.

Call Jane.

From Roadside Attractions/Everett Collection.

You’ve got quite a remarkable year, I’d say, for any actor in 2022. Four very different roles in Master Gardener, The Good House, Call Jane, and of course, no one has seen Avatar 2 yet.

I haven’t either!

I know you’ve talked about this: In an industry that enjoys typecasting and pigeonholing, especially actresses, it must feel good and fun to be able to play all these.

I know, I’m shocked. It’s like I threw these magic beans out the window and they went boom. I’ve always tried to find movies that mean something to me, but also I never like to repeat myself. I’m always game to try a character that is very challenging to me, but it is great fun for me, frankly, to see, as an older actor as well, these four movies. They’re all physically different. They all have different situations. We can see that actors should not be typecast—that’s an easy way of categorizing us—but that we’re capable of so many different stories to tell. This was all because of COVID—I started Avatar in 2017, I think—so it’s all coming out in a jumble, but it does make me happy.

To an extent, I think it’s about finding variations too. In Master Gardener, she’s certainly a strong woman, but about as far from Call Jane’s Virginia as you can get.

Yes, that’s true. [Laughs.]

How does a character like that strike you on the page, and how do you think about approaching it?

Yeah. To me, it’s a very Tennessee Williams kind of world. I’m so text-oriented. I really let the text work on me. And especially with Paul Schrader’s script, Master Gardener, it was so dense. It was like a layer, layer, layer, layer, and you had to kind of just spend a lot of time with the script and let it seep into you. I actually based Norma on two women I love and respect very much, because I felt there was a danger of her slipping into some sort of caricature or bad person, and I just wanted to play this woman’s personal situation. It’s a very odd situation, but she’s very emotionally caught up in it. As Paul explained it to me, it’s about a three-way love affair. I’ve avoided roles where I potentially chew the scenery, but Norma does some of that and it felt really good, I have to say.

The way I heard you shot this was pretty interesting, just given the limitations and time and budget, where you’d go from, say, within one scene, a master setup to a two shot to a close-up. Given the kind of character you’re playing with that sort of schedule, you have to make big choices and don’t necessarily have as much room to maybe scale them back. You’ve got to kind of go for it, right?

Yeah. I love that though. I think that’s what I love about film is you just have to leap off that cliff. It’s like doing a very broad sketch of something, and hopefully the colors start to be infused at the same time. It does involve no net. I must say I find that terrifying, exhilarating, because you had to have a direct line into that belly of the character and get out of their way, because by then, you’ve absorbed the script enough so that there is kind of a creature snarling and waiting to get out.

Master Gardener.

Courtesy of Bonnie Marquette.

This was your first time working with Paul and Phyllis Nagy. So then we go to someone you’ve worked with for over 30 years in James Cameron. I’m curious about what that conversation is like with someone you’ve known that long, when he asks you to play a 14-year-old girl. I’m sure there’s great trust there at this point, but even by your versatile standards, that is, again, something new.

I know, I know. I don’t think John Wayne was asked to play a 14-year-old, may I just say. [Laughs]

I’d hope not! You’d be first for someone of your caliber, probably.

I had a very early conversation with Jim about this, and he was very already committed to this kind of character, but who she was, what she was about was something we talked about at the beginning. I loved the choices he made ultimately, that she was part of the family. We worked together too, because when I first saw the pictures of my character, she was so perfect, every hair in place. And I said, “Jim, when you’re a 13, 14-year-old girl, that is not how you feel about yourself.” I was this tall when I was 11, so I was just like a big spider moving around, knocking things over. And I felt that it was a more difficult time for Kiri, especially because the family is uprooted in the beginning.

I got together with the designers or the drawers and just brought some awkwardness. That’s what he ended up calling it now, “awkward Kiri,” as opposed to “perfect Kiri.” For better or worse, my awkward, self-conscious teenager was able to flow right into Kiri, and I had to work in a completely different way, which is kind of letting it flow into me, letting her—I don’t know that any of us is very far removed from our adolescent moment, because it certainly stands out in bold relief for a lot of people. I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten away from my teenager, but Jim said to me, “You can do this. You’re so immature. This is about how old you are anyway.”

That’s a good encouragement for that role. That’s probably what you need to hear, right?

Yeah. That’s one way to look at it.

He told The New York Times recently that he became the “kinder, gentler” James Cameron while making Avatar 2. Not to say you observed the opposite of that, exactly, but did you see that kind of change in him?

When I first worked with Jim and no one really knew who he was—Terminator hadn’t come out yet, at least in England [where Aliens was filmed]—he had to prove himself every day, which makes you have to feel a little more driven. And now Jim is at a point in his life where he has his own family, a very stable life. He put a lot of the love he felt for his family into these stories. They’re very personal, in a way. He cast the people he wanted, he wrote the stories he wanted, and then I think he really relaxed and embraced this experience.

He is very demanding, but no one is more demanding than Jim is on himself. So whatever the hours were, whatever the challenge is—there was a lot of underwater work—it was an adventure, I have to say. But I always know that when I’m with Jim, I’m going to be safe. I mean, you don’t really know what’s going to happen when you take on this performance capture kind of person. Coming from the theater, I felt it was just like I was in a black leotard on an empty stage with nothing there—just my imagination. I found that really liberating. I didn’t have lights to wait for. It’s just actor to actor, and our actors are so good at playing these characters, that it was exhilarating to be able to do this kind of work without worrying about hair, makeup, blah, blah, blah.

Do you have a sense of what it will look like, what the movie’s going to be?

I know what I read. I know what I shot. We shot 2 and 3 together, and my friend, Trinity, who plays my little sister, was my guest at these Elle Awards last week and she said, “Sometimes I can’t remember what’s in 2 and what’s in 3.” And I said, “I’m right there with you.” [Laughs.] So for us, it will be quite an amazing experience. I hope we get to see it before we have to talk about it. I’m hoping that we will have an opportunity. But no one is going to see it, really. We’re all going to see it at the same time, because that’s when it’s going to be ready

Given all these projects and how varied they are, I’m curious what the next few years look like for you. What do the scripts look like? Do you have maybe a different kind of standard coming off of a string of projects like this for what you want to do next?

I turn down a lot of things just because—listen, I feel very fortunate to be sent things, but I think I have been spoiled a bit, being able to do projects that are about something more than just the people in them. I think as one gets older, I look at Maggie Smith and I go, “She’s going on forever. That’s great.” I don’t know if I’ll do that. Sometimes I think I’ll run away to India and really learn how to do yoga or something. But I must say that for better or worse, I really love to work. I finally feel I kind of know what I’m doing.

What do you mean by that?

Once I get on the set, I just let my instinct take over. With Working Girl, my character is based on someone that Mike Nichols and I both knew and liked; it’s always good to have a real person to inspire you, like a little bit of lemon sherbet in the back of your mouth giving you that little feeling. But I was discouraged at drama school—I took that too seriously. I wish I hadn’t. But I think it took me a while to get going. I was very lucky to have Alien as a first movie—that opened so many doors for me—but I was very ambivalent about a film career. I really wanted to stay in the theater. I panic before every job and go, “What made me think I knew how to do this? Because I can’t remember anything about it.” The only good part of that is it really forces you to go back to the script again and again, really immerse yourself. By the time you get on the set, you’ve done absolutely everything you can think of, and then you just kind of let it go.

So I now trust that. I was taught at drama school that I have to make a list of what I’m going to do, each beat and what my intention was. And I worked with Harris Yulin on a Shakespeare play early on, and I was playing Rosalind: As You Like It. I came in, I said, “Well, I’m not quite sure what my motivation is here.” And he went, “Do you know your motivation every time you come into a room?” I went, “Well, no,” and he said, “Well, she doesn’t either.” That was a very freeing thing. I suddenly realized that the techniques they teach you are there if you need them, but if you make a genuine connection with the character, you can just let that go. I’ve realized over the years that I’m a very instinctive kind of actor. I just need to get out of my own way.

This interview has been edited and condensed.