The publicist often has the boundaries that the movie star either doesn’t know how to have or doesn’t want to come off as having. I started at eleven, so I didn’t know how to say to an adult interviewing me, “I’d rather not talk about that.” I needed a grownup in the room. But sometimes you never develop your boundaries, because there’s always someone doing that for you. [Jay Kelly] is not an obvious narcissist, but he is a child who’s had other people be on the front lines for him.
Not to get even more inside baseball, but your character’s name is Liz. Noah and Greta Gerwig and Emily Mortimer, who also co-wrote the screenplay, all share a publicist named Liz Mahoney. Did you have a sense that you were playing her? Did you talk to her about this character?
I spent so much time with Liz and Annett and Lisa Taback [at Netflix]. There’s no way I’m not drawing on the way they protect their clients. They all have very different ways of doing it. The thing I love about Liz is that she’s just so dry.
The real Liz?
The real Liz. And the character Liz has that in her nature, that very direct quality that a lot of publicists have. You’d think a publicist is a “yes” person to their client, but the publicists I’ve known tell you the truth. Like, “No, this is a disaster. You’ve got to go this way.” It’s not like I needed to do research. I’ve spent my whole life with them, and my friends’ publicists, and boyfriends’ publicists, and best friends’ publicists, including Liz, because I’ve spent so much time with Noah and Greta.
You’ve seen the machinery of stardom from the inside your entire life. Is there something that this movie is revealing that people generally don’t understand about what’s underneath the hood?
Vulnerability is a trait that is not talked about in the iconography of a famous person. Some people can almost have a childlike, almost innocent vulnerability, because they’ve had people protecting them their whole lives. That is not George. George is astute and very honest, radically loyal, totally there for the people he loves, a very different kind of person. Jay misses it all. Liz never says, “The reviews are a disaster. They hate the film. One person said you’re handsome but not very good.” He’s almost seeing what’s going on, but we have protected him to a fault. It wasn’t what he wished for, but it’s what we thought our job was. I even reference it when I’m, like, “It was so great when we were young. He was our baby.” Until he grew up needing so much that we couldn’t have our own lives.
Right. They’re kind of like parents, best friends, and servants all at the same time.
And I’ve seen it plenty. I’ve been at a festival where Annett and I are having dinner, and another client has just arrived, and the mistreatment [of her] is very loud. The demands, or the way someone communicates to their team. There are a million ways to live your life, but one choice is to do it with gratitude.
Let’s move on to “Is This Thing On?” Unlike “Marriage Story,” which is really a divorce movie, I would call this a separation movie. These two characters are not at the point of lawyers yet, and there’s an ambivalence about whether their marriage is really over. How did you and Bradley Cooper and Will Arnett talk about that?
Will knew the story that inspired this film. A comedian in England, John Bishop, and his wife went through a version of this. Through the process of their separation, they both found their way back to themselves. For him, it was through standup. And, in fact, she did get invited to a comedy club and was sitting in the audience, when her soon-to-be ex-husband stood up. He had never told her. She didn’t know this was an interest of his. There he was, and he talks about the things he talks about in the movie and then says, “I miss my wife.”
The version I saw yesterday ended with the credit “Inspired by a true story,” which made me wonder, Whose story is this?
Yeah, and John has a credit on the film. He had a miserable job in pharmaceuticals and now is this huge comedian. That inspiration was what started the journey for Will, and then Will gave it to Bradley. And Bradley fell in love with the idea of a love story that’s about how you have to find your way to yourself before you can ever find the core of a relationship. That’s when the three of us started to dive in. It’s not a very typical female role, someone who is always pragmatic, always clear: “Here are the rules, here are the boundaries.” Usually, with characters I’ve played, I’m so deeply in the emotion of it. But pro athletes are trained in that win-lose [mentality], and volleyball is a game of strategy. It’s so different from the way my brain works.
Right, your character, Tess, is a former Olympic volleyball player. All this precedes the start of the movie, as does the marriage that we’re watching crater, similar to “Marriage Story.” That seems challenging as an actor, to have to start your story at a place where so much has happened. Did you create an entire history of this relationship with Will and Bradley?
Emotionally, we were very specific. We spent really deep, intimate, emotional time together on who we are as characters, as people. What we brought to the love story. What we fell in love with, or thought we were in love with. How we grew away from ourselves, becoming responsible adults. Giving up the job. Kids come. And, one day, a marriage is over. It’s funny—when people talk about marriages, they’re, like, “What happened?” Does anybody know, really? Even when it’s, like, “There was an affair” or “They lost their job and got depressed”—that’s still not what happened. When you’re looking at twenty-plus year marriages, you don’t even understand how you lose each other. How you lose your way. How you stop being honest with yourself about what you need. How you stop talking to each other.
And so we shared a lot privately, all three of us, about our lifetimes, about the history of these characters, so that, in a scene that says nothing about the history, you can hopefully feel the history. There are scenes when we hurt each other, where it may not even make sense. You feel the idea, but you don’t totally get it. And that’s intentional, because the characters don’t. Why are these people fighting over the way she dropped the kids off at the thing?
