The Hollywood Reporter continues their award season roundtable discussions, focusing this week on the actresses. The conversation includes Academy Award nominees Rachel Weisz (“The Favourite”), Regina King (“If Beale Street Could Talk”), Lady Gaga (“A Star is Born”), and Glenn Close (“The Wife”), in addition to actresses Nicole Kidman (“Boy Erased” and “Destroyer”) and Kathryn Hahn (“Private Life”). The wide-ranging conversation touches on a number of subjects, including on-set diversity and how these actresses choose roles.
As Glenn Close says, in response to the question of “Who gets to play what role?” she notes, “First of all, what we are up to is a craft. And in your craft, you should be able to – within a certain reasonable parameter – play anyone. But there are diverse actors and actresses that have not been served. So it’s up to the industry to nurture those actors. Nurture the trans actors, the people who don’t get a chance. And then, the best person for the part should play it.”
Kidman concurs, as she says, “The industry and the world are in enormous change right now. But maybe it’s just the actor in me: Ultimately, it’s the directors choice. Film is the director’s medium, it’s their vision ultimately. So, they’re going to cast who they think is right for their film.”
Regina King also agrees, noting that she has been shut out of many roles because of her race. As she says, she’s always wanted to play “a Joan of Arc-type character. Someone in history that wasn’t black but I thought was a pretty amazing woman.”
In regards to how they get into character, Lady Gaga says she “dyed my hair very early, before we started filming. I started to dress like her. I was writing music for the soundtrack and helping to hone Ally’s sound, which was essentially something that was going to arise out of Jackson’s sound, because she fell in love with him. I wanted Ally to be nothing like me. This was very important to me because the truth is, I am nothing like Ally. I created Gaga”
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For Weisz, she chooses based entirely on the material and who the character is but has “a real problem with the idea of ‘strong women characters.’ Well, does that mean we have muscles or something? No one ever says that to a man. But [I want] young girls growing up [to] see stories being told where a woman takes a central role. Where she is not peripheral to the story. She’s driving the story.”
While the conversation broaches a series of interesting and serious topics, it ends on an interesting question: What character that you’ve played would you like to have dinner with? For Hahn it’s her rabbi character from “Transparent” for Kidman it’s Virginia Woolf from “The Hours”, but Gaga might have the best answer, citing her character from “Machete Kills.” Check out the entire, hourlong, roundtable discussion below.
