She’s a Hollywood heavyweight with a serious actor’s attitude to her craft. But don’t expect tantrums and tiaras. Clare Barker talks to Naomi Watts about acting, family and keeping her feet firmly on the ground
In the open-plan living area of a weatherboard Wellington house a group of friends is playing a rowdy, wine-sodden parlour game called Celebrity Hats (Hollywood Charades, Guess The Actor, you get the picture). It’s been a long day at the office, and a bit of drunken silliness is in order.
So far, so humdrum. Except that the skinny guy, miming as his black hair falls across his disarmingly crooked profile, is Adrien Brody, the heart-throb star of The Pianist who famously snogged Halle Berry during her Oscar acceptance speech. His team-mates, too, are as famous as the subjects of their game. That fat guy with the killer sense of humour is Tinseltown funny man Jack Black. The brunette on the sofa is Peter Jackson’s wife, Fran Walsh. And the giggling blonde in the kitchen – the one showing rising star Jamie Bell how to tap dance as her Yorkshire terrier, Bob, yaps on – is none other than Naomi Watts.
This is the latest, albeit private, example of Watts playing against type. It follows more public turns as a town councillor’s mistress in British romp Plots With a View, a reasonably up-beat trot through Parisian chick flick Le Divorce, and her role as an image-obsessed model in last month’s mind-wrecking comedy I Heart Huckabees. In April, it’s back to angst with the release of the decidedly intense We Don’t Live Here Anymore.
“It’s such a misconception that I’m this on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown girl, because I have played intense characters,” she insists, referencing her gut-wrenching performance in 21 Grams. “I’m actually not so serious. I’ve always wanted to do comedy.”
It’s a few days later and the Celebrity Hats posse is nowhere to be seen, thoug Bob is still in attendance along with Heath Ledger’s cocker spaniel, Ned. (Yes, they named him after Ned Kelly, on the set of which they met. No, they are not together. Yes, they remain close friends.) Watts is curled up on her sofa, coffee in hand, wearing nondescript black pants, a grey T-shirt and not a skerrick of make-up. She looks about 22 , tiny rather than simply slim, though luminous with it. It’s a rare moment’s relaxation for this actor who is constantly working. Last summer in New York, Watts, her brother Ben and his wife Marylynn, both photographers, got together to shoot this portfolio for Vogue during another rare moment of down time, after which it took months of negotiation to get this interview happening.
With Brody, Black and Bell, Watts has been in New Zealand since August filming Jackson’s epic remake of the 1933 monster flick King Kong. Watts plays the beauty charged with soothing the beast, though about the film itself – an enormous-budget affair, for which it’s rumoured that Jackson, as director, was paid $20 million in advance – she won’t reveal much. “I’m not allowed to,” she says, adding that the film is not due for release until the end of 2005.
She will say that Jackson has been obsessed with King Kong since he was nine years old. “This is why he became a film-maker. When you hear him speak about it, being the genius that he is, and with these wonderful women around him [screenwriters Walsh and Philippa Boyens], you just think: yes.” Signing up to a project from the man who gave us The Lord of The Rings is not, however, without its concerns.
“This is an event film and I’ve never done that before,” she muses. “The Ring was a commercial film but really it’s a genre picture. This is much bigger. I have fears about how it will affect my life. I can get around [now], I blend easily into a crowd. I’m usually very surprised if people ask if I am Naomi Watts.” No-one batted an eyelid when the Watts clan, camera in tow, took to the streets of New York’s NoLita, where Ben and Marylynn live. “This film could change that. People keep saying, ‘Oh God! Get ready! It’s all going to change!’ But then …” she trails off, shrugs, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that.”
Watts’s story is well known: she and Ben were born in England, to Miv and Peter Watts, a sound engineer who worked with Pink Floyd. Peter died when Naomi was seven, and the family moved frenetically till they arrived in Australia. Watts was 14.
Fast forward three years. In Sydney Watts befriends the red-headed star of BMX Bandits. The pair make Australian coming-of-age movie Flirting, and both seem on the brink of promising careers. Then Watts watches Nicole Kidman marry Tom Cruise and board the one-way train to Hollywood superstardom, while she herself slogs her guts out in LA for six long years with nary a decent role in sight.
Enter cult director David Lynch who takes a big screen bet on her, thus, finally, saving her from a life of obscurity, drudgery, and surely – though she hotly denies this – creeping jealousy of best friend Nicole.
“I’m very proud of her. That’s what friendships are. You share experience and understanding,” Watts explains. “[Kidman] went over there and did what she did and that was inspiring. You wouldn’t be a human being if you didn’t, at times, fall into that trap of ‘what about me?’ but what I learned to do is play tricks on my mind. Okay, what do I have that somebody else wants? A car that goes, $2,000 in the bank, a call-back next week. There are other people in the world who wish for that.”
Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive was her emotional and professional breakthrough. “A million times before that I thought I’d have to give up. Every time I planned that something would happen, a little crumb of a job, a small part on a shitty movie, something to hook me back in. In hindsight, it seems like the journey that was meant to be.” During the dry years, Watts appeared in such forgettable film events as Tank Girl, Children of the Corn IV (who knew there were three before it?) and The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer.
“Ultimately the reason it didn’t work for me [at first] was I had more to learn about myself. And it may sound like some boring rationale, but I think if I had too much too soon, maybe I would have been seduced into making terrible decisions. Now I feel more equipped to trust myself, more secure about what I have to say.”
“As kids we screamed and kicked at every opportunity from the moment we could walk and talk,” she says, of the brother-sister thing
At 36, Watts has her pick of projects. In 21 Grams she shared billing with Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro, two of her favourite actors but surely two of the most intimidating? “Sean is not serious, that’s a big misconception, he’s like a little boy.” And Del Toro? “He’s very powerful, but kooky too.”
Watts prepared for her role by sitting in on support groups for parents who had lost their children. “With grief you can never judge it or know how it’s going to hit you. To lose your child is an incomparable type of pain that changes you forever. You learn ways to deal with it but you never get over it.” Tough work on set. Just to watch Watts crack on screen is to go through turmoil.
“I lived and breathed it. So what if I’m going to be miserable for two months? You psychologically prepare yourself: I don’t have to look good, feel good,” she stops, laughs. “I needed a straight jacket by the end.” Or a damn good laugh.
Which brings us back to comedy. “I think there is huge value in those films if they are done right.” Take I Heart Huckabees, a convoluted magic realist comedy about, of all things, existentialist philosophy. A brilliant, complicated farce, not unlike those by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), that casts Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin as Existentialist Detectives charged with working out the meaning of Albert Markovski’s (played by Jason Schwartzman) life.
Watts plays Dawn Campbell, the model girlfriend of Markovski’s nemesis Brad Stand, a bigwig at Huckabees corporation, brilliantly brought to life by a devilish Jude Law. Also on the menu, Isabelle Huppert playing a French nihilist who likes to have sex in muddy puddles, and a soul-searching fireman (played by Mark Wahlberg) who is happy to oblige. Confused? You’re meant to be. “I didn’t fully understand the script the first time I read it; it’s terrifying,” laughs Watts.
She also admits to fear about the comedy factor, though it was clearly something she had long yearned to do. “I had so many years of being told I wasn’t funny, after countless auditions for sitcoms and God knows what. When the chips are down you believe what you’re told. And if you’re already wildly insecure, you say, Okay I should know my limitations. I thought I wasn’t funny.”
She is funny, not just tap dancing with Bob the dog, but cavorting across the screen in I Heart Huckabees, too. We get to see Watts – with a spectacularly toned body thanks to two months of intense training high kicking her ditzy way through the television commercials for which her character lives and breathes: self-obsessed, insecure and downright hysterical. There are similarities between Watts’s performance here and Kidman’s in To Die For.
She must know she pulled it off? “I did?” she blushes, turns her attention back to the dog. “Isn’t he gorgeous? Bob! My little man!” This is Watts all over: the archetypal insecure actor, dampened down by a genuine dose of girl next door. According to Ben she’s “down-to-earth quite simply because she worked hard to get where she is”. And indeed there is nothing starry about Watts (remember that make-up-free face?), though glitz her up in Versace and she looks every bit the movie star. That Versace dress she wore to the Academy Awards last year is boxed up and rarely looked at. “What, am I going to wear it to the beach?” she grins.
Though she did time in the fashion office of a long-gone Sydney magazine, Watts is reluctant to pontificate about style: “As an actor, I always feel a bit stupid when I get into the fashion talk.” Practical, down-to-earth to the core. Her old friend make-up artist Noni Smith calls her “the most normal girl you’re ever likely to meet”. Her brother says she made a conscious choice to stay this way: “She appreciates every moment but never forgets the effort it took to get there nor the people who helped her. She’s also a genuine talent, and people always respect that in the long run. At the end of the day staying humble is a choice and she chose it for these reasons.”
What matters most to Watts is family. “As kids we screamed and kicked at every opportunity from the moment we could walk and talk,” she says, of the brother-sister thing. “But when we grew up we changed the tone and embraced each other. I just love him, we share so much. He’s a little bit of a soul mate and very protective of me. We really are inspired by each other.” When Ben married Marylynn he gained a stepson, Damien, pictured here. So when is all that coming to Naomi?
“There’s no-one in my life right now, though there are certainly possibilities – it’s not like I’m a lonely old spinster yet! But I’m here [in New Zealand] right now, away from everything. Love is something I would like to have in my life. I want to have children and I realise that time is cracking on and it’s something I will have to do pretty soon. I’m still figuring it out, just like a lot of women my age,” she says. “Really, I’m no different from anyone else.” And the weird thing is, you believe her.