In an ageist business, getting your first break in your 30s may seem like a late start, but Naomi Watts seems to be making up for lost time.
You don’t notice her, not at first. When Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s “21 Grams” opens, the first thing you notice is Sean Penn sitting on the edge of a shoddy bed looking like someone beat on his soul with a baseball bat. Maybe you notice the light, that it looks like someone has stolen all the sunshine and replaced it with some mixture of sepia-toned dishwater. Maybe then you notice the sleeping beauty, her breast, her body, slight and disheveled – Naomi Watts — not taking up too much space in the front of the frame. You might wonder what the hell happened for a gal like that to end up in a scene like this. She looks not like a fallen angel, but an angel who had fallen a long time ago and then wandered, lost and alone, for years.
The incredible angst of the story leaves little margin for error, and while Penn and Benicio Del Toro both give phenomenal performances in the Focus Features film (Del Toro’s earned him a supporting Oscar nod), Watts’ role was a big chance for any actress to take and especially so considering how far and how long she had to come to even get that chance.
“21 Grams” is something of a fairy tale, as much for what happens offscreen as on. Onscreen, the film jump-cuts its way through heartbreak and tragedy before providing the most startling of improbabilities: a happy ending. Offscreen it is the vehicle that assured Watts’ 13-year journey through B-movie anonymity — “Tank Girl,” “Children of the Corn IV” (or was that V?) — to her breakout role in David Lynch’s dystopian Hollywood horror show “Mulholland Drive.” Certainly, she followed that film with the chilling “The Ring,” a $130 million box office hit, but horror has always been a tricky genre, as quick to snuff a rising star as to propel one forward. It was “21 Grams” that gave Watts the keys to her kingdom, and a much-coveted Oscar nomination, all of which is made even more startling by her age. At 35, she could sit in the netherworld of Hollywood, one where many fine actresses find themselves partless, too old to compete with the industry’s taste for young blood, too young to achieve grand dame status.
And while she has stayed true to her indie past by choosing a bevy of upcoming projects with directors who either still belong in that category or ones who have just crossed over — like “Monsters Ball” helmer Marc Forster — her quote of $6 million puts her in the ranks of the A-list. As DreamWorks exec Mark Sourian, who championed Watts as the lead in “The Ring” and its upcoming sequel says, “She’s a very beautiful woman and a very legitimate actress; it’s a killer combination. The Oscar nomination underscores this, but the proof is ‘King Kong.’ ”
It wasn’t enough that Peter Jackson made box office history with his “LOTR” trilogy. That Universal gave him $20 million against 20% of gross for “King Kong” has the industry reeling again. And for Watts to be following her next half-dozen films with the tentpole — helmed by the front-runner going into the best director Oscar race — is a career-best, best-case scenario.
“The past three years have been crazy,” says Watts, “but somehow, now, I’m considered with the top people; now I get to read for the best parts; now, I suppose, I’m part of a different group. The fact that I get to work with Peter Jackson – he’s just brilliant, brilliant – and get to play Ann Darrow in one of the greatest love stories ever written – that’s the kind of part any actress dreams about.”
Though the 1976 remake of “King Kong” provided a poor launching pad for Jessica Lange’s film career, it did precurse her eventual transformation into one of our great leading ladies. And unlike Lange, Watts goes into this same territory with years of hard-earned experience and the faith of Jackson, the closest thing to a slam-dunk of a director. Making that faith even more far-reaching is the fact that “King Kong” is the helmer’s dream project; the sole reason he became a director was the 1933 original, the memorabilia of which plasters his office walls. He and partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens started working on their great ape script in 1997, when they first shopped it to Universal. Now they’re back in rewrite mode, with Watts in tow and an eye to a Christmas 2005 release.
For Watts, it’s a fairy-tale part to cap a fairy-tale story. And just like any other fairy tale, there are layers and layers of subtext. Cultural critics will tell you that there is a reason behind every celebrity’s celebrity. That the ascension of our icons is like an island – it is merely the protruding tip of earth that belies a deeper land mass. Thus our rock stars and pop divas and leading men and women all embody something that is present in the ether, in the zeitgeist, something woven through the texture of our society. A good student of fame will read something as iconic as Naomi Watts’ Academy Award nomination not merely as proof of her hard work or good luck or fantastic performance – all of which it is as well – but as the embodiment of something deeper and culturally important. And in Watts’ case, she has become a carrier of our pain.
Now that’s a hell of a thing, but these past few years have been exceptionally trying for Americans. We’ve come through the war at home and the war abroad, neither with an end in sight. We’ve watched our vaunted economy struggle, taking jobs and dreams with it. Traditionally in times of strife and for obvious, escapist reasons, Hollywood has outperformed most industries, and these past few years have been no different. But 2003 saw a harrowing 1.1% drop in box office receipts, with blockbuster sequels and expensive summer tentpoles taking the biggest hits. More interesting was that a string of grimmer films, such as “Mystic River,” “Monster” and “House of Sand and Fog,” in addition to “21 Grams,” got a lions share of critical (and Academy Awards) attention. Some claimed it was the first true showing of post-9/11 fare to come out of Hollywood.
All of which goes to show that Hollywood’s darker side is something people are now more willing to buy, and what people are buying from Naomi Watts is exactly what “21 Grams” is selling: someone who can do the heavy lifting despite unbearable burdens.
SHE WAS BORN IN SHOREHAM, Kent, England, in 1968, the daughter of Pink Floyd’s road manager/sound engineer and the kind of mother who falls for a rock band’s road manager/sound engineer. Her parents were young and itinerant. They were temporarily separated by choice when Watts was 4 and permanently separated by the time her father died when she was 7. Against her wishes, her mother relocated the family to Australia when she was 14. But it was the loss of her father that Watts tapped for “21 Grams.”
“I was so young when I lost my father,” she says. “There was much less information around about how one should handle that. My mother wasn’t really equipped for her own grieving, let alone mine. When I was preparing for ‘21 Grams,’ I spent countless hours reading about people and talking to people who had suffered a terrible loss, lost a loved one, lost children. When I read all these books and heard all that talk, I realized the things these people were dealing with were things I’ve carried with me my whole life. It was startling. It was – wow – that’s what’s going on with me.”
And thus, almost 30 years after the fact, Watts tapped back into that death for the benefit of audiences. In two hours she goes from dainty suburban housewife to drug-addled grieving widow to a woman long past the end of her tether, trying to reset the moral balance in the universe. Along the way there’s her affair with Sean Penn – part young love, part shelter from the storm, part twisted fuck.
“There are a number of scenes in ‘21 Grams,’ says co-star Del Torro, “where she just comes right out of the screen. It’s like she’s three-dimensional. And she does this without detracting from the movie; she doesn’t pull you out of the story, she just locks you in, and that’s a very fine line for an actor to walk.”
But with Watts, it’s also everything that came in between, for hers has been a long rise to stardom. Her Australian agent, John Cann, has represented her for over 13 years, for nearly her entire career. “Film is what she always wanted,” he says. “One of the first parts I helped her get was on an Australian soap called ‘The Country Practice.’ It was a very respectable part for an actress just starting out. She said yes on a Friday and then called me on Monday and said she had thought about it, that this wasn’t the direction she wanted to go. She turned it down. It was a brave choice.”
Watts held out for what she wanted and got it with a supporting role in John Duigan’s “Flirting,” one of the films that helped launch best friend Nicole Kidman’s career. Afterwards there just wasn’t enough going on film-wise in Australia. So Watts came to America, to the 10-plus years of endless auditions that have, by now, become the story of record in just about every profile of her ever written.
Actor-writer-director Scotty Coffey has known Watts for over a decade. They worked together on “Tank Girl” and the then-TV version of “Mulholland Drive,” then again 2 ½ years ago, after shooting had wrapped and after ABC had passed on “Mulholland Drive,” but before Lynch turned it into a film and all the acclaim that followed. “That was a really, really bad time,” recounts Coffey. “We thought it was the end. We thought we’d be doing bad TV for the rest of our lives if we were lucky.” But instead of doing bad TV, the pair decided to shoot “Ellie Parker,” a short Coffey had written about the endless audition treadmill – in all of its surreal glory – that just about every young talent faces in Hollywood. Coffey says it’s not an exact replica of their lives, but it comes pretty close.
It’s a testament to Watts that her performance in the ramshackle “Ellie Parker” is so fierce and downright hysterical (both in ways funny and not so funny). This was a no-budget short made with a pal during what nearly everyone interviewed for this story and Watts herself describes “as the darkest period of my life.” Still, she knocks the part out of the park. “She’s ferocious in it,” says Coffey. “She’s got a deep, frustrated anger, a restless pain. It’s a really uncommon trait in big name actresses right now, but she just nails it.” She nailed it so much that festival audiences loved “Ellie Parker” and Showtime recently optioned it. They’ve already commissioned a pilot and are hoping to turn it into a show (not starring Watts).
Considering this, it is perhaps no shocker that her breakout role in “Mulholland Drive” was that of an ingénue. What was surprising, especially to her, was that after the film broke, she was being anointed as the next big thing. “That’s the real irony,” says DreamWorks’ Sourian. “After everyone saw ‘Mulholland Drive,’ saw that audition scene, we all felt she was a really new find. But the truth of it was that she’d already been her for quite a while.”
The reward for her tenacity came afterwards. “I came to visit Naomi right when ‘The Ring’ was starting to shoot,” says Cann. “She’d become a big enough star in Australia to drive the financing of a film, so I had three or four really good scripts for her. Then I walked into CAA (Watts is repped by Rick Nicita and Bryan Lourd in America), and my three or four scripts were completely dwarfed by the tower of scripts they had for her.”
It’s revealing that a few weeks later, in a 10-minute window between takes, “21 Grams” directed Gonzales Inarritu and the film’s screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga, went to visit Watts in her trailer on the set of “The Ring.” They walked in and told her they wanted her to be in their movie.
“What’s it about?” asked Watts.
“We can’t tell you,” recounts Arriaga.
“Can I see the script?”
“We don’t have one yet.”
“You want me to commit and you don’t know what it’s about and you don’t have a script?”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
And that was how she got the part, one she took on blind faith, despite the stack of scripts in her agent’s office, but because of her admiration for the filmmakers’ “Amores Perros.” “That just the kind of person she is,” say Arriaga. “Those are the kind of risks Naomi takes all the time.”
And while they may seem like risks from the outside, everyone in Watts’ inner circle knows that because she spent 13 years in the Hollywood grind – years spent watching friends like Kidman rise to the top, and others stick to the bottom – she knew exactly what to do and what not to do after her breakout moment. She knew where the good parts were; she knew how to place her bets.
NAOMI WATTS IS PRETTY AND PERKY AND PETITE. There is something slightly tomboyish about her and something slightly aristocratic at the same time. She is often in Los Angeles, a city she finds incredibly isolating. For this reason, she has recently bought an apartment in New York. She has two dogs, both small and named bland boys’ names. She’s had an on-again, off-again relationship with fellow Aussie actor Heath Ledger for the past few years. Despite her time in the States her accent is still thick and mildly more Australians than English, but it comes out as a motley mix. In conversation, her voice rises when she’s laughing or emphasizing a point, but otherwise trails off, growing softer by lilting increments as she gets deeper into the meat of the exchange. As an actress, she is often described as brave and willing.
Helmer John Curran, who has known her for years and cast her in “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” the recent Sundance fave about two couples caught up in a series of self-destructive affairs, says, “I don’t think there’s anything Naomi’s not prepared to do, both on and offscreen. I’ve played soccer with her and she’s completely aggressive, charging men twice her size. She’s always about letting it all hang out.
Because of this quality, she does not shy away from sexuality and is often naked in her films. Unlike most onscreen erotic moments, hers are often too raw and too real, as if the fire she generates is the kind that can quickly burn down the house, right along with the bed. And if it’s the audition scene in “Mulholland Drive” that first caught everyone’s attention, it was the masturbation scene – which in true Lynch form took hours and countless takes, and during which Watts cried almost nonstop yet still pushed on – that showed the depths to which she’d go.
But like any good protagonist in any good fairy tale, Watts reads differently to different people. Marc Forster cast her opposite Ewan McGregor in Fox’s David Benioff-scripted “Stay,” the story of a psychiatrist (McGregor) who tries to talk a suicidal patient (Watts) back from the edge. “It’s a movie about the journey towards death,” Forster says, “which is a big idea and a hard part for anyone to play. But there’s something about Naomi that’s angelic and pure. After meeting her, I just knew she could embody everything I needed to make this film.” Forster also acknowledges that a lot of her essence is the product of her path. “She really paid the price to get where she is; she really paid in pain.”
Which is also why it’s surprising that David O. Russell cast her in his much-anticipated existential comedy “I Heart Huckabees.” “That was such a challenge,” say Watts. “I signed on for that film and then tried to do everything I could to get out of it. I kept telling (Russell), ‘I’ m not funny, I don’t have the timing.’ But he persisted and it was wonderful.”
But dark comedy isn’t the only new direction she hopes to take. She also has a producer credit on Curran’s “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” something she plans on continuing to explore. She’d also love to do a romantic comedy if the right project came along (the rather dreary “Le Divorce” notwithstanding).
And maybe the next time we need another grim fairy-tale ending – for getting through another round of tough years – Watts will be there to deliver. Considering that she has seven projects already shot and another four in various stages of development – a lineup that has her booked solid through 2005 – one thing’s for certain: It may have taken folks a while to notice her, that sleeping beauty in the forefront of the frame, but now that we have, she’s not anyone we’ll easily forget.