NOBODY EXPLAINS IT BETTER THAN DAVID LYCH. For being one of the great masters of cinema, or for counting among Laura Dern's best friends, or maybe for both. "There's no one like her. She has that completely independent side, an actress who is not afraid of anything, rebellious and untamed but at the same time a product of Hollywood, part of that royalty born and raised in the industry. Its name evokes the echo of ancient Hollywood as that of very few interpreters today. I have never given up a shot in which Laura has not given everything and even more than I expected, ”explains the director of The Elephant Man . This is her description of an incombustible actress, someone with a 40-year career in 52 life who never loses her smile or good mood. Lynch knows what he is talking about. The future star lasted two days at the university (where he planned to study Psychology and Journalism) before being hired by the director for his film Blue Velvet (1986). And exactly two decades later, the actress was going to spend no more or less than three years shooting what her friend David Lynch considers as the best Laura Dern movie, Inland Empire (2006), a film that the public barely saw.
"His energy is magical and contagious," confirms director Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed it in 2014 in the movie Alma Savage . Thus he speaks of someone who, despite notorious works in films such as Wild Heart (1990), The Price of Ambition (1991) or Jurassic Park (1993), has never received an Oscar. His recent nomination as best supporting actress for the Story of a marriage, the third in his career, can end this void thanks to a job with which he is reaping some important awards from the film industry.
Tall and cimbreante, this versatile and unpredictable interpreter is both an elegant giraffe or a sloppy ostrich, although the daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd never hides the head. His bearing passes in an instant of the greatest elegance, in love with fashion and his Louboutin shoes, to the look of the most bizarre woman. The same goes for his face, elegant, sharp, smiling and apparently serene, a friend of meditation and yoga and an ardent defender of the environment. A hippy at heart, but sheathed in the uniform of a calculating woman capable of changing the temperature of the encounter with a stroke of hair.
His work is equally complex, flexible, elastic. This is confirmed by actress Reese Witherspoon, her friend and partner in battles not only in Alma Savage, where they made that friendship, but right now in the Big Little Lies series: “Laura improvises as a piano virtuoso. I have never seen anything like it, with the whole team applauding when it finishes its shots. It is extraordinary, ”he says. New York director Noah Baumbach went to Dern to improve the dialogues in the History of a marriage, the film that has now led to the Oscar nomination. "We liked to talk about that imaginary film we had shot because we could not give credit that we had not worked together after so many years of getting to know each other," laughs the director now that they have already done so. And as he made clear with Jurassic Park , saga to which he returns this year with Jurassic World 3 , Laura Dern can with everything. "If she didn't do a blockbuster before, it's only because she wasn't interested, because Laura is the best in everything," says Nicolas Cage of her, who in 1990 shared with her in David Lynch's Wild Heart .
“I never had the patience to enjoy a life as a star. I don't have time for paparazis ”
Even so, there is a more prolific Dern, the closest to complicated women like the ones she has played in Ruth, an amazing girl (1996), by Alexander Payne - one of her favorite works - or in Jennifer's The Tale (2018) Fox, and in the Enlightened series (2011), for which he won the Golden Globe. "Unfortunately you are right," the actress confesses after a few seconds of pause doing a mental review of her filmography. “Yes, there is a type of character that I have interpreted and that the American public, not the European, has problems watching in the cinema. They are disheveled women that as an actress I enjoy interpreting because I like to be somewhat rebellious. I am interested in roles focused on unpopular people, what I call misunderstood characters. But I also believe that I have interpreted such a large number of women, all of them different, that it does not seem fair to me that they are perceived as the same. This homogenization devalues them, because each one has a value in itself. That said, I will not complain. ”
Together with Meryl Streep in 'Little Women'. In video, movie trailer. WILSON WEBB (NETFLIX)
Laura Dern exhibits an indisputable pride in having had the privilege of seeing directors such as Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, David Lynch or Alfred Hitchcock himself, who directed his father, Bruce Dern, in 1976 in La plot .
Few figures in the interpretation like Dern can talk about such peculiar babbles. It was conceived during the filming of The Angels of Hell (1966), by Roger Corman, in which his parents met. He saw his father's head roll down the stairs in Lullaby for a Corpse (1964), by Robert Aldrich, and inflated with ice cream while he was doing extra in Alicia, he no longer lives here (1974), by Martin Scorsese, where he worked his mother. Not only is she the daughter of the “man who killed John Wayne” in The Cowboys (1972), by Mark Rydell, but through her veins runs the same blood that inspired the playwright Tennessee Williams, the poet Archibald MacLeish, actress Mary Lanier or the politician George Dern, who served during the war cabinet under Franklin Roosevelt, all of them more or less close relatives of the interpreter. He assures that no one who bored her ever passed through her life, and that includes Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson or Gena Rowlands, friends of the family, or her own godmother, also actress Shelley Winters. “She was one of the people who influenced me the most, who was with me when my heart broke and when I discovered the interpretive method, allowing me to be in her New York apartment while I was studying at Actor's Studio. She taught me how to attend a premiere in jeans and sneakers, but always with a good coat and well-painted lips. From her I also learned that as a woman, in the cinema, it is best to tell the most complicated story, to tangle with her sexuality, with her age, with everything the character can give you, ”she recalls excitedly.
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At the time of returning to the screens through the big door and thinking about the assault on Oscar, the American actress never tires of repeating that she was always here in one way or another. He also likes to talk about the way in which Hollywood allows his women to age on the screen, although his longevity is not due to both his age and his long career: “What happens is that as all roads lead to my mother and My grandmother, like them, I never had the patience to enjoy a life as a star. I am in love with interpretation, but I don't have time for paparazis. And after spending my life working as a child as an actress, when that time came when I wanted to have my own children, I preferred to live life in another way and go on tour, ”he explains. It is true that he turned to his children, Ellery Walker, today 18, and Jaya, 15, the result of his marriage to the musician Ben Harper, who was "his groupie " for a while, as he likes to say.
Hence the contrast with the avalanche of recent years, not only in quantity, with an average of three to four annual films, in addition to powerful television series such as Big Little Lies , but in quality. Dern accepts the inevitable again: “If you want to talk about a second chapter in my life, let them do it, I don't care. I also feel a new appetite, a new fever, a new desire to explore a new fun and dark universe, with love and fury in a world that I really adore as it is the interpretation ”, he explains, and adds with a firm voice:“ It is incredible and beautiful to feel the most daring Laura of my career ”.
Not everything is cinema in a life punctuated by what could well be called "tall love." The last example is given by former NBA player Baron Davis, along with what has been seen in recent times. The actors Kyle MacLachlan and Billy Bob Thornton were also among their lovers, the latter breaking his marriage promise with that express wedding that was marked with Angelina Jolie. And continuing with the height, Jeff Goldblum was one of his longest-lived partners after meeting both in the filming of Jurassic Park . Dern does not have time to remember his men, with whom he claims to maintain "in general" a very civic relationship. But he recognizes that height is something that has marked his life. "The same thing happened to Nicole Kidman, it's something that has marked us," he says about his artistic partner in the Big Little Lies series, another of Hollywood's tallest women.
“She is an actress who is not afraid of anything, is untamed and at the same time a pure Hollywood product” (David Lynch)
Of all his partners, musician Ben Harper was the only one he was married to. That was a story that ended in divorce, but, as he comments after the filming of the story of a marriage, it is clearly clear that his children are the best reminder of that relationship. Ellery and Jaya also remind him of other things. For example, his passion for the fashion universe, a field in which Ellery works as a model. Laura Dern has the style of designer Stella McCartney, whom she admires and with whom she maintains a friendship, or the work of Gabriela Hearst, who only uses recycled materials. But he also opts for more classic firms, such as the works of Pierpaolo Piccioli in Valentino or Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Again, cinema is his school, dating back to the times of The Great Gatsby of 1974, where his father worked and when he met Ralph Lauren as his costume designer. Or more recently, stuck in the flesh of Renata Klein, her alter ego in Big Little Lies . “We have the same taste although we use fashion differently,” admits the actress.
Her children are also reason and part of her political activism, accompanying her in demonstrations against the Government of Donald Trump, in defense of gender equality and the environment. She remembers herself with little more than eight years protesting with her mother, side by side with people like Jane Fonda or Ed Asner, actors with conscience who are still in the fight. “If you want to know what puts me at a hundred, tell me about American politics. Or the environment, ”he whispers. “It breaks my heart to see what happens in Australia, and in general all over the world. As an actress, as a citizen and as a friend, because there I have many friends, like Nicole Kidman herself or Naomi Watts. But especially as a mother. Because that is hard, being a mother, and not the fact of creating the characters I create. Look my children in the eyes and give them hope. We talk about the fury of my characters, about their strength. And of my optimism. But I find that strength, that incentive, in the smiling face of Ted Danson when he is arrested in Washington for defending our precious planet, ”Laura Dern throws freeing her chest from a load that weighs more than any of her jobs. Because, as the interpreter admits, no matter how hard his papers are, he never takes them home. It takes, yes, the tiredness of a job well done, but nothing that your daily meditation and yoga routine does not improve.
Active in the future of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of the United States, an organization whose presidency he chose, Dern is working on two interviews with his father and Jack Nicholson to help preserve the memory of a Hollywood to which he belongs, But that is going out. She is also preparing a mother and daughter book together with Diane Ladd, and another between friends and co-religionists with Mónica Ramírez, co-founder of the National Peasant Alliance and at her side since in 2018 they took the #MeToo and Time's Up protests to the carpet Red of the Golden Globes, a fight that continues. “Laura hated me from day one. And that he already knew her having worked with her father, ”recalls actor Bob Odenkirk, who shares a poster with her in the last adaptation of Little Women . “Off camera we had a great time. There are very few people with as much humor as she in a set. But in the shooting I hated her, and I don't criticize her because my character represents a lot of what she hates in a man ”, reflects the interpreter on this equality fighter who is capable of bringing her war to the 19th century. "As Marmee says, this annoys me almost every day of my life," Laura Dern apologizes about her character's behavior, this kind of mother courage that anchors Louisa May Alcott's classic and that the actress has endorsed.
And in addition to all this, these happy dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park saga are back in their dance card. “I did not give more thought to the idea. I said yes without even knowing what they were inventing, ”she admits excited as a girl with her next job. The actress loves this franchise and does not hesitate to sell it to anyone who comes with that famous dichotomy between the interpreters with capital letters that star in untouchable quality films and those that star in films that simply make millions among the public. "As someone who came from the independent cinema, I had my doubts, but Laura little less than twisted my arm until I called Joe Johnston to count on me in the saga, and thanks to her I enjoyed the amount in that movie," he recalls. actor William H. Macy, grateful after passing through Jurassic Park III (2001).
As for her, she openly admits: "I love Steven Spielberg and the universe he created in the company of Michael Crichton and David Koepp." And he adds with a small dose of sneer: “But above all, what is better than a dinosaur as a cast partner? They are lovely and majestic. They know their place and you better know yours. So I'm going to have a good dinosaur season. ”
