Kyra Sedgwick can relate to the Upper West Side matriarch she portrays in her latest film, “Bad Shabbos.”
“I very much have all the trope attributes of Jewish motherhood,” she said. “I really want to know that you’ve eaten, and if you’re hungry I’ll make you something. I want to make sure you’re not too cold or too hot. I want to know what you had for breakfast.”
“Bad Shabbos” centers on a Shabbat dinner that goes spectacularly off the rails, but Sedgwick finds the sentiments it evokes to be universal. “Like them or not, they’re your family,” she said in a video call from Austin, Texas, where she and her husband, Kevin Bacon, and their children, Travis and Sosie, are making a comedy-horror movie about a family of filmmakers.
“It is not us, but it is inspired by us,” she said before elaborating on why ’90s rock, “All Fours” by Miranda July and the meditation teacher Tara Brach are among her must-haves. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
‘Liberation’ by Bess Wohl
Bess Wohl is extraordinary. Basically it’s about this woman who’s now in her 30s trying to figure out who her mother was in the genesis of women’s lib. And she’s imagining what that was like and asking, “What did we get wrong?” I think the message of the play is: We didn’t get it wrong. The world got it wrong.
Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare by Creed
I’m just heartbroken because they stopped making it. I’m not a big perfume person, but I’ve been wearing it for 20, 25 years, and all of a sudden they’re putting it in the vault. And there’s really not much to say except that I just loved it.
’90s Rock
Oasis. Pearl Jam. The Goo Goo Dolls. Anything in the ’90s music category just makes me joyful but also really, really nostalgic for that time. It was the music that I played in the car when the kids were with me.
Watching Something With Others
Nothing beats being in a room with people having compassion for other people on a stage or a screen. To me it can heal the world. If we go into a movie, we get to walk around in other people’s shoes. We imagine what it’s like to be them. We relate or we don’t relate. We’re moved.
‘All Fours’ by Miranda July
I go back and forth between being really angry about it and then thinking that it’s the greatest thing in the world, because she’s sort of fulfilling this fantasy that many women might have but would never admit that they had. She’s approaching middle age and menopause, and she’s got a child and she’s got a husband, and she wants to remember what it’s like to be none of those things but just an autonomous person in the world. I feel like I’m seeing a lot in the culture that explores female sexuality at past 40. And I’m really grateful for that because I think that we don’t see enough people my age having good sex, having fantasy sex, having marital sex.
Poshmark
It’s an online place to go for secondhand stuff that’s gently worn, and I’ve got a Rachel Comey dress that I’m totally obsessed with that was not expensive. There’s a lot of fast fashion, and I try not to contribute to the landfill.
‘PBS NewsHour’
I call it the “PBS Blues Hour” because it’s usually so depressing because the world is in a hard place. However, what I love is that they show two sides of everything that they cover. I feel like we’re all in our little bubble, getting the news from our own little place where everyone’s telling you the same exact thing.
TWP’s Patti Shirt
It’s a ruffled shirt that is like a camisole almost. It’s got buttons on the front, it hits at the hip in the right spot, you can wear stuff underneath it, but you can also wear it by itself. Whenever I put on one of those shirts, it’s really special.
Tara Brach
She wrote a book that broke out in 2003 called “Radical Acceptance.” This doesn’t mean I don’t want to change some things. It doesn’t mean I won’t alter my behavior, myself, my feelings. Like someone said, “All any feeling ever wants is to be greeted with kindness.”
Central Park
Can you imagine New York City without Central Park? It’s totally democratic. Anyone can go there. And the fact that Olmsted built that — not just the way the whole thing was going to be mapped out but also where we’re going to put these bushes, these oak trees. It’s shocking that it has stood the test of time and that we have made it a priority in the city to take care of it.
The post Kyra Sedgwick Wants More Middle-Aged Sex Onscreen appeared first on New York Times.
