Rosalind Eleazar had quite the scare on her flight from New York to Los Angeles the morning before our interview. The captain told passengers they would be making an emergency landing in Kansas, “and we’re descending,” she remembered, her large brown eyes widening. “When we got on the ground, he said, ‘Full transparency, we’re supposed to travel with 24 quarts of oil. We’ve just landed with one.’ And I thought, thank God that wasn’t over the Atlantic.”
Chat with Eleazar long enough and you realize the 38-year-old actress — who’s been getting rapturous reviews as the title character of the new Chris Rock-directed drama “Misty Green” — has a spiritual side: She had a premonition that with all of the traveling she was doing to promote the film, one of her flights was “going to be messy.” She tried to use psychic persuasion on Rock while she waited an ocean away in London to hear whether she had won the role (“When I got to set I asked, ‘Did you at any point hear me talking to you?’ And he was like, ‘No.’”) And at the end of our interview she impulsively asked for a hug, commenting on my “good energy.”
She couldn’t be more different from Misty, a fallen star who won an Emmy in the 2010s but has developed a bad reputation (sleeping with married colleagues can do that), a cocaine problem, a penchant for miniskirts and shredded dresses, and an attitude that could be generously described as prickly. She has gone the way of so many before her, chasing Hollywood dreams but derailed by the grind and her own bad decisions.
Eleazar (pronounced Ella-zahr) has worked steadily since her big break in the 2019 film adaptation “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” starring Dev Patel, and is best known for her role as the sharp MI5 field operative Louisa on the Apple TV+ series “Slow Horses.” She has interspersed her screen work with well-received performances in theater, including “Small Hotel” opposite Ralph Fiennes last year.
In person, she is laid back and charming, dressed in an oversize denim shirt and black pants for our talk over peppermint tea at a West Hollywood restaurant. An easy smile replaces the defiant glower Misty holds through much of the film.
“I just loved how contradictory and how humanly flawed she was,” Eleazar said of Misty. “Often you get a chance to see these really difficult-to-love characters in male form. And I’d love to see more female characters allowed to be as [expletive] up and wild.” Though the word vulnerable is often associated with being close to tears, “someone like Misty is so volatile and metaphorically, punching, and it’s someone that’s really vulnerable.”
It’s exactly these multitudes that made Rock want to cast Eleazar. “Rosalind is extremely prepared, she’s extremely diligent,” he said by phone from Italy. “Here’s the weird thing about Rosalind: She’s got a lot of Misty in her. But she’s too smart to be Misty. Rosalind’s not going to [expletive] up her life partying. But Rosalind definitely loves to party.”
Because Los Angeles, and its inequalities, is a big through line in the movie, Eleazar spent more than a month there before shooting began, trying to soak up the city’s vibes and peculiarities before fully inhabiting her character. She went everywhere from the Santa Monica boardwalk to Cedars-Sinai hospital to the lounge at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, where pivotal scenes take place. She took movement classes at 5Rhythms, where one of the goals, according to its website, is to “tune into instincts and intuitions.” She even befriended two women who worked at the front desk of a cryotherapy clinic to research a scene that was eventually cut.
What she did the most, though, was the probably the least L.A. thing imaginable: Walking. “Everyone stares at you when you’re walking” in L.A., she observed. “They’re like, Are you OK? Go get yourself a Waymo!”
She has said that she fell in love with walking as a student at the boarding school Gordonstoun (a.k.a King Charles’s alma mater) in Scotland, where she attended on an academic scholarship. She spent a lot of time camping and perambulating in the Scottish Highlands. It’s a detail that makes her performance as the distinctly American Misty even more impressive. As her character says early in the film, “I’m too Black to be with Leo, not Black enough to be with Damson. I’m not a nepo baby, and I’m not a Brit.”
But Eleazar is a Brit. Born to a British American mother and a Ghanaian father, Eleazar was raised by her mom in London. Though she visited her father, the two didn’t become close until the year before his death in 2010. “It’s a complicated situation,” she said. “I managed to reconnect with him, and I felt like the rug had been pulled under me, especially when you just started to get to know someone.” Her eyes get teary. “What I mourn is the memories that we could have had rather than what we did have, because we didn’t have lots.”
As a girl, she traveled often with her mother, who worked for a Greek shipping company (and still does, now in her 70s), to China, Malaysia, Pakistan and elsewhere. Eleazar believes the exposure to different cultures gave her an optimistic understanding of others.
“Most people are trying to do the best they can,” she said. “I think that people could do evil acts. But I don’t think that people are evil.” She paused. “I’m making it sound like I’m a saint, I’m really not. I judge people loads,” she said with a laugh.
Eleazar credits her upbringing with helping her deal with sexism and racism in Hollywood — and how she metabolized those feelings to play Misty.
“Sometimes I don’t know whether it’s my own mind that is playing tricks on me or it’s actually happening,” she said of her experience with discrimination. “Is this because I’m brown or is it, this would’ve happened to someone that was white?” Either way, the actress refuses to let it define her. “I don’t want to get under the wave of that, and feel small and like a victim. I’ll try and do my best work wherever I go and let that speak.”
Misty’s troubles culminate in a dramatic sequence when her F.W.B. (a smarmy Adam Driver) invites her to Dubai with a gaggle of women chosen specifically to entertain a hedonistic prince. It’s the nadir of a week that includes Misty being kicked out of the apartment gifted to her by a former lover, a humiliating audition, the appearance of her troubled brother (Daniel Kaluuya) and the reappearance of a skeptical director (Rock) she had wronged in the past.
Eleazar said she had no idea that shadowy world existed before she read those Dubai scenes. (“Riding a line between ho and hostess,” as Misty’s best friend, played by Anna Kendrick, remarks.) “I went to Chris, ‘Does this stuff happen?’” she recalls. “Maybe I was naïve in thinking that actually wasn’t an occurrence.” (Rock told me later: “I’ve seen stuff like that in America, unfortunately.”)
But the actress didn’t have any qualms about going all-in on the chaotic party scenes, where drugs, Birkin bags and jewelry are tossed about like candy for the women to fight over. “It was so connected to the character,” she said. “That audition scene where she’s being disrespected, I think that that’s equally as debasing as crawling on the floor for money.”
Nor did she have any problems connecting with Misty’s anger. “A lot of women do know the rage and how little we’re able to express our rage because it’s deemed a certain way,” she said. “You get shunned, you get punished.”
But overall she’s grateful. For her husband, the Italian actor and producer Gabriele Lo Giudice (“He’s genuinely happy for me and my path”), for “brilliant” directors like Rock and Adam Randall of “Slow Horses.” For the Oscars chatter surrounding her (“It just feels utterly mad”). And most of all for Misty.
“She’s not a victim,” she said. “God, I love her.”
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