Jessica Lange has started tapping into a “wildness” as a performer. This might sound strange coming from someone who’s already won the Triple Crown in acting—with two Oscars (Tootsie, Blue Sky), three Emmys (Grey Gardens, two seasons of American Horror Story), and a Tony (as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night) to her name—and built her reputation on a kind of emotional fearlessness. But these days, Lange says on this week’s Little Gold Men (read or listen below), she’s even less inhibited. A lot of her characters “are navigating sanity,” she says. “And that always, to me, is the most interesting thing to play.”
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Lange is coming off a hell of a double-header between the Broadway run of Mother Play, which recently concluded (and for which she received another Tony nomination), and her HBO film The Great Lillian Hall, for which she’s back in the Emmy race. In both, she plays mothers confronting decades of mistakes and regret. But whereas in the former we track her riveting trail of destruction over decades, in Lillian Hall the work is more internal—and devastating. Lillian is a great stage actor battling dementia, and the film, costarring Kathy Bates and Lily Rabe, follows her determination to complete a production of The Cherry Orchard while facing both the realities of her disease and the choices she’s made in life to get to this moment.
It’s another tour de force from an actor who’s been known for them for going on 40 years. In our interview, Lange explains why this moment still feels different.
Vanity Fair: What did you connect to in Lillian Hall?
Jessica Lange: First of all, the opportunity to do a film about the theater world, I thought was really fascinating. You look at the classics like Cassavetes’s Opening Night or All About Eve—just the idea of being able to go into the world of the theater and really film it in a truthful way, I thought was a great opportunity. The character, she’s flawed, but most characters are. She’s also very brave and I think she has a lot of courage. She makes huge mistakes, but she also perseveres and has a great sense of commitment to the theater.
You’ve talked about the notion of likability, and you’ve called it a trap actors often fall into. How have you navigated it over your career?
Oftentimes what I say yes, it’s to characters that are difficult—who are living on the edge. If you look at, say, Frances Farmer or Blanche DuBois or even Mary Tyrone, or the character Carly in Blue Sky—all these characters have a dark side, and a light side. The idea of: What would it take to teeter off that high wire and fall into the abyss? It seems to me that those kinds of characters lend themselves to an exploration of the depths that normally you would not want to fall into.
Probably my most favorite character I’ve ever played, and one that I could keep on playing forever if I didn’t continue to age, would be Mary Tyrone. It’s so brilliantly conceived. I’ve done it now three different times now—I did it on stage in London, I did it on stage here in New York, and I’ve also filmed it—and it never feels like you come to the bottom of that well. There’s always more to explore. And for me as an actor, that’s what I would be looking for.
With this character that I’m doing on stage now [in Mother Play], that is also the case. It’s a difficult character. She’s not likable, but there are moments where she’s likable. There are moments where the mistakes, the decisions that she makes are almost inconceivable, incomprehensible as a mother. With Lillian Hall, it’s not quite that extreme, but she has been guilty of mistakes made as a mother—whether it was neglect or putting other things before her child. As the years go by, how do you deal with that? What kind of remorse, what kind of regrets, what kind of sorrow, really, do you carry with you from those experiences?
With characters like these, I’m curious if they can be hard to shake off. They’re very emotionally intense roles, the ones that you’re describing.
I think in the beginning, yes they were. Frances really was the first big role I had. That one was hard to shake. Some of them do stay with you. They kind of haunt you after you leave them. I felt that way with Blanche DuBois, after playing her on stage several times. They’re still there. You know their essence, they’re hovering. You feel them. And it is a bit like a haunting over time, of course. It gets easier because you’re more accustomed to like, “Okay, that was that. I’m finished, I’m walking away.” But there are a few that have hung around longer than others.
As you prepare to finish Mother Play, do you have any personal rituals for when you finish a show?
It’s always a mixed blessing, because you say goodbye to people you’ve grown to love—who become family, really. This is such a tight, close-knit cast. They’re just the three of us on stage, and I love Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger with all my heart. You’ll miss the ritual of doing it and the experience of going through this character every night. But at the same time, I can’t wait to just be sitting somewhere in a rocking chair out on the front porch, looking at a lake. I just want to be in the country, some place in nature—healthy, healing.
You’ve said recently that you felt more liberated as an actor with your last few roles. The characters themselves are fantastic, but you’ve had a lot of great roles over your career. What do you attribute to that sense of liberation?
I don’t know what it is, really! But the last three things—first Mary Tyrone, then Lillian Hall, and now Phyllis Herman in this play—felt unencumbered by any ideas. It was pure energy, it felt like to me. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but there was a freedom and a kind of wildness in less ideas, less thought. Was it more imagination? I don’t know exactly, but these last few have felt different to me.
One quality of your work that I wanted to ask you about was silence. In Mother Play, you have this extraordinary sequence that you’ve highlighted as a major part of your experience on this play. Can you talk about going into that as an actor?
In this case, it was a great acting exercise because it lasts about 13 minutes on stage. There’s absolutely no dialogue alone. I’m sure everybody has been in this situation before, and perhaps it’s not uncommon to a lot of people—that sense of loneliness and how to fill up the time. How do you occupy yourself in an empty apartment for the evening hours? We had signposts—there’s the television, there’s the radio, there’s the lights, there’s the mail, there’s the dinner, there’s this, there’s that. But then to imbue it with emotion was what was most fascinating for me. I find It moves like water. You feel like you’re in a river, and the current is taking you from one to another. It really is an emotional exercise, more than anything else.
I was thinking about it in comparison to Lillian Hall. You have to chart so many complicated emotions and states of being with her, in very intricate ways. How did you track her state of mind? There’s a real determination in her to see The Cherry Orchard through, but she’s obviously fighting against her capabilities.
What I liked about this script and about this character is that we don’t take it to its natural end. We take it up to the point where she has this extraordinary courage and fortitude and forbearance and ability to get through this opening night, and through the run of the play. It’s a great lesson to her, and to all those that she surrounds herself with. It was interesting to play that and to take it to that point and then to say, “Okay, this is who this woman was.”
I wanted to pivot a little bit and ask you about the Oscars. You returned to the stage this past year, reuniting with the group of best actress winners. You get this sense of lineage and history in moments like that. I’m curious how it felt to you.
It was really great. I loved standing up there with the other four actresses and acknowledging the [nominees] that year. I was thrilled to introduce Carey Mulligan. I’ve always been a huge admirer of her work. So it was a lovely evening, actually. [The Oscars] have changed a great deal since like the first couple times I went, where you dressed yourself, did your own hair, did your own makeup. Yeah, it’s a bit more of a production now than it was back then. [Laughs]
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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