Jennifer Grey: 'People don't choose to start again because it's scary'
It’s an unseasonably damp October afternoon, and on the streets of Whitehall beneath the Corinthia London hotel, a grey mist is closing in as pedestrians hurry by. One person who isn’t discouraged by the Dickensian scene, however, is Jennifer Grey. ‘I live in Los Angeles and we’ve been getting crazy amounts of rain that are just not natural. But here, it feels natural, you know?’ she beams. ‘It’s good for the curly hair,’ she adds, raising her hands to zhuzh her honey-highlighted waves.
Grey and I are sitting in a warmly lit hotel room encircled by camera equipment. The 64-year-old opposite me is doll-like in stature, dressed in a sheer ribbed top and a pair of teal green leather trousers that emphasise her petite proportions. One of the biggest movie stars of the 1980s, who found success with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, most iconically, Dirty Dancing, she radiates a buoyant friendliness that makes her easy company. But alongside it, there’s an unmistakeable air of a Hollywood star who has seen it all.
We’re meeting today to discuss her latest project, A Real Pain. Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, the buzzy Sundance dramedy follows two diametrically opposed cousins, David and Benji (played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin), who set off on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland in memory of their beloved grandmother. On their pilgrimage, the pair are forced to reckon with their differences, as well as the different ways people confront pain. Grey makes her mark as Marcia, a melancholy divorcee and fellow tourgoer who is on a quest to reconnect with her past and reclaim her identity.
‘Sometimes it’s really easy to become jaded in the business and with what kind of material is floating around,’ says Grey. She’s usually disheartened with the offers of work that arrive in her inbox. Not so when A Real Pain came through. ‘Every word in the email was almost unbelievable.’ She noticed that Eisenberg was writing, directing and co-starring, and immediately decided she was on board. Then she spotted Culkin’s name – a huge draw, she explains, having become a ‘rabid fan’ of Succession. ‘I was trained on [him] from the first time I saw him on the show. I knew I was seeing somebody that had the kind of magic that I respond to,’ she says. ‘I just was like, “Well, I’m doing this, no matter what it reads like”, and then every page of the script was just... am I dreaming? This is exactly my kind of movie, exactly my sensibility, exactly the kind of work that I want to be near, around, involved in.’
The character of Marcia, she continues, was precisely the kind of complicated role she had been seeking. ‘It’s always exciting to play someone whose life is falling apart or whose life has been blown up, whether it’s your own doing or someone else’s,’ she says. ‘It’s always an opportunity for transformation.’ She found she could relate to Marcia’s feeling of losing her identity through marriage and motherhood. ‘I know that on some level, it happened for me, even though I love being a mother and I’m obsessed with my grown daughter, and it’s the best thing that I ever experienced personally. Because being a mother to me is the greatest, but there is a cost for me. I don’t know what it’s like for anyone else, but I knew that there was some part of me that felt like I had gone missing.’ Like Marcia, whose cosy LA life has been uprooted following her divorce, Grey knows what it’s like to start over again. In 2021, she divorced actor Clark Gregg after 20 years of marriage. ‘I think very often people don’t choose to start again because it’s so scary,’ she says knowingly. ‘But [Marcia’s] trauma had jettisoned her into the abyss, and within the abyss is a lot of space to reclaim or redesign or reconfigure your life or what’s important to you.’
Grey has a fascinating family history. Both her parents’ families had fled Ukraine and Latvia, while her maternal grandfather – ‘a very sad man’ – had travelled to the US in 1907 on a boat, carrying all the family silverware sewn into his wool overcoat, unaccompanied by an adult but in the company of ‘three, maybe four younger siblings’. When Grey took part in Who Do You Think You Are? in 2017, she was able to pierce the darkness surrounding her grandfather when she learned that his mother had died in childbirth in Ukraine. Still a teenager, and with no parent beside him, he voyaged with his siblings to meet his father, who was in Brooklyn. ‘When I realised that this was a young boy who lost his mother and came over not speaking the language, and just what my family went through...’ She pauses, searching for her words. ‘It didn’t feel somehow real. It felt like a story, and I felt separate from the history of my family.’
Grey’s outlook and determination are clearly inspired by her own early experiences. Although she always wanted to be an actor, she grew up knowing that ‘there was no family business but showbusiness’. Her mother, Jo Wilder, had been an actor and singer before motherhood. Her father is Broadway legend Joel Grey, who won an Oscar in 1973 for his performance in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Having begun his acting career at the tender age of nine, she had no illusions about how punishing the business could be. ‘It’s not like I ever had the fantasy of like, “Oh, I’ll move to Hollywood and I’ll become a star, and my life will be fantastic”. I always knew that it was tough, and I also saw that it was possible.’ She resolved to ‘be really good’, and took dance classes and singing lessons until she graduated high school, then attended the neighbourhood playhouse instead of college at the request of her parents. ‘It really showed me craft,’ she notes. ‘Because sometimes you don’t need techniques; sometimes it’s just easy. But sometimes you need it. And so the more prepared you are, and the more confident you are, and the more tools you have, the better your chances of surviving.’
Yet still, the limitations of her industry were apparent. ‘It was the 1970s, and I didn’t look like Marcia Brady from The Brady Bunch,’ she recalls. Nor was she able to see herself reflected in TV shows, movies or commercials. ‘I just didn’t see anyone who looked like me, and I didn’t see a lot of Jews who looked like Jews.’ Her family had assimilated to American society by undergoing cosmetic surgery; her father, Joel, had a rhinoplasty early on in his career, as did her mother, grandmother and aunt (upon the encouragement of her mother, Grey would also go on to have the procedure in the late 1980s after becoming famous in Dirty Dancing, despite resisting it her whole life). In the world of showbusiness, she continues, changing the family name was also tradition, so Joel changed his from Katz to Grey. ‘It’s just all about how to orient yourself to succeed in a world that is very clearly defined as: “this is how you make it”. Diversity wasn’t encouraged or applauded or anything. It was much more about: how can you fit into the mould that we’ve designed, as this is what a movie star looks like?’ She soon discovered that women were frequently reduced to one-dimensional characters. ‘You know, you’re a mother, you’re a wife, you’re a hooker, you’re a slut, you’re a nerd. I mean, there’s not that many baskets.’ For a young Jewish actress who didn’t fit conventional beauty norms, the climate wasn’t encouraging. Nevertheless, she kept the faith. ‘I knew I wanted to do this, and I was like, “How will I ever be the one they’re looking for?” So I think I was just believing that it would happen, just because I wanted it to happen, and I couldn’t imagine any other way. And then it did, but when it did, I was like, “Oh, thank you. Okay, finally, something that is exactly right for me.”
The role that changed everything, of course, was that of Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman in Dirty Dancing, an idealistic teen who falls for brooding dance teacher Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) at a Catskills resort while on holiday with her family. ‘It was a perfect fit,’ says Grey emphatically, although she notes that it was ‘weird’ playing a 17-year-old when she was 27. ‘I hadn’t been a virgin for a long time, and I’d never been as innocent as Baby was.’ The audition process was an intense run of dance and acting auditions, followed by a period of ‘pairing up with guys’. She was longing for her big break: the year before, she had auditioned ‘10 times’ for Flashdance. ‘And I was like, “Wait, that was supposed to be it. If I can’t get this, I can’t get anything!” So it’s kind of like, how many times can we bounce back?’ That must have made you resilient, I counter. ‘Well, I didn’t know how to do anything else. I mean, I really didn’t. I still think that’s the only reason I stayed with it this long, because what else am I going to do?’
Decades later, Dirty Dancing is an inexhaustible subject to discuss. Along with grossing more than $200m at the box office and cementing the line ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner!’ in the cultural lexicon, the film maintains unwavering devotion from fans. How does she look upon its enduring popularity? ‘It doesn’t feel surreal because it’s my life, so it’s very real to me,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘But it feels very precious and like lightning in a bottle.’ She feels immense gratitude at having ‘imprinted and given joy and refuge and diversion’ to fans, and tells me that Gene Wilder once told her that his late wife and Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner watched the film the whole time she was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. She seems genuinely moved at the memory, and ‘the idea that I could do anything that would ease anyone’s suffering, or give pleasure or fantasy, or make somebody feel like they’re not the only one who feels like the world is not built for them, or they’re invisible, or they’re not beautiful enough, or they just weren’t born with the right dot, dot, dot, and therefore you’ll never get dot, dot, dot.’
It goes without saying that Swayze, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, played a huge role in elevating Dirty Dancing to pop culture immortality. Exuding a cowboy swagger but with an endearing sensitivity, he redefined what it meant to be a leading man, while his intense chemistry with Grey made fans fantasise about mambo-ing with a rough-diamond dance teacher (and still do). Despite having created one of cinema’s greatest ever romantic duos, in a 2022 interview with People, Grey recalled ‘tension’ in her relationship with Swayze, and said that if she could say anything to him now, she would apologise for not being able to ‘appreciate and luxuriate’ in who he was, instead of ‘wishing you were more like what I wanted you to be’. When I ask Grey to expand on what she meant, she grows contemplative. ‘There’s something about having distance and appreciating people in a fuller way as you become more of a full person yourself,’ she muses. ‘You have the distance to be able to see how lucky I was and how scared I was and how hard it is to be a young person in your first lead role, and how hard it is to trust that a man would have your back and be able to jump into their arms and have them lift you up into the air. Because if you don’t have that experience of that kind of trust, it’s just complex. And the movie is basically, to me, it’s like a metaphor for so many bigger stories.’
The Dirty Dancing chapter, however, hasn’t yet been closed. In 2020, a sequel was announced, with Grey attached to star as well as executive produce. Originally slated for a 2024 release, production was delayed due to the Hollywood strikes. While the studio is ‘dead set’ on making the film, Grey says she will only speak about the project ‘when there’s something to say and when it’s the right recipe’.
Is she excited, then, to give Dirty Dancing fans a new experience? ‘Oh, 100%. But I’m very particular and stringent. I’m very specific about the authenticity of the experience and what the fans deserve, because I have such reverence for their experience and the meaning it holds for so many people. I think of it as extremely precious and rare.’ In the meantime, she’s embarking on a special venture. ‘I’m excited about working on something with my dad right now, and that’s all I’ll say,’ she says, eyes sparkling.
After navigating the industry’s shifting sands for so long, she seems ready to take the reins in her career. ‘It’s a really good thing to be able to feel this kind of gratitude in life in general,’ she adds. ‘I think that’s a gift.’
A Real Pain is in cinemas now.
This interview is taken from the February 2025 issue of Red
You Might Also Like
