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Laura Dern explains why you were so obsessed with Marriage Story and Little Women

Photo credit: Christopher Polk - Getty Images
Photo credit: Christopher Polk - Getty Images

From Harper's BAZAAR

I apologise to Laura Dern for my dishevelled appearance when we meet over breakfast at the Ham Yard Hotel. I was wearing make-up, I explain, but I cried so much watching her in Noah Baumbach’s bruising divorce drama Marriage Story that it ran down my cheeks. “I was just the same when I saw it,” she confesses. “It’s breathtaking. I find it more hopeful than a movie about Prince Charming – I’d rather see a story about how to have love and hold onto it.”

Rapturously received at its Venice premiere, and now available on television screens worldwide on Netflix, the film is an unvarnished portrait of marital discord that sees the separation of Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) nosedive from amicable to acrimonious following the introduction of their fee-hungry lawyers. Dern plays Nicole’s attorney Nora, a tough yet loyal figure with a sympathetic crinkle of concern etched into her forehead. “The lovers have agreed: they’re just going to split everything. The minute Nicole invites me into the story, I change the whole
narrative,” she explains. Bristling with humour – and veering between smug concern and combative indignation – she is endlessly watchable in the role, breezing authoritatively into scenes, playing to win with dogmatic abrasiveness.

Photo credit: WILSON WEBB
Photo credit: WILSON WEBB

Dern is, to my relief, eminently more agreeable in real life, coaxing me to share her fruit platter and repeatedly topping up my empty water glass. She is, however, passionate about defending judicial rights. “Marriage Story shows how a woman in the really ruthless, ugly world of divorce might use her body, her design sense and her shoes to win a case,” she says. “Men in this business are famous bullies who leave the women with as little as possible. Nora has to fight the way the boys do to protect her female client.”

Having gone through her own, highly public, divorce in 2013, Dern understands her character’s fury at the gender bias embedded in the legal system. “Divorce is experienced differently by men and women. Women and mothers are held to a higher standard,” she says. “Nora believes the idea of a good father was only invented 30 years ago and I love that. No one ever considered suggesting that mine [Bruce Dern, the star of Nebraska] should drop me off at school. Ever. And he was an actor, not a businessman. Now men are given more room for empathy, and women can go to work without guilt.”

Photo credit: HBO
Photo credit: HBO

Dern has certainly been putting in plenty of work herself. Her celebrated, versatile turns in Big Little Lies, Twin Peaks and Star Wars have sparked the trending hashtag ‘Dernaissance’, in recognition of the recent upswing of the actress’ already enviable 40-year career. For her latest big-screen outings, she has collaborated with both halves of indie cinema’s most sought-after power couple: Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. “I have seen two perfect films this year: one is by Noah and the other by Greta – and I’m not saying that because I’m in them,” she jokes.

Alongside her role in Marriage Story, Dern portrays the March siblings’ open-hearted matriarch Marmee in Gerwig’s heartwarming adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Shot in Concord, Massachusetts, the New England town where the Alcott family lived, the film offers a fresh interpretation of the classic tale, drawing out its latent modernity. Dern fell in love with the novel when she first read it as a 13-year-old, appreciating its resonant presentation of sisterhood, and says she has been captivated by Gerwig’s singular vision for the movie. “Greta has cracked open the true story of who Louisa was, and the enclave of deep, radical feminism she came from,” says Dern. “Marmee was inspired by Louisa’s real mother Abigail, who was a massive revolutionary. I’d never seen that in previous versions of Little Women – they were always more about the mother’s angelic character and not her ferocity. I helped bring that fierceness to the film.”

Photo credit: Courtesy
Photo credit: Courtesy

Dern is certainly well-versed in embodying fiery characters, given the explosive tirades she unleashed weekly in Big Little Lies as Renata, the corporate highflyer whose wings are clipped in the second series, when she is plunged into bankruptcy. The show’s star-studded cast included Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep, but it was Dern who stood out with her perfectly calibrated work, a careful balance of snarling tantrums interspersed with crushing vulnerability. “It is draining! Renata
is exhausting. I would come home like a zombie after shooting,” Dern says, laughing. “She’s so physical with that bat.” The actress is referring to the eruptive season finale in which she decimates her philandering husband’s games-room with guttural roars and a baseball bat, a sequence that is sure to feature in her Emmy reel come 2020 (and, if justice is served, help her secure a companion for the statuette she won for the part in 2017).

Returning for the series delighted Dern, who relished spending time with her on-set sorority. “Big Little Lies is one of my favourite experiences of co-creating and working on a show,” she says. “There’s a different sense of community collaborating with women that I’d never had before – it’s supportive and amazing. Now we’re making art about female relationships and it’s the greatest.” With that, Laura Dern envelops me in a hug and glides away, off to breathe life into another deeply complex, unpredictable character.

This article originally appeared in the January issue of Harper’s Bazaar.


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