Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Laura Dern strikes back

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This was published 6 years ago

Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Laura Dern strikes back

By Emily Cronin

Let the record reflect: no one, not even an Oscar nominee, is immune to the agonies specific to being a mum to pre-teen and teenage children. "I'm here in Paris with my 12-year-old daughter," says Laura Dern, inching forward on to the edge of her gilded chair at Hotel Le Bristol. "We're walking down the street and I see the most beautiful girl's dress. I'm looking at it, just pining, and she says – now with a wary, worldly wise tone – 'I see that look on your face.' I say, 'What look is that?' And she says, 'The look of heartbreak that you don't get to dress me any more.' "

Dern takes a beat.

Laura Dern in Los Angeles.

Laura Dern in Los Angeles.Credit: Emily Berl/ The New York Times

"I mean, oh my God, yes! It's such a simple thing, but I could cry saying it," and she truly looks as though she could.

Dern does this. Commits, that is. In a career that's seen her collaborate with the same directors over and over but never repeat a role, she's played a reckless runaway (Wild at Heart), a valiant paleobotanist (Jurassic Park) and a type-A tiger mum (Big Little Lies) – a performance that saw her nominated for an Emmy. She dissolves into her characters so completely that before meeting her, I have a flicker of uncertainty about whether I really know what she looks like. In person, Dern, 50, is willowy and expressive, with hands that never seem to rest from conjuring a world in gestures. She's also warm, attentive and in possession of a particularly Californian, perma-awed outlook. She deems most things – her fellow actors, a Laduree macaron, time with her children – "amazing".

Laura Dern as Vice Admiral Holdo in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Laura Dern as Vice Admiral Holdo in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.Credit: David James

One of the aspects of her life she finds most amazing these days is that she's living out a childhood dream: she's in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The original film was the first movie she ever queued to see, aged 10. "Oh my God, I fell madly in love with it," she says. "Princess Leia meant so much to me as this iconic, irreverent, sassy, female superhero, and that was a very new feeling for me as a kid."

She kept a C3PO action figure next to her bed, but never once conceived of one day playing a character from that galaxy far, far away. (Lest you think she's sitting across from me in a Millennium Falcon T-shirt, she looks movie-star soignee in a sharp Saint Laurent blazer, silky Rodarte top and second-skin black jeans.) The Last Jedi is the eighth episode in the Star Wars franchise, which will see the return of favourites including Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Isaac) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) – and, of course, Luke (Mark Hamill) and Leia (the late Carrie Fisher). Dern plays a new character: Vice Admiral Holdo, a lilac-maned Resistance officer. "She's there to shake things up," Dern says, "which I like many of my characters to do."

For the longest time, Dern had to keep her participation in the film under wraps. "That was very hard," she says. She describes finding herself in the midst of the mythology she bought into all those years ago as "profound". Seeing C3P0 and R2D2 on set was "just incredible"; watching John Williams conduct the orchestra recording the score for the film, she cried. "It was gorgeous," she says. "The whole thing has just been a dream."

They don't make "a star is born" stories like Dern's any more. She was practically delivered on a film set, with award-winning actors – Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern – for parents. "Within my first seven years of life I'd watched Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby and Alfred Hitchcock direct my parents. And I was like, 'OK, I think I want to do that.' It wasn't that hard to want to become an actor." Aged seven, she appeared as an ice-cream-eating extra in Scorsese's 1974 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore; after the 19th take, the film-maker told Diane, his star, that if Dern could do that without throwing up, she had to be an actress.

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Dern accepts the award for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series or movie for Big Little Lies.

Dern accepts the award for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series or movie for Big Little Lies.Credit: AP

"There was something growing in me, as a girl, that was interested in women being portrayed in all their power, in all their grace and in all their mess ... Witnessing strong women in the creative sphere is something I don't think you come back from. Then you are driven to have that be important to you, whatever you do with it."

Since then Dern has co-starred with her mother many times, to memorable effect. In 1990, in David Lynch's dark fairy tale, Wild at Heart, Dern played the tearaway teenage daughter to Diane's homicidal, lunatic mother (after her breakout role in Blue Velvet, Dern has become one of Lynch's favourite lead actresses, seen most recently in this year's Twin Peaks reboot). The next year, Ladd and Dern became the first mother-daughter team to earn Oscar nominations for the same film (Martha Coolidge's Rambling Rose), and they reunited as an embattled on-screen mother and daughter in the HBO series Enlightened from 2011 to 2013. "I think if we didn't have that experience, I might not have known the profound impact she's had on me," she says. "I have learnt more about who my mother is because of getting to act alongside her – it is such an intimate thing. She's really able to laugh at herself; there is real humility in her flaws."

During her decades in front of the camera, Dern has picked up multiple Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, and admirers as diverse as Lynch, Robert Altman, Ellen DeGeneres (Dern played a crucial role in Ellen's coming-out episode) and Reese Witherspoon. Witherspoon and Dern met when they acted in Wild, the 2014 biopic based on Cheryl Strayed's bestselling memoir, in which Witherspoon played Strayed and Dern played her mother. They co-starred again in this year's hit HBO series Big Little Lies, in which Dern played Renata Klein, a highly strung corporate lawyer and anxious mum convinced that another child was tormenting her daughter. From the outset the character was unlikeable – so much so that Dern's mother scolded her for being "too mean" to Witherspoon.

"I love being given a character that seems the most intolerable one, the most nightmarish, the bitchiest," Dern says. "If you start there, you're free to do everything ... I like finding heroism in the most potentially hateful person."

The show also starred Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley and Zoe Kravitz – and the strong chemistry between the cast came through loud and clear in every red-carpet photo. "I don't think you can expect a love story," she says of her feelings toward her co-stars. "So when you find each other it is bliss." Of Witherspoon, she adds, "Reese is a kick-ass mom and she loves fiercely. It's impressive to watch."

For Dern, the warmth sprang from "the beauty of being women together at work, which we rarely experience because usually there's maybe one other woman on a movie." Recently she acted in a short film that, in addition to an all-female cast, had an almost exclusively female crew, and she was taken aback by how novel it seemed. She refers to a statistic from a 2016 study by the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film, which found that only seven per cent of film-makers that year were women. "The more [female-driven] films are successful, the more room there is for more. It's just one foot in front of the other." It's no surprise she found Wonder Woman "so satisfying" to watch.

Harvey Weinstein aside (we speak just before the scandal breaks), when it comes to women's place in the industry Dern is concerned by social media's emphasis on looks, and how that may limit young actors' careers. "The actresses I grew up with were inside their characters as deeply as anyone could be. That lack of vanity and ability to disappear into a character really shaped me. I fear that social media has made that harder to reach. There's so much focus on the branding."

She said as much in an open letter to her daughter Jaya published in the September issue of US InStyle. "Don't limit yourself," she wrote. "I want you to know that most of your life will happen in the grey spaces between bliss and heartbreak, between having everything lock into place and having it all fall apart. That's where the grace is ... The beauty of being a woman today is in savouring the minutiae of life, all the moments that add up to you." Dern read it to Jaya once she received a copy; Jaya also heard from friends that their mothers used the essay as a conversation starter.

Dern feels all the more pressure as a "primarily single parent" to Jaya, who has just turned 13, and Ellery, 16, her children with her ex-husband, the musician Ben Harper (she has also dated Nicolas Cage, Jeff Goldblum, Billy Bob Thornton and Kyle MacLachlan). They live in Los Angeles but travel often – this trip to Paris has given Dern a chance to take her kids on a bit of a nostalgia tour. "We were just at the Jardin du Luxembourg and I was telling my son all about this being the place he took his first steps. It was sweet to show him that."

As much as she comes across as a wise woman, she calls raising teenagers "uncharted territory", and all she'll say about love is "that I have a lot to learn".

"With age you get more comfortable in your skin and start to trust yourself more, and that's an amazing feeling. And now I really don't give a s--t. I hope that I surround myself with people who appreciate the wisdom of growing up, because it's so sexy to not give a s--t, and it's just not something you get in your 20s.

"You can't," she says, looking supremely at ease. "Because it takes getting to know yourself – defining yourself as an artist, and who you want to be as a lover, who you want to be as a mother. Those things come from self-awareness, and that takes time."

The Last Jedi is released on December 14.

Stella Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, London

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