Allen: Why I had to say yes

Joan Allen tells Matt Wolf why she jumped at the chance to spout iambic
pentameters in Sally Potter’s latest take on love

12 August 2005
The Independent/UK

In a milieu, namely Hollywood, in which beauty is skin deep, Joan
Allen possesses the kind of natural radiance you can’t buy off the
shelf. Sure, Allen doesn’t make the cover of Heat and People: few
performers the wrong side of 40 do. (The actress will turn 49 later
this month.) But amid an environment that is harsher than ever to
women of a certain age, Allen is working almost constantly – five
films in the past two years – and with unwavering integrity and
adventurousness, too: after all, not every actress would say yes to a
film like Yes.

“I just feel very fortunate that I’ve got to do interesting things
with talented people,” she says during a stopover in London, a city
she has come to know pretty well in recent years. For the Mike Binder
film The Upside of Anger, co-starring Kevin Costner, for which she has
won rave reviews across the Atlantic, Allen lived in Notting Hill and
was driven every day to Hampstead, which was substituting on screen
for, of all places, suburban Detroit. Sally Potter’s film Yes, which
opened in the UK last week, found the actress taking up residence in
the East End. And yet, she laughs, “I still can’t get my bearings
here.”

The more immediate question is whether filmgoers will find their
bearings as regards Yes, a movie told not just in verse but in rhymed
iambic pentameter. As one might expect from the director of Orlando
and The Man Who Cried, Potter’s movie is a love story but of a
particularly rarefied, high-flown kind, and it also registers as a
none-too-veiled political commentary.

Whatever one’s reaction, it’s hard not to respond to the burnished
intensity of co-star Simon Abkarian, an Armenian-Lebanese actor who
was in fact cast in The Man Who Cried but cut from the finished
feature. And, especially, to the unforced luminosity of Allen, here
playing an American scientist based in London who finds refuge from a
chilly marriage to an English diplomat (Sam Neill at his most severe)
in an affair with the Lebanese refugee played by Abkarian.

The two principals go only by the names She and He. It can’t be easy
acting archetypes – characters who, Allen acknowledges, “represent, I
suppose, the Eastern and Western worlds, though I don’t want to sound
pretentious or anything”. What’s important, she says, is Potter’s
interest in bridging different cultures and merging the political and
the personal at a time when too few movies choose that route. “I was
really drawn to Sally’s material because of that question of how we
really talk to each other; how do we try to understand.” Potter began
writing the script of Yes on 12 September 2001, a date that resonates
throughout the finished film. Says Allen: “Somebody said to Sally that
it was the first therapeutic response to 9/11 because we are all
sharing a dialogue. It’s not just one person talking while the other
listens.”

Allen’s capacity for listening – for a restraint that tends to gather
force throughout a film – can often make her the quiet centre of a
noisy movie. She got the first of her three Oscar nominations a decade
ago for playing Pat Nixon, wife of the disgraced American president,
in the Oliver Stone biopic Nixon, and was nominated again the
following year for her role in Nicholas Hytner’s film version of The
Crucible. “On film, I like work that is more introverted,” she tells
me, citing Robert Duvall’s low-key contribution to The Godfather as
the sort of acting she admires. To that extent, her contribution to
Yes is as remarkable for what goes unspoken as for the language that
Allen gets to speak, not least a scene in which colour visibly drains
from her face.

Nixon wasn’t Allen’s first big-screen splash. In 1986, she played
Brian Cox’s blind victim in Manhunter, the first of the Hannibal
Lecter movies, while she was Jeff Bridges’ wife in the little-seen but
much-admired Francis Ford Coppola film Tucker: The Man and His Dream
(1988). A later biopic, When the Sky Falls (2000), cast Allen as a
semi-fictionalised version of the murdered Irish journalist Veronica
Guerin. “It was very hard to understand her character,” says Allen,
reflecting on a film about a crusading woman and mother who dared to
invade the Irish underworld. “People would go, ‘Why did she do this?’,
and I was like, ‘Because she did’. You wouldn’t be asking that if she
had been a man.”

Still, her range of acting opportunities over the years seems even now
to come as something of a surprise to Allen, who, by her own
admission, grew up “a gal from a little-horse Illinois town surrounded
by cornfields”. The youngest of four children, Allen had never before
been to New York when she first worked at the Lincoln Center for the
Performing Arts in the early 1980s in CP Taylor’s play And A
Nightingale Sang. That production was part of the widening reach of
the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago, where Allen acted
alongside then-unknowns John Malkovich and Gary Sinise while working
as a secretary to pay the rent.

Allen soon began appearing on Broadway, winning a 1988 Tony Award for
her role in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, and a nomination the next year
for Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles. But she hasn’t done a
Broadway play since 1989, the dual result of raising a daughter,
Sadie, who is now 11, and her shifting attitude toward that
medium. “I’m just not as interested in doing the same thing every
night; I used to love it, but it just doesn’t interest me the way it
used to,” she says.

Besides, it’s not as if Allen has much time to miss the theatre, as
she ricochets between high-profile films such as Face/Off and The
Contender (which brought her a third Oscar nod, her first for Best
Actress) and art-house fare like Yes. Still to come is a film, Pushers
Needed, written and directed by the Irish actor Jimmy Smallhorne,
about four working-class Dublin women who take a visit to Lourdes with
their local church. (Brenda Blethyn is among the others.) “It’s
called Pushers Needed because we push the wheelchairs of the
crippled,” says Allen, laughing at the misconception that the film
might have anything to do with drugs. Another adventure for an actress
who by now is used to them? Allen smiles and nods. “I haven’t done
much world travelling, I have to say,” she is quick to comment, “but I
have been to Lourdes.” Filmgoers keeping a keen eye on this fine
actress will give thanks for that.

‘Yes’ is on limited release; Matt Wolf is London theatre critic for
‘Variety’