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.”
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 where 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 actress 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 for 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?
