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Dark and Lovely
By Abby Ellin
Gotham
August, 2005
Powerhouse actress Jennifer Connelly may be scared senseless onscreen in Dark Water , but off screen she's cool as a cucumber, raising a family and blending into her childhood neighborhood.
Last year Jennifer Connelly made a big move. She and her family--husband, actor Paul Bettany, and sons Kai, 7, and Stellan, 21 months--packed up house and home (er, apartment) and hightailed it back to the borough where the 34-year-old actress spent her youth: Brooklyn. It was a necessary effort: Connelly's West Village apartment was simply too small for her clan--not to mention her bikes. And the prices in Manhattan?
As a girl, she spent four years in Woodstock, New York, where her father, Gerard, worked in the garment industry and her mom, Eileen, dealt in antiques. But Connelly spent her youth in Brooklyn Heights, attending the tony St. Ann's School and honing her acting talents. When she was 10, family friends suggested she try modelling. This led to film roles, her first being in Sergio Leone's 1984 epic Once Upon a Time in America . A litany of films--and stints at Yale and Stanford (she didn't graduate)--followed , including Labyrinth , Inventing the Abbotts , Waking the Dead , and Requiem for a Dream , not to mention the part for which she is most famous: Alicia Nash, wife of John Forbes Nash Jr., in Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind . That experience garnered her an award named Oscar and a man named Paul, as in Bettany, who costarred in the film and whom Connelly married in January 2003. The couple has one son, Stellan, named for Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard (Kai's father is photographer David Dugan). Here, the actor talks romance, real estate, Roosevelt Island, and Walter Salle's Dark Water (coming out July 8), with a little Joni Mitchell tossed in.
Gotham: How do you do it all? And you don't have a nanny, do you?
Jennifer Connelly: No. We make it work. Paul and I spend a lot of time juggling hours and coordinating schedules. Kai is in second grade, so it's difficult to travel with school, but Paul and I haven't gone longer than two weeks without seeing each other. When Paul was on my shoot, he liked to call himself the "set bitch."
G: Why did you make the leap back to Brooklyn?
JC: Before we moved, the apartment we were in was one of those tiny West Village spaces. It was miniscule. The broker showed us this townhouse here in Brooklyn, and we loved it. It's been great having a place to put our bicycles. It's quieter and less fashionable in a way that I like. Less stimulating and much calmer.
G: At least you were close to home when you were filming Dark Water .
JC: Yes. We shot it in Toronto and New York. The whole movie was fantastic to do--it was a great crew, everyone just seemed really into filmmaking and especially involved in what we were doing. You get different sorts of crews. This one was particularly involved and aligned. I don't know if it had anything to do with Toronto--it might have had to do with Walter Salles, the director. Then we came to New York City. In the film, my character takes an apartment on Roosevelt Island, so we shot there.
G: What's it like there? It's embarrassing to admit, but I've never been.
JC: Most people haven't! It's right there, but so few New Yorkers ever go. Roosevelt Island has such a different atmosphere. It was this great idea at one point, but you feel this strange tension. It's like a completely different place and aesthetic from New York. The windows on the streets look completely different--a bit dusty, a bit stuck in time, from another country, another era. The Island has an odd history--what with the hospital and asylum that used to be open; that's an unusual slice of history, combined with the fact that it was built to be this great community. It was strange feeling so far from home--even though I was looking at Manhattan.
G: In House of Sand and Fog , you were having house troubles, too. Do you think you're trying to work out some real estate karma on camera?
JC: It's a tenuous connection. In both films, my characters are struggling and are facing real estate issues. The issues in Dark Water are more about parenting, fear of abandonment, and unresolved relationships between mothers and children. My character fears that she won't be able to mother her daughters the way she hopes to because she has this unresolved history with her mother.
G: Did this resonate with you?
JC: I think everyone goes through that. I was as moved by the script and the story as I was by seeing the original [2002] Japanese film. It's a scary movie--not a horror movie but a scary, suspenseful movie.
G: You've commented that you want to do roles that are less grim.
JC: For a long time, I had to fight hard to be taken seriously to get things like Waking the Dead . Now I'd love to do a comedy, but not just for the sake of doing one. It would have to be the right role. People have a tendency to categorize actors: This one does this or that one does that. After Requiem for a Dream , I only got parts where the characters were all drug addicts.
G: Was your character in Waking the Dead really dead?
JC: It was deliberately left open. I chose to play it as a human being, that she was still alive--but I liked that it was left open.
G: Do you have favorite roles?
JC: I've loved doing a number of things. I had a fantastic time doing this one. I liked the working relationship that Walter and I developed. It was such a privilege working with someone I respect so much. I felt that with Ron Howard, too, but this was different because we had the opportunity to explore more, because I was in almost every scene. I felt inspired to withhold judgment, and I would try whatever he asked. It was exhausting--I was still nursing Stellan; I'd do a shot and run back to the trailer and nurse the baby--but I was so happy to come to work.
G: Who else is in the film?
JC: John C. Reilly--he's hilarious, and such a nice person to hang out with. I think every New Yorker should go just see him play a New York real estate broker. He goes to town with it. Tim Roth is in it. He's great, as is Pete Postlewaite.
G: You've been in two movies with Billy Crudup, Inventing the Abbotts and Waking the Dead . Do you stay in touch? I can't wait to see him in The Pillowman .
JC: I'm supposed to go see it this week. It was really great to get together and work, and I think fondly of him and hold him in high regard, but we're not in touch. This whole thing about chemistry and what's sexy in a film is a red herring. You perceive it as chemistry if you have two actors who work well together. It's about simulating the salaciousness of the performance. Do they have the hots for each other? It's about acting, make-believe.
G: Was it weird to be playing make-believe while falling in love in real life, like you and Paul did on A Beautiful Mind ?
JC: We didn't get together until way after the film--more than a year. We didn't even spend much time together.
G: Did you like dating actors?
JC: I like being with Paul and I think he's really good at his job, which also happens to be what I do, so I can say, "Do you think this works?" or "Do you have any ideas?" and we can talk about work or scripts. The downside is that our schedules are erratic. You don't go to work in the same office, or often even in the same country; and the hours are weird, and sometimes you work six days a week. But it's good because then we have downtime in between. We had a couple of months where wejust hung out with the kids.
G: Can you walk around town without being recognized?
JC: In Brooklyn, no one looks at us. In Manhattan, I think people recognize us and I wonder, Don't they know that we can see them looking at us and talking about us--but not really acknowledging us? But most of the time, we're oblivious because our eyes are glued to our very mischievous two-year-old.
G: What about reviews. Do you read them?
JC: I don't read most of them. I like to know the worst thing that's said about me. Sometimes, I like to hear it paraphrased: "OK," I'll say. "What's the bad news?" It makes me feel less anxious. I just want to know what the worst is. I can get mad or feel like I've learned something. I'm still at that point in my life where I find many more ways to use the bad stuff. I'm working on fixing that.
G: Well, in terms of good things... you seemed nervous when you won your Oscar.
JC: It's a very loaded moment that's on public display. Navigating your way through a time like that, knowing it's being broadcat around the world and looking out into a sea of people--that's a hard thing to juggle. I get quite shy in those environments. I felt humbled by the whole situation, and a bit unsure about, like, where to put my hands! And what about the piece of paper I had? Is it pretentious to think about winning? Is it pretentious to not think about it? Am I pretentious to be worrying about being pretentious.
G: Where do you keep the Oscar?
JC: It hasn't found a place to be yet. It was on a bookshelf, but then, so are all our photographs; I haven't hung up any arwork or paintings. We've been travelling and busy and frankly, by the time I finish work and doing interviews and getting the kids to bed, I'd rather sing songs with my husband.
G: Literally?
JC: Yes. He plays guitar, and we sing other people's really clever songs. He's just mastered Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You." That was a big night in Brooklyn.
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