Beth Broderick goes to extremes with indie films ‘Fly Away,’ ‘(818)’
March 16th, 2011Brian Truitt
You can’t get much more different than the two indie movies with which actress Beth Broderick is barnstorming the film-festival circuit. In the dark comedy (818), which was just at the Miami Film Festival and is heading to Cleveland, Broderick plays an aging, has-been thespian whose career gets a boost when she’s pegged for killing her appliance-peddling husband. And premiering at South By Southwest this week — before moving on to the Palm Beach Film Festival — is the drama Fly Away, which stars Broderick as a single mom struggling to care for her severely autistic daughter (played by Ashley Rickards). Fortunately, SXSW allows her to hang out in her second home in Austin, Texas. “I love getting to Austin and throwing off the big-city LA vibe and putting on my flip-flops and trying to get people to vote. It’s making me really happy,” Broderick, 52, says with a laugh. She balances her acting career with many efforts outside Hollywood, including voter engagement, animal-rights and environmental causes (such as her work with The Thirst Project), and the anti-AIDS movement (she helped found The Momentum Project in 1984). I talked with the former Sabrina the Teenage Witch star — who was Aunt Zelda to Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina — about her performances in her two films, so read below for our conversation and check out this trailer for Fly Away.
Photos by Catherine McNamara and Meg Madison
Fly Away Trailer from Fly Away on Vimeo.
These are two very, very different roles. It’s interesting watching them back-to-back.
They couldn’t be more different, could they? [Laughs] It’s very freaky. I’m so different from both characters in real life, and with (818), I’m the least actressy actress in the history of the world. Everyone will tell you that. So I really had to become this actressy actress and I wasn’t sure I could, really. I’ve never been the fingernails and the hair and all that — that’s just so not me. When we finally pulled her together physically, I was like, “OK, this hair and makeup girl’s a genius because I don’t look like that.” And for Fly Away, I had strip away any semblance of actress or presentation, and really live in this raw nerve center that is Jeanne’s life. They were both challenges in different ways.
First, let’s talk Fly Away. Did you talk with mothers of autistic children for research?
Not really. My sister Laura is one of the leading specialists in the country in working with adults with severe autism and disabilities. She’s been doing that all of her life, and I’ve been around it with her years and years and years. She was actually a consultant on the film and really helped us with a lot of those behaviors. We have all these parents out there who really are struggling, and when the kids turn to their teenage years, that’s when changes really happen and a lot of families can no longer cope. None of us are trained or prepared for our teenagers in the first place, but if they’re severely impacted? What the hell!
The shoot was 14 days long. That must have been a pretty exhausting two weeks.
It was bone-crushing exhaustion by the time I was done. Actually, the last few days of the film, I could no longer drive to the set. I was too tired and the producer picked me up because I was afraid I would run over somebody or crash my car. I was like, “Just let me sit here with ice on my face and I’ll get there!” [Laughs] You know when you take on a job like that and you look at the schedule, you know what it’s going to be. You know going in they’re going to try to kill me. And of course they do – they have no choice!
What other role that you’ve had come close to that emotional journey?
The character I played on Lost [as mother to Evangeline Lily’s Kate] was a pretty rough, emotional journey, but most of my career, I’ve been a light comedienne, which has its own set of complications — comedy’s hard. This was definitely the most sustained, dramatic role I’ve taken on in a long time.
Ashley really inhabits her role well, too.
It was very transformative. For a young actress like that — and believe me, I play the mom all the time, so I have a lot of movie and television children — she just came with no emotional complications. She was dedicated to doing it right and getting it right. She was such a little trouper and I really bonded with her almost from day one. I’m kind of an unfussy, very dedicated actor and so was she, and it really paved the way for us to have this amazing relationship on film.
Do you keep up with all of your movie and TV children?
Yeah, they always keep up with me, too. I mentored a group for a long time called the Young Progressive Majority, so there are about 2,000 people who call me mama out there in the world. [Laughs]
If you aren’t the “actressy actress” type, did you go a little over the top as Alyssa in (818)?
You kinda have to. You have to try to look almost fake, and I’m so not fake. I didn’t really know if I could be fake! [Laughs] And she’s such a shark. It doesn’t matter how dark it gets, she will find her way through, she will kill, she will do whatever she has to do to get where she needs to be. That’s an uncomfortable characteristic for me to inhabit, although I think the movie is really a lot of fun.
Do you feel more at home naturally in something like (818) than a gritty drama?
I would say probably, yeah – more at home in that it’sa more familiar state of being. Comedy is such an intellectual thing in a way because you really have to think on so many different levels, and I really enjoy that. It’s some place I like to live, whereas in a really gritty drama, you’ve really got to tear yourself apart to do it.
With the many actors and actresses you’ve met over the years, while they might not have been as shark-like as Alyssa, do you often see that kind of extreme ambition in either younger or older performers?
Both. There are actresses out there who will do anything they can to mess you up during an audition. They’ve got the extensions and the nails and the fake tan. It’s very hard for those people to get older – really hard. There’s a certain kind of desperation that kicks in because there’s a power that comes with that glamour. As women age, that power is taken away from them. And some of them really can’t give it up and makes them crazy, I’m sure you can think of a lot of tabloid examples of that in recent years with people who really had lived in that place all of their lives. Alyssa doesn’t fall apart — she just plays to win so hard that she sacrifices almost everything to get there. A lot of people just fall the hell apart when they hit their 50s, and it’s because of that ambition, that heat-seeking missile quality, they don’t develop any ego identity outside of our business. My ego identity is just as strong with being a mentor to young political aspirants and writing for the Huffington Post and being a good cook. My identity is equally distributed among those things. They always tell you, “Whatever you do, don’t get older,” and I just went and did it anyway. I’m prepared for the consequences of that. I’m very lucky in that I always work and I never pay much attention to anything but the work.
Do you feel like staying busy outside of acting keeps you balanced so you’re more laidback to work?
I think it’s been really important for me. If I were just an actor, I would have lost my mind long ago. I’m serious. I need the intellectual stimulation of trying to solve problems in the world at large and I need the emotional ballast that effort gives me. I’m a very sensitive person, and I don’t think I could read the paper and survive if I wasn’t trying to make it better. I wasn’t thinking along the lines of making my acting career sustainable and livable. I just follow my passions. I remember walking into my agent’s office in 2003 or 2004 and saying, “I hope you care about my career because I’ve got to go get Bush out of office. So I won’t be calling. I’m just going to hope you guys keep it together because I need to make a living but there’s work to do out here and I’m going to focus.” God bless them, they kept me working.
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