Did you ever think you’d see the day when Meryl Streep would star in a Diablo Cody-written film? Meryl plays a rock star trying to make amends with her children in Ricki and the Flash. The movie has an interesting cast, including Sebastian Stan and Rick Springfield. Meryl’s real-life daughter, Mamie Gummer, plays her daughter in the movie. They also both appeared in Evening but played the same character in different phases of life. It must be hard coming into the business as Meryl’s daughter, but Mamie handles her own career (including a role on The Good Wife) pretty well .
Mamie has a new interview with Backstage to promote Ricki. Some excerpts:
: “I think weather is how stories start. It’s, like, the rains come, you’ve got to make a choice. You’ve got to find shelter. It activates. There’s conflict, and the group comes together. My favorite thing ever is the beginning of spring, when everyone sort of collectively emerges from this hibernation of ‘That was rough, huh? But we made it through.’ I have a good coat. And I like the camaraderie that’s bred in the face of that, even though it’s a low level of adversity. I like walking into a crowded, warm restaurant and everyone’s in there seeking the same warmth and consolation. I dig that.”
She prefers New York City to Los Angeles: She quotes Mark Twain — “Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company” — in comparing the two cities. “I’d rather be in hell and in good company,” she says, adding that Hollywood’s high society is unbearable for similar reasons. “It’s homogenous. It’s the sameness that starts to feel stultifying and stagnating, like everyone’s running on empty. It’s like SoulCycle, a whole city of SoulCycling. Spinning, spinning, spinning, going nowhere.”
She also can’t find work in LA: She moved there for a change of scene, she says, after her marriage to actor Benjamin Walker ended, and suddenly she “just couldn’t get a job. I didn’t work, really, for over a year. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. So I started really doing that thing that everybody tells you to do. Just treat an audition like an opportunity. This is your chance to just try stuff, try something. Have fun. That’s what got me out the door.”
She yells at Meryl in this movie: “That was fun. But it was hard to come down so furiously on the person that I actually love the most in the world.” She and Streep would communicate wordlessly, as only parents and children can, keeping each other’s performances truthful between takes of particularly fraught scenes. “It was a mirror thing, like, ‘You weren’t buying that, were you? Me neither.’ She’s one of the very few people who knows when I’m lying.”
[From Backstage]
Mamie’s career downswing in LA correlates with the period following her surprise divorce in 2013. She didn’t enjoy LA at all for that reason and more. I think she’ll be just fine. Mamie has serious talent. She’s not one of those bubbly “it” girls, but that will work to her advantage in the long term. Girl’s got longevity in her veins. Here’s the Ricki and the Flash trailer again. It looks really good.
Photos courtesy of WENN
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