Jennifer Jason Leigh has said it more than once, over a three-decade career in acting, that she doesn’t scheme, or plan ahead – that she “isn’t a careerist”. The 53-year-old says it today, sitting in the bar of a hotel in New York. “I’m not great at judging a career. Or planning one.” It would sound like thesp-talk, the sort of thing established actors say to help us imagine them cool and fallible, were Leigh not so obviously guileless, with a history to back up what she says. Her CV is wild: like the inky passport of a student who’s been InterRailing on gut, shambling upon great things, then oversleeping stops, ending up in sidings.
In person Leigh is soft-voiced, a floor-starer, with kinked blond hair that hangs down over her cheeks. She wears loafers, leather trousers, a dark jumper and a colourful patchwork scarf. Curled up on a sofa, she tells a story about how, not so long ago, she was going through a quiet patch, professionally. She took work on a French cartoon series, voicing the part of a plucky cowgirl in French. “I thought it might be lucrative,” says Leigh. “It was not lucrative. Anyway I got fired after 10 episodes, replaced by a French actress.” In the years since, Leigh says, there haven’t been a lot of screen jobs that she has been proud of – not until this winter, when she’ll star in the new Quentin Tarantino film, The Hateful Eight, as well as in the new Charlie Kaufman film, Anomalisa.
This is huge, I say. “Insane! The two best movies I’ve made in a decade,” she says, “coming out right next to each other.” But this seems to be how things work for Leigh, who in her own words “has been around for ever”.
She is admirably unbitter about the lack of awards she has accumulated. Back in the early 1990s, when the Hollywood magazine Movieline ran an introductory profile on the actor, the cover line was bold: “Future Oscar Winner, Jennifer Jason Leigh.” The actor giggles, genuinely tickled, when reminded of this. Her Oscar has never come, not even a nomination. At the ceremony in 1996 – when Leigh might have got a nod for the drama Georgia, in which she played a forlorn alcoholic – Meryl Streep went about backstage, grabbing at least one mutual acquaintance to say: “Jennifer should be here!” Again, Leigh giggles. “Meryl’s sweet.”
She talks about her pleasure at being asked to audition for Tarantino’s Hateful Eight. The film, out in the UK this month after a December release in the US, is set in Wyoming shortly after the civil war. Among the warring gang of desperados who make up the titular Hatefuls, Tarantino needed someone to play a convict called Daisy Domergue, wild-haired, foul-mouthed. “She’s a pepper, ain’t she?” it is said of Daisy, in the opening scene. Tarantino required an actor who could do pepper.
They met for dinner, and reminisced about the Cannes film festival in 1994. Tarantino had been there with Pulp Fiction, Leigh with a biopic, Mrs Parker And The Vicious Circle, as well as a Coen Brothers movie, The Hudsucker Proxy. These were the only two American movies up against Pulp Fiction for the Palme d’Or, and Leigh was starring in both. Tarantino took note. “He told me that when he was coming up, I was one of the actresses he paid to go to the movies to see. Hearing that was a big deal. I don’t look back and think, ‘Oh! There was a time!’ But it’s nice to know that that old work can still mean something.”
Leigh is clearly dismayed by the tendency in Hollywood to consider actors as having a sell-by date. “And this is something that makes Quentin different from most directors,” she says. “He doesn’t just look at the last three movies you’ve made. The last three years of your career. He was quoting lines from a movie I made when I was, like, 23. He can look at me and see that I’m still that person who gave that performance... Not to compare an actor to a painter, but you can go through different phases and still be the same artist, y’know?”
From the start, Tarantino has been a great one for reviving the standing of forgotten or under-appreciated actors: John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Daryl Hannah in the Kill Bill series. Just about all of his movies have one – the apparent Rehab Project. Did Leigh interpret anything patronising in his interest in her?
“No! I felt grateful and lucky. It’s a really fun part – and you just don’t come across those. Forget about age. Forget about male or female. Forget about anything. You just don’t come across fun so much. And Quentin writes like nobody’s business. So no, I didn’t, uh…”
Leigh thinks for a moment.
“I can imagine other people thinking it. Like, ‘Oh, that’s so nice for [Jennifer]. It could be a breakthrough for her again.’ For me it’s all about the joy of the doing.”
British bookmakers, not a bunch to risk their money, have Leigh down as a good bet for an Oscar nomination for The Hateful Eight. “That’s nice,” she says, learning this. She points out that Charlie Kaufman’s film Anomalisa, a stop-motion animation to which she has lent her voice, has been a part of the possible-Oscar conversation, too. (Anomalisa, out in the US this month, won’t be released in Britain until March.) “It’s all nice.”
Only nice? “You know what? Honestly? I’ve been at this precipice, like, so many times.”
Leigh was here with Last Exit To Brooklyn (1989), in which she played a troubled prostitute and received rave reviews. And with Georgia, for which her co-star, Mare Winningham, was nominated for an Oscar instead of Leigh, and afterwards sounded frankly embarrassed about the fact. (“In my mind [Jennifer’s] will always be the greatest performance of [1995], and a lot of other people thought so, too.”)
Leigh continues, “So I kind of just let myself think: ‘That’s nice.’ Awards are lovely. I’m not going to say: ‘Awards! Who needs them?’ It feels nice to get them. And they look pretty. But I don’t… There are a lot of people who are locked [to be nominated] and, you know, if I listed all of them, some would make the list. And some not.”
For those who are serious about their statue, the campaigning work becomes full-time around Christmas. No doubt Leigh has damaged her chances in the past by being a reluctant lobbyist. “If you knew what actors did to get nominated,” she once said, “it would make you shit your pants.”
Will she hit the campaign trail for her work in The Hateful Eight? If she was asked to, she would. “You know why? I really feel like this movie could be The Last Great Thing.” She’s 53, but Leigh refers to herself once or twice as a veteran, and seems to imply she won’t have all that many more decades left to wait for the first-class parts to be offered. “I certainly feel like we were all a part of something magnificent. So you want to give it everything that you can. I have a great movie... Two great movies, because I think Anomalisa is groundbreaking and poignant and beautiful... Two great movies that, when my kid is old enough – which will be many, many, many years from now – he will be able to see. And I hope be proud. I’m proud of them. And that’s really nice to be able to say at 53.”
When not on location, much of The Hateful Eight was shot in a small studio in LA, not far from the home Leigh shares with her five-year-old son, Rohmer. (Rohmer’s father is the American director Noah Baumbach, Leigh’s former husband.) Mother and son would spend a lot of time pootling around behind the scenes together. Field trips, Leigh calls them.
“I’d take Rohmer to the makeup trailer and explain about prosthetics. ‘This is the silicone rubber’ – it was for a little cut on my face, y’know? He was transfixed. But still. It’s a little off-putting for a kid. There’s a scene in which my nose is broken, swollen – again, done by prosthetic. He did not like kissing me when I had that on. He would ask before visiting the set, ‘Will you have the nose? Or not the nose?’” Between scenes the two of them would ride around the lot on scooters. “Mine’s silver,” Leigh says. “His is blue.”
She grew up around movies herself. Leigh’s father, Vic Morrow, was an actor; her mother, Barbara Turner, to whom Leigh is still very close, is a screenwriter. The actor once said she knew how to judge the quality of a script because she’d grown up reading drafts of her mum’s work. “I trust her,” Leigh says now. “She’s always been symbolic to me of what a woman can do in her life.”
Mother and daughter disagreed, however, about Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982), Leigh’s first big film. “Mom said she didn’t respond to the script. I remember she was blowdrying her hair when she told me. It really cut me to the quick!” Leigh trusted her gut and took the part anyway, going on to play a prim Ridgemont High student called Stacy. The film was a smash, launching careers as if out of a Gatling gun – those of Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Nicolas Cage, the director Amy Heckerling, the writer Cameron Crowe. It took a few years before Leigh established a name of her own, though, post-Ridgemont. Last Exit To Brooklyn, in 1989, won attention. Miami Blues, a year later, “was the first movie I made where I felt like there was no scene I fucked up,” she recalls.
By this point Leigh was already entrenched in the lifetime habit of deep and time-consuming prep for parts. She’d imagine herself into the heads of characters and write diaries. Cast as a blind girl in an early horror movie, Eyes Of A Stranger (1981), Leigh spent time between scenes brushing up on her braille. She geared up to play a stalker obsessed with Bridget Fonda’s character in Single White Female (1992) by wallpapering her dressing room with pictures of her co-star, as well as spraying a prop dildo with mint flavouring between takes when filming the infamous blowjob scene. Before playing a phone-sex operator in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Leigh spent time in phone-sex offices.
“A bunch of them,” she remembers. “I read the logs and recognised names. There were directors in there. Two people I knew personally. Their credit card numbers. How often they called. Preferences!”
Did she ever take a call?
“No. That would have been crossing the line.”
So there was a line?
“There was a line.”
Things that didn’t cross the line: turning herself into a chainsmoker before Dolores Claiborne (1995), or letting Alan Cumming punch her for real during a fight they filmed for The Anniversary Party (2001).
Looking back, have these preparations ever come to look excessive to her – silly even? “Not really. It’s just all exploration. I never endangered myself. I never forced my mode of working on anyone else. Everyone has their own way to get to it.” If ever she was cast to play a mother, before she was a mother for real, she says she used to think of her love for her dog. These days she thinks of Rohmer. “You can use that, that love – it’s so huge.”
Leigh began dating Rohmer’s father Noah Baumbach in 2001, the pair introduced by a mutual friend. They married in 2005, the year they started making a film called Margot At The Wedding together. A drama that Baumbach directed from his own script, with Nicole Kidman, Jack Black and Leigh cast in the central roles, Margot was a wonderfully twisted story of inter-family resentment. Leigh played a well-meaning and occasionally irresponsible parent, about to have a second child. For the role – as a way to get to it – she drew on the fact that she and Baumbach were gearing up to become parents themselves. “I was just about [trying to get] pregnant then. So it was easy to have maternal feelings.”
Rohmer was born a few years later. By then the couple had collaborated on another film, Greenberg, the story of a depressed carpenter, played by Ben Stiller, who begins a relationship with a younger woman, played by Greta Gerwig. Leigh had a small but significant role as Stiller’s ex, and she shared a writing credit with Baumbach. A perfectly pitched film, Greenberg was one of the best dramas of 2010.
Leigh has not rewatched it. “I haven’t revisited those movies. I think they’re both good movies. Y’know, I enjoyed the process of making them...”
Her marriage to Baumbach ended at around the time of Greenberg’s release, and he has since been in a relationship with Gerwig. In a joint interview published in the New Yorker, Baumbach and Gerwig insisted their romance began after his marriage was over. The new couple have gone on to collaborate on more movies, two since Greenberg. Meanwhile, documentation relating to Baumbach and Leigh’s divorce has been uploaded to several gossip and celebrity websites.
Leigh, understandably, is not eager to discuss this side of her life. “I don’t think it’s that important for people to know.” She says of Baumbach: “We co-parent really well.” Asked if she’s started seeing anybody since, she puts out a finger, polite, firm: enough. “That I don’t want to talk about.”
What she will say is that Anomalisa has served as a strange sort of frame around the upheaval. Kaufman wrote the script for Anomalisa more than a decade ago. He always had Leigh in mind for the part of Lisa, a woman from Ohio who is lonely, eager to be loved, but spirited – optimistic. In the story, Lisa has a short, sudden romance with an older British man called Michael. Back in 2005, Kaufman arranged for Leigh and the British actor David Thewlis to perform Anomalisa as a play. The small-scale production ran for two nights at a student theatre in LA. After that, Kaufman put the script away, eventually reviving it a couple of years ago and beginning the process of turning it into an animated film.
He asked Leigh to play Lisa again. Seven or eight years, and a lot of life had gone by in that time. “I’d just got married the first time we did Anomalisa,” Leigh recalls. “And by the second time I was alone, raising my son as a single mom. And… life had shifted. Like, under my feet, without my knowledge, suddenly – this big change.”
Lisa is such a lovelorn figure. Did the changes in Leigh’s situation alter her approach to the character? “I don’t know,” she says. “Lisa is so beautifully written, there’s just no way to fuck her up. But I guess I understand her in a very deep way.” She leaves it there.
As long ago as 1992 – in that old article, in fact, that had Leigh down as a future Oscar winner – she outlined to the magazine how she hoped her future would pan out. “I want to spend my entire life,” she said back then, “staying out of those who-fucked-who maps of the world... My ideal life would be to play all these great characters, and disappear.”
How well does Leigh think she’s done on this?
“I think pretty well, actually,” she says.
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