Interview: Robin Weigert On Playing a Lesbian Housewife Gone Wild In ‘Concussion’
Robin Weigert is best known for her incredible role on the late,
great HBO series “Deadwood” as drunken, foul-mouthed Calamity Jane. But
fans of that series — and anyone else, for that matter — are about to
see a very different side. Her bold, complex turn in Stacie Passon’s
“Concussion” was definitely been one of the highlights of Sundance, and now audiences around the country can see why for themselves as RADiUS-TWC releases the film in theaters and on demand this weekend.
In “Concussion,” Weigert plays Abby, a fortysomething lesbian who’s
married with two kids and lives in the New Jersey suburbia. But after
being hit in the head by her son’s baseball, Abby begins to unravel and
through a series of events finds herself with a new double life: Lesbian
housewife by night, high-end lesbian prositute by day. It’s a sexy,
uncomprising and unique take on the cinematic mid-life crisis that works
in large part because of Weigert’s peformance.
Weigert’s involvement in the project came via “one the rare moments” in
her life where she had an offer, the actress told Indiewire.
“I didn’t know anybody involved,” she said. “I really liked the script,
and an agent of mine was a big fan as well. Which is helpful when an
agent gets on board with a project. I met with Stacie and I really liked
her mind and the ideas behind the film. I couldn’t even look at a
former film of her’s because there just wasn’t one. But I could feel and
tell there was a significant vision here. It was really clear in
talking to her.”
Shortly thereafter Weigert was totally committed to the role, which she admits was a pretty vulnerable one.
“I had never had a sex scene before,” she said. “I had a tiny part in a
Steven Soderbergh film where I played Philip Seymour Hoffman’s adult
daughter whose a stripper. So there was some nudity in that. And there
was some very unflattering nudity where I had underarm merkins on in
‘Deadwood,’ but I hadn’t had any sex scenes like this before in my
career. And there were a lot of them in this film so that was new ground
for me.”
Weigert prepared for the role mainly by working on her body and trying
to get to place where she could get out of her head and into the part.
“I’ve been asked in a couple interviews if I did research on sex work,”
she said. “And I was like, ‘God, no.’ Why not? Well, the character
doesn’t. It’s not like she’s in a line of work. She’s someone leading a
fairly conventional life who takes one step out of the box and then
another step out of the box. You know? I thought, ‘Let it be
experiential.’ Let me have her experiences.”
Those experiences included sex scenes with women she’d literally never met until moments before the cameras rolled.
“A couple cases I didn’t know the women at all before,” Weigert said.
“I hadn’t hung out with these actresses whatsoever. They would come in
and change into their underwear or something and we’d shake hands and do
the scene. It was a very strange experience. All I can say is that with
each person there was an intuitive understanding of what might bring it
to a place where the head was out of the game. Where you weren’t
thinking. Which is I think that obstructs that from being genuine or
intimate or passionate or whatever. When your head gets involved.”
But Weigert said that it wasn’t those scenes that made her the most
anxious on set, but instead the ones where she was playing the bored
housewife side of her character’s double life.
“As an actor, I worried that that would just recede and not play,” she
said. “I didn’t know how boredom plays. Not just boredom, but all of
those states of mind that come from being in a state of unease with your
life. In my mind I was like how do you follow a protoganist whose in
that state for a long period of the film. Do you get on board with her?
But Stacie knew exactly what she was doing.”
One thing Weigert very specifically hopes comes of the experience is
having the film find it’s way to sex and relationship advice icon Dan
Savage.
“It would be so interesting to me to hear what Dan Savage might have to
say about a film like this,” she said. “Because he’s constantly teasing
open the subject of monogamy and how realistic it is in a way that’s
very controversial in this culture that everybody sort of in a box. His
call-ins are all over the place, from the gayest of gay to the
straightest of the straight. And they have a million questions. The idea
that there could be permission to solve these problems differently is
so mind-blowing to people in a fairly conventional culture.”
Dan Savage, are you listening? Book Weigert and Passon as guests on your show ASAP.
