3/25/2023 0 Comments Catherine mccormack 28 weeks later![]() She's now negotiating to stage Patrick Marber's TV sequel to Strindberg, After Miss Julie. In the past two years she has won acclaim in her first two theatre roles - in Arthur Miller's All My Sons (she was nominated for an Olivier award) and in Mike Cullen's false-memory syndrome drama Anna Weiss. That's partly because, unlike many who rail at the system even as they pander to it, she has now decided to get on with her life and let Hollywood go hang. The words sound glum, but McCormack's tirade is delivered with a smile, and a sense of her own ridiculousness. So I thought I'd try the small parts with good directors, and that hasn't worked either." I'd tried the good parts with shitty directors and it turned out very mediocre. ![]() "I worked with someone who's a brilliant director, John Boorman, but I played such a flat part and I hated it. It's really extraordinary." Her other recent movie is the Pierce Brosnan flick The Tailor of Panama. The kind of things they ask me to do! I tell them, 'If I did that, I wouldn't have any women friends left at home.' They're clueless. Soon after that movie is mentioned, she unleashes the following outburst: "I happen to have worked with male directors who don't understand women at all. The "another one" in question may be Spy Game, directed by Tony Scott, in which McCormack stars with Brad Pitt. Everything inside me said no and everybody else said, 'Yes, do it, because it'll help you on the way to doing interesting films.'" I've just done another one and I don't know why the fuck I did it. But I always thought that'd never work, and I'd get stuck doing silly films and playing love interests. "Maybe if you do the Charlie's Angels," she speculates, "you can then leap from that to. I once thought I kind of did." She tried to navigate a course through bad scripts towards good ones. So how does a young actor get ahead? "I don't really know how it works any more. But when you get home, and look at those lines about how fabulous you are, it all feels like bullshit. Only after her second movie, Mel Gibson's Braveheart, did the maelstrom of celebrity threaten to engulf her. You don't see me in magazines at first nights." Even when going out with the actor Joseph Fiennes, McCormack has never courted publicity. It doesn't help that she's not a natural schmoozer. ![]() The remark hints at the isolation that McCormack has often expressed as an actress adrift in the Hollywood machine. "Actors are accustomed to doing exactly what the director or writer requests us to do, and rarely get involved in that part of the process." "It's nice to have an input," says McCormack. The script has been constantly evolving since its four-strong cast came on board. It sounds like a badly arranged marriage between performer and play - except that McCormack claims to be "a huge romantic" and credits Chibnall with being "very, very receptive to what may be hopeless or helpful thoughts we actors had". ![]() "I think they get pissed that night, probably have an argument and fuck off in different directions." She also pokes fun at what the play suggests may be an enduring romance between its two young suitors. "If someone said to me, 'I love you,' on the first day and went bleary-eyed, I'd want to be sick," she says. On paper, Chibnall's romance errs dangerously close to sentimentality, and, says McCormack, "I don't like things that say how you feel, and this play did." For instance, her character is required to fall for a man who seduces her at a party. "It's funny and moving," concedes McCormack - but she has reservations. Her recent roles in two Britfilm romantic comedies - This Year's Love and Born Romantic - will have prepared McCormack for the material: she plays one half of a couple whose relationship begins just as, upstairs from the party where they meet, that of an elderly couple comes to an unusual end. It came to McCormack's attention after she took part in a script reading at the theatre and met its artistic director, Abigail Morris. Kiss Me Like You Mean It is the young writer Chris Chibnall's first work for Soho Theatre. But McCormack doesn't pull her punches, about her new stage role or about a profession with which she is rapidly becoming, in her own words, "fed up".įirst, the play. Indiscretion from a Hollywood star is as uncommon as summer rain, and just as refreshing. So it's a surprise when Catherine McCormack, 29-year-old British actress and erstwhile Braveheart star, admits that she has taken a job in fringe theatre not because her heart belongs to the stage, but because "I was six weeks unemployed and getting very miserable". F ilm stars are in demand, right? They pick and choose the vehicles to transport them ever higher up Mount Olympus, leaving to us lesser mortals our career crises and what's-it-all-for? angst.
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