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Showing posts with label Clea DuVall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clea DuVall. Show all posts
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Friday, January 12, 2024
Kristen's cover feature for Variety - January 2024
BTS
Interview
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Kristen Stewart is jabbing her finger into the couch we’re sharing, speaking with increasing speed and ferocity about what has driven her to this brink. She’s spent five years fruitlessly trying to drum up financing for what she hopes will be her feature directing debut, “The Chronology of Water,” based on the stream-of-consciousness memoir by bisexual author Lidia Yuknavitch. She’s so hacked off about it that she’s about to ruin the furniture.
“I won’t make a-fucking-nother movie until I make this movie,” she declares. Then she sits back and breaks into nervous laughter. “Can’t wait for my agents to read that.”
Stewart has clearly entered the “fuck it” phase of her career.
Don’t worry: She isn’t going anywhere yet. Next week, Stewart is packing her snow boots for her eighth trek to the Sundance Film Festival, where she’s premiered films from “The Runaways” to “Camp X-Ray.” This year, she’s headlining two movies there — the existential sci-fi romance “Love Me” and the queer crime thriller “Love Lies Bleeding.”
Just sitting with her on this bright December afternoon in Los Angeles, I begin to understand what Stewart’s next phase looks like. Her brown hair frames her head in a brambled mullet, and she’s wearing a simple, careworn gray T-shirt and ripped jeans. She looks butch, comfortable, herself.
To get to this point, Stewart’s weathered more than a decade of unrelenting media scrutiny, first about her straight relationships, then about her gay ones, as she figured out her own identity. She leveraged her global stardom from the “Twilight” franchise not to become a superhero or a lifestyle guru, but to fuel an astonishing run of acclaimed independent films, including “Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Still Alice,” “Certain Women,” “Personal Shopper” and the Princess Diana drama “Spencer,” for which she earned an Oscar nomination.
“Whenever I hear that she’s doing something new, I’m so curious to see what it is, because it’s going to be a movie that hasn’t been made before,” says Clea DuVall, who directed Stewart in one of her only Hollywood films during this period, Hulu’s 2020 release “Happiest Season,” the first lesbian Christmas rom-com backed by a major studio. “She really is so herself. And I think that’s why so many people respond to her the way they do — because she is so authentic.”
Authenticity has always been paramount for Stewart. Her ability to burrow into the truth of whatever scene she’s playing has made her one of the most quirky and compelling actors of her generation, and she’s handled her public life with such endearingly awkward charm, she’s made it all seem effortless. But it wasn’t. “People say to me, ‘Oh, you’ve just so come out of your shell,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘Well, yeah. I’m 33. It was really hard.’”
As she entered her 30s, something profound shifted for Stewart. She’s candid about everything now, from watching herself as an 11-year-old acting opposite Jodie Foster in “Panic Room” to Foster’s public defense of her during her tabloid breakup with Robert Pattinson; from why she came out on “Saturday Night Live” in 2017 to the queer undercurrents of the “Twilight” movies. And while “Love Me” and “Love Lies Bleeding” could scarcely be more different from each other, both movies nurtured her need to explore the edges of her identity.
Those films are Stewart’s 11th and 12th at Sundance; she’s been coming since she was 13. But this time, rather than spend just a few days in Park City, Utah, marching up and down Main Street to a procession of promotional events, Stewart plans to attend the full run of the festival.
“I can go meet fledgling filmmakers and actually experience Sundance the way that it’s talked about — as a breeding ground for connection — and, I don’t know, get drunk and yell at each other, and be like, ‘What did you think of that movie for real? There’s no journalists present,’” she says, then stops to reassure me: “I’m going to be real with you.”
By the time Stewart stepped on the stage of “Saturday Night Live” in February 2017, she’d spent the previous two years trying to convince the press that it was OK to write about her relationships with women, rather than resort to the vexing practice of referring to her girlfriend as her “gal pal.”
“It wasn’t even like I was hiding,” she says. “I was so openly out with my girlfriend for years at that point. I’m like, ‘I’m a pretty knowable person.’”
But even with that posture, the media’s “gal pal” dog whistle triggered a deeper, more painful history of intrusive curiosity about Stewart’s sexual identity. “For so long, I was like, ‘Why are you trying to skewer me? Why are you trying to ruin my life? I’m a kid, and I don’t really know myself well enough yet,’” she says. “The idea of people going, ‘I knew that you were a little queer kid forever.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, you should honestly have seen me fuck my first boyfriend.’”
It’s worth dwelling on this point: For almost the entire history of Hollywood, queer actors dreaded the public discovering who they really were, and that fear kept the closet door firmly closed. “Because I was gay, I really retreated,” says DuVall, who came out publicly in 2016. “Even doing a teeny tiny movie like [the ’90s lesbian cult favorite] ‘But I’m a Cheerleader,’ people immediately were like, ‘She’s gay, how can we out her?’ I wanted to stay small.”
Stewart, though, went big, with a monologue on “SNL” about how President Donald Trump, in 2012, obsessively tweeted about her relationship with Pattinson. “Donald, if you didn’t like me then, you’re really probably not going to like me now, because I’m hosting ‘SNL’ — and I’m, like, so gay, dude,” she said to wild cheers from the audience.
"It was cool to frame it in a funny context because it could say everything without having to sit down and do an interview,” Stewart says before running through the kind of questions queer actors have had to consider before coming out publicly: “‘So what platform is that going to be on? And who’s going to make money on that? And who’s going to be the person that broke it?’ I broke it, alone.”
A few days later, I mention Stewart’s “SNL” monologue to Foster over the phone, and she lets out a big laugh. “I never knew that,” she says. “What a wonderful, funny, wry, modern way to be honest to the world. That’s just awesome.”
As Stewart talks about her “SNL” experience, I think about how no stars of her age and stature ever came out when I was growing up as a gay kid in the 1980s and ’90s. So to have her professional trajectory not skip a beat feels like real progress.
When I tell her as much, she takes the conversation in an unexpected direction. “Because I’m an actor, I want people to like me, and I want certain parts,” she says. “I have lots of different experiences that shape who I am that are very, very far from binary. But I did get good at the heteronormative quality. I play that role well. It comes from a somewhat real place — it’s not fake. But it’s fucked up that if I was gayer, it wouldn’t be the case.”
I try to clarify what she means: “So your career maybe would have suffered after coming out had you not affected a performative femininity …”
“… that I know works to my advantage,” she admits, nodding. “That’s why I’m fucking stoked about ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’”
The moment Stewart saw Rose Glass’ 2020 debut feature, “Saint Maud” — a psychological thriller about a caretaker whose obsession with saving the soul of her charge takes on a harrowing, hallucinatory fervor — she wanted to get to know the British filmmaker. “I couldn’t believe that a young woman who’d never made a movie made a movie like that,” Stewart says. “Just to be allowed to find a voice in that way is not an easy task, and it was ambitious and funny and scary.”
The actor arranged a meeting during a trip to London, and asked Glass what she was doing next. “She told me that she had a movie about a really strong girl,” Stewart says. “I was like, ‘OK, I guess that’s what we’re supposed to do.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, but this is different.’”
“Love Lies Bleeding,” which opens in theaters in March, follows Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an aspiring bodybuilder with a killer physique, who catches the eye of Lou (Stewart), a meek, boyish lesbian who looks after the gym where Jackie works out. Their attraction is mutual and immediate — and complicated after Jackie starts working for Lou’s father (Ed Harris), a murderous gun runner.
Glass laughs when asked how Stewart reacted to the script. “She said to me, ‘Sometimes you get offered parts which are kind of like, I don’t know if I can do this one,’” Glass says. “‘When I read your script, I was like, Well, who the fuck else is she going to get to play this?’”
As an actor, Stewart does occupy a category of one: a young queer female movie star whose very presence conjures robust financial support. Glass had big ambitions for her second effort, but it wasn’t until Stewart signed on that “A24 and Film4 suddenly decide they’re trusting you with all this money.”
Stewart had a similar catalytic effect on “Love Me,” which will play in competition at Sundance as it seeks distribution. When first-time writer-directors Andy and Sam Zuchero, a husband-and-wife team, approached her about the film, “she read it in a weekend and immediately got back to us and said, ‘Let’s meet right now,’” Sam says.
“We’ve been pitching this movie about a buoy and a satellite that fall in love, and most people say, ‘A what? A who?’” Andy adds. “But Kristen instantly was just like, ‘Oh cool, like, a post-human love story about transcending forms and loving yourself no matter what shape you are — count me in. Can I be the buoy?’”
Stewart was taken with the film’s look at how a person defines their own identity while contending with how they think they’re expected to behave. The movie opens long after humanity has vacated Earth, and all that’s left are two AIs: a buoy, named Me, created to catalog the ocean, and a satellite, named Iam (played by Steven Yeun), loaded with every last megabyte of recorded history. Eventually, Me and Iam adopt human avatars based on a social media influencer couple (also played by Stewart and Yeun) whose videos Me discovers inside Iam’s mainframe.
As she talks about shooting scenes with Yeun, Stewart begins sheepishly fiddling with her hair. “Steven and I took on very binary roles, which was very surprising with a movie about identity,” she says with a mix of exasperation and wonder at how easily she’d slipped into that “heteronormative quality” once again. “I felt this desperate girl thing so often, and Steven was so pragmatic about everything. I was like, ‘Oh God, biology exists for sure.’”
By sharp contrast, what most interested Stewart in “Love Lies Bleeding” was just how unapologetically queer the movie felt, and how radically different Lou — masculine, scrappy and unmistakably horny — is from all the classically feminine roles that made her career.
“I always wanted Lou to have this moody boyish charm, to be butch and androgynous in a way which not many actors of Kristen’s profile are,” Glass says. “Weirdly, I can’t think of that many roles like this she’s done, and yet to be honest, it feels like it’s maybe a bit closer to who she is.”
It’s hard not to notice how much Stewart brightens as she talks about Lou’s more butch qualities. “There was something about having the things that I have found attractive be really glorified,” she says. “It was really sexy. And I don’t mean from an outsider’s perspective: I felt turned on by it, and it was cool to have people witness that.”
She means that literally: Lou and Jackie have sex multiple times in “Love Lies Bleeding,” including getting it on in Lou’s bathroom in a way that will both thrill and scandalize Sundancers. “They don’t take their clothes off, but this is going to shock people,” she says.
Stewart and Glass believed that the sex in “Love Lies Bleeding” needed to feel real. “All you ever [usually] see is a dress coming up and a head going down under,” Stewart says. “I think even hetero sex on film is so rote. You go, ‘OK, I know what that looks like in movies, that’s what we’ll do,’ because no one actually wants to reveal themselves.”
And that’s precisely what Stewart wanted to do with “Love Lies Bleeding” — reveal more of how she sees herself than she ever has on film.
Before filming started, Stewart visited Glass’ residence in Albuquerque, N.M., with her “friend-slash-hairstylist,” the director says, to begin transforming into Lou. “Her hair was still longish and blond,” Glass adds. “She was just like, ‘Oh, get it off me.’” At one point, Stewart took the scissors and finished off Lou’s hair herself, as her stylist looked on nervously.
“When I watched the movie, I was like, ‘This is really cool to see me look like this again,’” Stewart says. “I haven’t looked like that since ‘Panic Room.’”
For most of her adult life, Stewart had avoided watching the movie that launched her onto the public’s radar. She turned 11 while making the 2002 David Fincher film — playing Foster’s tomboy daughter, who rallies to her aid when their Manhattan townhouse is invaded — and, she says, “Little-kid stuff makes me very embarrassed.”
Recently, though, “Panic Room” happened to be on TV in her home while she was hanging out with friends. “Everyone was like, ‘Come on, this is such a trip, dude. You need to just remember,’” she says, cringing at the memory. She agreed to watch just one scene but wound up sitting for the whole thing, drawn in by Foster’s intensely physical performance and Fincher’s tightly wound direction. It was enough to force Stewart to push past her self-consciousness and really see what so many queer people had sensed about her from the start.
“I was already going like, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’” She starts laughing. “I was gay.”
“Isn’t it interesting?” Foster says about Stewart’s revelation. “There’s so much that you bring to a role that’s conscious, that’s choreographed, that you thought about. And then there are things that you’re working with that are entirely unconscious, that you won’t really understand until years later, or maybe never.”
Foster speaks with me on a December morning from her car “because everyone’s still asleep and every bedroom in the house is taken,” and her perspective on Stewart is similarly conveyed through the lens of maternal warmth and concern. “She feels like a daughter to me,” she says. “I worried that the job would swallow up what was best about her, because I worried about that for myself. There was a sort of unconscious similarity between us. I guess that’s why I’ve always felt so protective of her, because I wanted her to grow into the person she was meant to be.”
In 2012, after paparazzi caught Stewart making out with “Snow White and the Huntsman” director Rupert Sanders while she was still in a relationship with Pattinson, Foster even wrote an op-ed for The Daily Beast defending her.
“It was such a truly kind act,” Stewart says. “I really needed Jodie to unpack that for other people before I could even understand.”
Foster is still frustrated by the uproar. “The whole thing was just stupid,” she says. “When you’re in your 20s, you do all sorts of stupid shit. I felt for her. I wish for her that she had the space and the privacy to be able to explore herself so that she could be a full human being.”
Stewart didn’t let that scandal, as intense as it was in the moment, stifle her. Instead, she grew to fully embrace her queerness in her public life — like bringing her girlfriend, screenwriter Dylan Meyer, to the Oscars in 2022. “It’s not that I wasn’t scared,” Stewart says. “It was just that there was no other way to live.”
She’s even started to recognize that the most ostensibly heterosexual thing she’s done, “Twilight,” has its own queer sparkle. “I can only see it now,” she says. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie. I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”
I ask Stewart if she understands how much her decision to come out has also made her a role model for LGBTQ people. She cackles. “Oh, you have no idea,” she says. “Every single woman that I’ve ever met in my whole life who ever kissed a girl in college is like, ‘Yeah, I mean, me too.’ I’m constantly joking with my girlfriend. I’ll be sitting there and be like” — she whispers — “‘She’s gay too. Everyone’s gay.’”
It can be easy to forget just how rare this still is, a giant movie star living such an openly queer life. “It feels like a generational thing, where I’m watching somebody make the leaps that I didn’t think I could ever do,” Foster says.
After fiercely guarding her privacy for decades, Foster came out publicly at the 2013 Golden Globes, and has just now played her first explicitly gay character in the 2023 biopic “Nyad.” Talking about Stewart has put Foster in a reflective mood. As our call is coming to an end, she offers this unprompted insight: “I get a lot of questions about who I was and what I represented in the industry, and was I — I don’t know …” She exhales. “Was I helpful in terms of representation? I’m sure there’s a 12- or 13- or 14-year-old when I was making movies as a young person who said that I had something to offer to them in their life as a queer person. I had to do it my way. I had pioneers to help the way, who I’m grateful for. And now people can be grateful for Kristen for being the pioneer. I’m just — I’m grateful to her.”
This sense of communion with the wider LGBTQ tribe is why Stewart has dedicated herself to embracing the fullness of who she is as a bro-y, butch-y queer woman in her work as an actor and, come hell or high water, a director.
“I was like, ‘I would like to be on that team because we need each other,’” Stewart says. “I didn’t want to be left out anymore. It was this whole world that I didn’t realize I could explore.”
She sighs that signature Kristen Stewart sigh and smiles, ready to embark upon the next chapter of her life — starting at Sundance.
“I want to go make friends,” she says. “I want to be a young filmmaker. I need to find my people.”
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At the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, Kristen Stewart announced that her feature directorial debut would be an adaptation of “The Chronology of Water,” the 2011 memoir by author Lidia Yuknavitch. Since then, Stewart has been pounding the pavement to drum up financing for the project. But despite her track record of headlining some of the most well regarded independent films of the last 10 years — from “Clouds of Sils Maria” to “Spencer” — and despite the fact that Imogen Poots is attached to star as Yuknavitch, and that Ridley Scott is producing through his production company Scott Free, Stewart has been unable to secure the backing she needs to move forward.
This frustrating experience has pushed Stewart to make a surprising announcement about “The Chronology of Water” during her interview for Variety’s Jan. 11 cover story.
“I’m going to make this movie before I ever work for someone else,” she says, before breaking into nervous laughter. “Yeah, I will quit the fucking business. I won’t make a-fucking-nother movie until I make this movie. I will tell you that, for sure. I think that will get things going.”
The 33-year-old is starring in two feature films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the pulpy lesbian crime thriller “Love Lies Bleeding” and the conceptual sci-fi romance “Love Me.” She’s also filmed a supporting role in the upcoming indie road trip comedy “Sacramento,” costarring Michael Cera, Maya Erskine, and Michael Angarano, who is making his directorial debut with the film. But then her slate is clear, and she does not intend to fill it until she can get “The Chronology of Water” made.
Reaching that goal, however, has been “near impossible,” Stewart says. “The current climate is a real, capital N ‘No’ for anything that has not been proven already.”
Stewart knows that one of the hurdles is that she wants to recreate Yuknavitch’s non-linear, stream-of-consciousness prose — meant to evoke the elusive tumult of memory — as a cinematic experience, while portraying how the author’s personal and sexual traumas fueled her alcohol abuse even as she was striving to be a competitive swimmer.
“I think there’s an entire, yet-to-be-written female language,” Stewart says. “There’s a certain physicality to the type of film that I want to make that I think will be, in a slugline, really unattractive to quote-unquote ‘buyers,’ but in action, is entirely pervasively moving. That has just not been an easy sell. It’s not about the plot. It’s about someone self-Heimliching and contextualizing why that person has swallowed their own voice their whole life.”
Filmmaker Rose Glass, who directed Stewart in “Love Lies Bleeding,” has read a version of the screenplay that Stewart wrote with Yuknavitch’s husband, Andy Mingo. “It’s really wonderful,” she says. “I’m sure it will be a challenging one. It’s got some sharper images and leans into some spaces that make people uncomfortable — but in an interesting way.”
In her Variety cover story, Stewart also discusses wanting to explore a wider spectrum of female experience beyond the “heteronormative quality” that she credits for boosting her acting career, and she wants to bring that to “The Chronology of Water.”
“There’s just something about the open nature of our physicality, and I mean that vaginally — the flow, the bleeding,” Stewart says. “We can take in a lot of negativity, and we can put out a lot of beauty, and that is what the movie’s about. But it comes from this disgusting, bloody orifice, and we’ve negated the existence of it forever, and it needs to be in discourse. It needs to be physicalized in movies. It needs to be looked at, acknowledged. It needs to be fucking honestly worshiped.”
In an industry in which Greta Gerwig can gross $1.4 billion turning a plastic doll into a treatise on feminism, one may expect that someone would see the potential value in helping one of the most famous and acclaimed actors of her generation forge her own psalm to womanhood. But that has not been Stewart’s experience.
“I’ve never made a movie before, and so I lack experience — and therefore, I lack credibility,” Stewart says, parroting the feedback she keeps getting. Stewart has directed before: She premiered her short film “Come Swim” at Sundance in 2017, and she directed an extended music video in 2023 for the group Boygenius. But, she says, that hasn’t been enough. “They’re like, ‘I don’t know if she’s right.’ I’m like, ‘Well, I am! I’ve done this forever.’”
Glass agrees. “She’s obviously been doing this all her life, and you can feel that when she’s on set. She’s very much one of the crew, really,” she says. “I would’ve liked to think that she found it easy to get funded, fucking hell. It’s ridiculous. Someone should make it.”
Despite all her setbacks, Stewart remains optimistic. She’s fairly certain she’ll end up making the film in Europe, and she’s hopeful that her impending trip to Sundance — where she plans to stay for the full festival — will allow her to connect with filmmaking peers facing the same issues.
“I feel like I could walk through a wall right now because — I’m going to tip my hand, because that’s what I do — I just scouted this movie, and I saw places, and people, and faces, and locations that opened themselves up to me and didn’t have big no’s on them, and I was just bawling the entire time,” Stewart says, clapping her hands. “I can’t wait to go to fucking Sundance. I can’t wait to make my movie.”
Friday, December 25, 2020
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Kristen and the 'Happiest Season' cast interview + portraits for the NY Times
Outtakes and better quality (below).
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No one imagines that a Christmas rom-com can be renegade. And yet “Happiest Season,” about a couple played by Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, manages to be at once deeply, warmingly conventional and surprisingly radical, simply by focusing on a pair of women.
“I just wanted it to feel very, very relatable — but then also completely new,” said Clea DuVall, the director and co-writer with Mary Holland, who also stars as a loopy sister.
DuVall, who is an actress too (“Veep”), has said her own role in the seminal 2000 comedy “But I’m a Cheerleader,” in which she played a gay teenager sent to conversion camp, helped her out of the closet. She came out to her own mother on Christmas Day and modeled Stewart’s character, Abby, after herself. The production included other L.G.B.T.Q. stars, with Daniel Levy as Abby’s scene-stealing bestie and a soundtrack, courtesy of the producer Justin Tranter, performed by queer artists.
They shot in the cold in Pittsburgh — DuVall adamantly wanted that winter light — wrapping just two weeks before Covid-19 upended life.
In a recent video interview, DuVall, Stewart, Davis and Holland — beaming in from different locations, with Stewart’s dogs occasionally barking in the background — spoke about missing each other and somehow not yet getting the hang of Zoom interviews. (“Yesterday I had it on Gallery View, but then I just was looking at my own face the whole time,” Davis admitted.)
“Happiest Season,” which premieres on Hulu on Thanksgiving, was the last big project for all of them — a time capsule and a holiday rolled into one. “Christmas movies are so specific and they become a part of our lives in a way that other movies don’t,” DuVall said. “None of us had any idea just how much we would all need that comfort when the movie came out.”
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Kristen and Mackenzie, your characters at the beginning have such a sweet relationship and real chemistry. Did you build their back story to create that intimacy?
STEWART Right before we started shooting, you and I maybe had a couple of conversations. Do we meet in college? Are you older?
DAVIS We talked so much about our own current or past relationship experiences, what we like, things that felt really specific to our own lives. That’s for me more relevant than the checklist of, OK, we met then, what were our friend groups like when they merged? That stuff is important to a degree but it doesn’t show up in the same way as, like —
STEWART How do you catch a person’s eye.
DAVIS Exactly.
Stewart said she wanted the romance to feel as if it were about “just two women in love” who happen to do a Christmas movie.
Stewart said she wanted the romance to feel as if it were about “just two women in love” who happen to do a Christmas movie.Credit...Photo illustration by Sam Cannon for The New York Times
STEWART I always felt as long as we felt solid going in, we could be like an aspirational, really self-assured couple in a way that strips any kind of discomfort or internalized homophobia that is undeniably applied to same-sex couples in commercial projects. Like, did we seem like lesbians? Or were we just two women in love, and then we do a Christmas movie?
Tell me more about characterizing queer characters onscreen vs. what has historically been represented.
STEWART I’ve had a lot of experience with confusing people and having it be misconstrued as my confusion. It’s like, I’m sorry, you need to catch up. Sometimes I didn’t wear heels when I was younger [and that was commented on]. Wardrobe choices — it became more and more evident that optics really matter, because they’ve been violently used against me.
You know, the word “lesbian” has a negative connotation to me that I have now tried to strip because I grew up being like oh, I’m not a lesbian. Because I hadn’t dated girls yet. But, like, that was violent. In retrospect — just because I have so much of pretty much every other type of privilege — that doesn’t mean that I have to not acknowledge that sucked and felt physical.
So it was important for me in this movie to acknowledge it and be like hey, I’m going to nicely invite you towards me, rather than feel like I’m feeding into an alienation that I have been sucked into my whole life.
Davis said she and Stewart didn’t work on a back story for their characters so much as discuss their own experiences.
Davis said she and Stewart didn’t work on a back story for their characters so much as discuss their own experiences.Credit...Photo illustration by Sam Cannon for The New York Times
DuVALL I think people don’t even realize how rampant homophobia is and how casual it is. And that it does really have a lasting impact.
I so appreciated making this movie with Kristen, because I felt she could understand it in a way that not a lot of people can. I was very lucky early in my career to be in “But I’m a Cheerleader” and play a character that felt like me for the first time, and also seeing that for the first time [onscreen] — it was so major. Creating Abby was really wanting to bring that kind of specificity back into movies.
Mary, you and Clea were co-stars on “Veep.” How did you go from that to writing a Christmas rom-com together?
HOLLAND Our characters on “Veep” never had scenes together, so we never got to be together on set. But I would go to the cast table reads and right away, we sort of locked in with each other and had this chemistry. She told me about this idea, and I was a thousand percent on board. Clea really took a shot in the dark with me. We were pretty much strangers when she asked me to write with her.
Did you have a list of Christmas movie must-haves, like that image of a door with a giant wreath on it opening, which seems like a staple of all holiday movies?
STEWART I’ve seen the movie like three times now — [jokingly] because I’m obsessed with myself. But when the door opens, I feel like the movie gets up and starts to run. And you’re like oh, my God, wait, I’m supposed to run with you? I love it.
DuVALL In the writing we didn’t really watch stuff — we built the world on our own. But once I got into working with our production designer, Theresa Guleserian, and our [director of photography], John Guleserian, that’s when we started creating those iconic images and [making] them feel like Christmas without just putting up a bunch of tinsel and lights.
The soundtrack is also totally Christmas-y. But why no Mariah?
DuVALL Because Mariah’s Christmas song is very expensive.
DuVall based Stewart’s character on her own experiences.
DuVall based Stewart’s character on her own experiences.Credit...Photo illustration by Sam Cannon for The New York Times
Kristen and Mackenzie, how do you balance being funny with the movie’s big emotional arcs?
DAVIS Clea would tell us this all the time — don’t try and make it something that it’s not. Don’t shy away from the big romance and don’t shy away from the slapstick and the big emotional moments, because all those things together are part of this genre. So even though your instinct as an actor might be to make it a little quieter, all of those things actually thrive if you invest the most into each of those elements.
STEWART Going back and forth from the comedy to being emotional or hurt was, like, traumatic for me. I would be mad at Mackenzie in the morning.
Holland met DuVall through “Veep” but the two hadn’t written anything together until “Happiest Season.”
Holland met DuVall through “Veep” but the two hadn’t written anything together until “Happiest Season.”Credit...Photo illustration by Sam Cannon for The New York Times
Dan Levy has a memorable scene talking about the coming out process. How did that develop?
DuVALL His speech was actually almost an afterthought. I was needing to create sides for auditions to see if this actor can do drama.
And then when I got into it I was like oh, this is maybe the most important part of the movie. And it was something that I hadn’t ever really articulated for myself. Because I came out and I think I just brushed it off. Then when I thought about it and that came out — he delivered that so beautifully, I would watch it in the tent and just cry.
STEWART Also Dan, I was so nervous. He’s so funny. I didn’t know him before. I was like, dude, is he going to think I’m like a dumb loser? Are we going to like each other? Because I’ve had experiences with comedians that at first you go, oh, this is going to be really fun, and then you’re like actually, I kind of just feel dumber around this person. And also there is a sort of one-uppy thing some really funny people have.
Dan is the most warm and welcoming and truly observational and neurotic funny person, without ever taking anyone down or being weird and negative. I was like oh, man, it’s going to be so easy to love this guy.
This movie made me realize that there’s a certain amount of tension and release that can be good, but really you do your best work when you’re supported and feel seen. Rather than fighting to feel that — which I have also loved doing, but I’m growing out of. I don’t have the energy for it.
Also, it feels so good to watch a movie where the jokes are so familiar to me and my friends, with relationships between two girls. It feels amazing to take the piss out of stuff that hurts, because that means you can release it.
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Clea Duvall talks 'Happiest Season' and mentions Kristen
NATASHA LYONNE: Hello, Clea DuVall.
CLEA DUVALL: Hello, Natasha Lyonne.
LYONNE: Huge fan of the movie. Very excited to talk to you about it, and very excited for the world to see it. It really exemplifies your vision for how you want to see the world change, and you did such a beautiful job on it and I’m so proud to be your BFF.
DUVALL: Thank you.
LYONNE: How did you come up with the idea for it?
DUVALL: I’m a huge fan of Christmas movies, but I’ve never seen my experience represented. After The Intervention, which you and I made together, when I started thinking about what I wanted to do next, this film felt like a great opportunity to tell a universal story from a new perspective. I had this idea that was sort of based on my own experiences of going home with people and being the “friend,” or me asking people to be the “friend.” I’ve definitely been on every side of this. The story just unfolded for me and I wrote an outline for it. When I was working on Veep, I met Mary Holland. She and I had this very easy rapport and she made me laugh and she’s such a talented actor and such a great comedian. I asked her if she wanted to work with me on writing the script and she said yes. And then we took my outline and ran with it.
LYONNE: How many years ago did you write that first seed of the idea? I think it’s so helpful for the kids at home to know how long it really takes to bring a dream to life.
DUVALL: I wrote it right after we made our movie, which must have been in 2015.
LYONNE: And now it’s 2027, for context.
DUVALL: Yeah.
LYONNE: Wow, so 12 years, huh?
DUVALL: Yeah, 12 years ago.
LYONNE: That’s really something. So it took you about four years in what we’ll call human math. I’m grateful that you continue to refer to The Intervention as our movie, even though the reader should be aware that it’s strictly Clea’s movie as the writer, director, producer, and star of the film. What tools or knowledge did you bring with you to Happiest Season that you didn’t have when you made your first feature?
DUVALL: What I learned very quickly on The Intervention is that acting and directing is not really something that I want to do. Going into Happiest Season knowing there was never a point where I was going to be in it was very liberating, and allowed me to take any attention off myself and put everything into the film and to be able to support my cast and crew in a way that, on The Intervention, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to do. I’m an actor who really relies on my directors to help make sure I’m on the right track, and to not have that is very destabilizing.
LYONNE: I identify with that. On this Sarah Cooper thing that I just directed [the Netflix special Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine], if I had to go from de-masking to being on camera it would have been really scary. To be completely inside any one of those jobs is so all-consuming. Have you had any experiences like the one we see in the film?
DUVALL: I’ve spent the majority of my Christmases with other people’s families. It’s a very odd thing. You really see sides of your partner that you don’t see for the rest of the year.
LYONNE: How did you go about casting Mackenzie [Davis] and Kristen [Stewart], who are both so great in this movie that it feels like, “Are they dating in real life?” What’s so great about them as a couple is that they both are such complicated, incredible women, in addition to being, as respectfully as I could say, incredibly hot women. What a fucking ultimate couple.
DUVALL: Kristen was the first person I cast. Even though this is a romantic comedy and it’s very light and warm, it’s really about something. I wanted to hire actors who could play the complexity of what was happening underneath everything else. Kristen is someone who I really admired and who I think always makes such interesting, bold choices in terms of projects that she takes on. I sent her the script and she was in Germany filming Charlie’s Angels, so I went out there to meet with her and we spent two very late nights going through the script and talking about the movie and the character. I already knew that she was who I wanted, but after sending this to her, she was the only person who could play that part.
LYONNE: I’ve seen you play Mafia with Mackenzie. I know that she really excels at that game, and so do you. Did you guys meet playing Mafia?
DUVALL: I actually had not met Mackenzie before this movie. I remember seeing her for the first time in The Martian, and the second she came on the screen, I was like, “Who is this incredible human being?” I just wanted more of her. Anything she was in, I would watch. She has this incredible ability to create women I’ve never seen before. It’s such an exciting thing when I see an actor who brings a character that represents a completely new kind of human being. I feel like Mackenzie always does that, and Harper is a very difficult part, because she’s asking a lot of Abby and the audience. We’re also meeting her at this turning point in her life where she’s maybe not making the decisions we want her to be making, but they’re necessary and they’re messy. Being able to have an actor who’s able to play all the different layers of that and still maintain their own humanity, I thought that was really beautiful.
LYONNE: I love her, too. She’s so good at crossword puzzles and reading books, and those are the two key components to being an excellent human being. This movie is already been labeled a “gay rom-com” in the press. Do you feel like, “Hey, it’s 2024, why are we still doing this?” Or do you feel like it’s important?
DUVALL: I understand why people do it, but it is a way of othering. This is not something that has been made on the studio level, so it’s complicated. I, as a gay person, need this movie because I want to see a genre of movie that I love reflect my life. I am a gay person, Natasha.
LYONNE: Clea, let’s not do any sort of surprises because I’m just trying to have my day, and now I just feel like you’re dropping bombs. It’s interesting because this movie has never existed before, so it’s worth mentioning so that people feel seen. Representation matters.
DUVALL: I’m very proud that this is a rom-com that centers on the gay couple, and there aren’t that many, so that’s why people do talk about it. I do think in time, telling stories that are not told from the perspective that they have historically been told from just becomes the norm.
LYONNE: But then again, that’s what’s so subversive about your world domination. Typically, when these movies exist, they are sort of othered and they are meant to be seen on a small scale. What you’ve done with the concept of the movie and the execution is so brilliant. You’re like, “No, this is a big movie,” meaning that everybody can enjoy this movie in the same way that we can all enjoy It’s a Wonderful Life. It just so happens that it’s not Tom and Tina, it’s Tina and Tina. You’re inviting everybody in to say, “I think we’re ready for this now, right guys? Can we handle it?” The act of rebellion becomes just subtle enough to have everyone participate in it. It’s just awesome.
DUVALL: I wanted to create a film that anyone would be able to connect with, in the same way that I’ve spent my entire life watching Christmas movies that don’t represent my experience in any way, and yet I watch them every year.
LYONNE: So much of what we talk about is that little girl who’s the outsider. Little us needing to be able to know that we’re not alone and that there’s hope on the other side of those weird, outsider feelings. What do you hope that they get from this movie?
DUVALL: I hope that people feel seen. I think about when you and I had the privilege of making But I’m a Cheerleader. We’ve spent the last 20 years seeing how it’s impacted people’s lives in a positive way. That’s very meaningful to me. It definitely informed the kinds of stories that I want to tell.
LYONNE: What did you feel like when this movie wrapped?
DUVALL: I felt a tremendous amount of relief and accomplishment because we made this movie for less than we thought we were going to, and we had not as many days as we thought we were going to. Every single day of the shoot I would just look at the schedule and go, “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to do it.” I would begin every single day with a pit in my stomach thinking, “Are we going to get what we need to tell the story?” And somehow, miraculously, every day we would, without having to work insane hours. It was a testament to the cast and the crew.
LYONNE: It’s also a testament to you. People may or may not know this about you, but you are just so fucking on top of shit. Clea DuVall does not fuck around in terms of hitting deadlines and budgets. I’m always so in awe of how clean a thinker you are and how efficient and decisive and sure of your vision you are. That extends to us on a road trip. If we’re on a road trip and we’re driving to Vegas, and then I say, “Take a nap, I’ll take the wheel,” we may end up in Arizona. That’s only half the fun. And then all you need to do is wake up and I’ll be like, “Hey, Clea, I don’t think this is Vegas.” And then you’re like, “Hold on, let me drive.” And the next thing you know, we’re in Vegas.
DUVALL: [Laughs] We got there.
LYONNE: How did you get all of these incredible actors? It’s chockablock with movie stars.
DUVALL: Some of the people I knew already, so I reached out to them to see if they wanted to be involved, and luckily they did. Then there were other people I didn’t know who were passionate about the script and what the movie was doing, and it being the first of its kind. I was very moved by the reaction we got when we started sending out the script.
LYONNE: I love Aubrey Plaza in this movie so much. Obviously, she’s such a ridiculously funny person and she’s proven 20 times over in the past few years just how great she is as a solid, multi-leveled actor. It’s really satisfying seeing the truth emanate from somebody and bringing a character to life with such ease.
DUVALL: My very favorite shot in the movie is of her.
LYONNE: Can you describe it?
DUVALL: I kind of don’t want to. I’ve never told anyone that.
LYONNE: Okay. They say secrets are the sauce of pasta.
DUVALL: I just love her. I want to work with her over and over again.
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Monday, November 23, 2020
Video: Kristen, Mackenzie Davis, Clea Duvall and Mary Holland for the Them 'Chosen' initiative
Full Show
(the Happiest Season cast start at 23.22 mins)
Kristen's interview for 'Happiest Season' with Variety
In Clea DuVall’s “Happiest Season,” Kristen Stewart plays Abby, an art history Ph.D. student whose girlfriend, Harper (Mackenzie Davis), has invited her home for Christmas. Though she’s at first reluctant to go, Abby then decides she’ll actually propose to Harper, assuming that meeting the family goes well — but Harper tells Abby she hasn’t yet come out to her parents, and they both have to pretend to be straight. It’s a romcom with a queer twist, and a conventional Christmas comedy made radical merely by centering the story on a lesbian couple.
Since her “Twilight” years, Stewart has made eclectic career decisions that have veered from indies such as “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Seberg” to more mainstream fare like the 2019 “Charlie’s Angels” reboot — but she’s never been especially associated with romantic comedies. Yet writer-director DuVall wanted an actor who could do both comedy and drama, and so when she was putting “Happiest Season” together, she flew to the “Charlie’s Angels” set in Germany to meet with Stewart. “I already wanted her before,” DuVall told Variety about those initial conversations with Stewart. “But after meeting with her, I couldn’t imagine making the movie with anybody else.”
“Happiest Season” was backed by Sony’s Tri-Star Pictures from the start, and was poised to be first LGBTQ movie from a major Hollywood studio to be produced as a broad commercial vehicle. But with the theatrical business in its current nearly non-existent state, Sony had to bow to the realities of the coronavirus pandemic and sell “Happiest Season” to Hulu — where it will premiere on the streaming service on Nov. 25. In a recent interview, Stewart talked about building the Abby-Harper relationship with Davis and DuVall, how working with Daniel Levy made her raise her game and the thorny question of whether only gay actors should play gay characters.
I found “Happiest Season” to be a delight. How did it come to you?
Clea sent it over to see if I wanted to partner up with her to find the rest of the cast, and start early in terms of defining the character and making it something between the two of us. I thought that was a really generous offer because when I read the script, it felt so completely personal — like a story that she’d been waiting to tell for a long time.
We had a meeting early on, and I knew immediately that we were going in this together, and that it was going to be something that reflected both of us. And I’ve always loved her — I was kind of shocked that she’s so good at comedy, at writing something funny. I’ve taken her very seriously my whole life, you know what I mean? The script made me really curious about her.
Did you build the character of Abby together?
Abby is so completely Clea. Obviously, she understands both of these characters very well. But Abby is absolutely her, like all of her idiosyncrasies. Every time I needed to find Abby again, and stop just playing myself — which was easy to do in this case — there is a pragmatism and a straightforward earnestness to Clea that is not like me, that I really loved pulling into this person’s repertoire. Whatever a queer female couple is to the masses, who aren’t necessarily accustomed to that living in their homes for Christmas, I really wanted these people to feel completely lived in and self-realized. Even though the story is about someone coming to terms with their identity, I still think that these girls in a vacuum know themselves implicitly. And they’re not confused — it’s other people that are having a harder time accepting them.
I wanted to have these people fully fledged before we started because the movie starts so quickly. That would be a sort of amalgamation between myself and Clea, and both of our experiences involving coming out and having relationships and being romantic idealists. And then also people that are kind of awkward weirdos, and not very good in a new family scenario — to highlight the comedy in that.
And so basically, to make a very simple answer very complicated, she is very much that character, and I was allowed to bring aspects of myself. I definitely took a lot of inspiration from her tonal quality — she expresses herself very directly. She’ll be like, “Hello, how are you? I’ve been thinking about you.” I’m a more sideways sort of communicator.
I wanted to be proud of the couple. I wanted to be like, I like these people. You know?
I do! Have you ever played someone bumbling and charming before? I couldn’t think of another time.
No, I don’t think so. I mean, maybe in my real life — like, bumbling for sure. Charming, always trying. But no. Not in a movie.
What kinds of conversations did you, Clea and Mackenzie Davis have about what the relationship should be like?
We found Mackenzie to be such an ace up our sleeve. I couldn’t really imagine somebody that I wouldn’t halfway through the movie be like, “All right, I’m fucking out of here!” She has this open, extremely kind, aware, delightful nature. I can’t get mad at that person! Like, I really, really like her.
She’s introduced in the beginning of the film as somebody who feels like my encourager. And then suddenly she becomes this person who really lacks that assurance and is really not being honest, and it does not even remotely reflect who Abby thought she was in the beginning. It’s such a jarring reveal. Sure, the audience should be afraid that they might not get together, but it’s a romcom — they’re going to get back together!
My thing is, I never wanted to lose affection for her. I never wanted people to be, like, “Honestly, she needs to get her shit together sooner — like, fuck her!” I was constantly telling Clea, “Don’t you think I would go over and be like, ‘Hey, babe, are you OK?’” And she was like, “No! You’re angry at her!” We did go through really carefully and with a lot of consideration of the relationship being so solid that it could actually withstand something this traumatic. Because if you boil down the story to what it’s actually about, it’s a full-grown woman, like a 31-year-old woman, coming out to her family. I mean, generationally speaking, that is remarkable. And it is so unremarkable in terms of how accelerated that growth has occurred — we didn’t have a movie like this just a couple years ago. And now, if you were to tell somebody who’s 10 years younger than me that we’re making a movie about a girl coming out to her parents when she was 30, they’d be like, “What? That’s insane.”
That these people always felt like they were in a real relationship, and that they earned getting back together — it just felt more important because of the queerness of it.
You and Dan Levy together — pure gold. How did you guys establish that dynamic?
Hats off to Clea for seeing the potential of that dynamic, and then also to Dan’s energy being something that’s easy to be uplifted by. I have a tendency to be slow, emotionally speaking. I don’t know if it’s because I’m nervous — or who the fuck knows — but I sometimes will bog things down a little bit. In a comedy, that is just no good. And I couldn’t do that with him! I just felt like I wanted to keep up.
The moment he looks at me and describes his coming out story and encourages me to see how hard it can be from a different perspective — it feels historical. I’m like, we’re in a movie, but also fuck the movie! We’re in 2020, and watching him say that in that scene just feels like so different and cool. I feel so lucky to have been around him. In that moment, it’s like a rare opportunity to feel like — shit, we definitely put a little flag in there.
Totally. It’s such a smart movie, because it is so conventional, in terms of being a romantic comedy and a holiday comedy. But just the mere fact of it being a lesbian holiday movie, it becomes political and important. Was there a sense of that as you were filming it?
Absolutely. I really do admire Clea for not being defiant, and not being reactive to the world — and doing something that is welcoming. I was so pleased to have been invited onto something that was, for lack of a better term, hiding the vegetables. Because I don’t think we’re hiding shit; it’s pretty clear what we’re saying.
At the same time, it’s just presented in a way that is very conversely different to something that feels afraid or angry. It feels forward and open. I mean, it doesn’t have to be like this overwrought thing in order to be politicized!
It feels very true, and very in the moment. I love a little bit of defiance and anger, and real passionate raw exposure. But in this case — the fact that you got on the phone and say that it was a “delight,” I’m so glad to hear that. Because that was the goal.
There are a lot of people who feel it’s important that gay actors play gay characters, after so many years of that not being the case. What’s your stance on that?
I think about this all the time. Being somebody who has had so much access to work, I’ve just lived with such a creative abundance. You know, a young white girl who was straight and only really was gay later and is, like, skinny — do you know what I’m saying? I so acknowledge that I’ve just gotten to work.
I would never want to tell a story that really should be told by somebody who’s lived that experience. Having said that, it’s a slippery slope conversation because that means I could never play another straight character if I’m going to hold everyone to the letter of this particular law. I think it’s such a gray area. There are ways for men to tell women’s stories, or ways for women to tell men’s stories. But we need to have our finger on the pulse and actually have to care. You kind of know where you’re allowed. I mean, if you’re telling a story about a community and they’re not welcoming to you, then fuck off. But if they are, and you’re becoming an ally and a part of it and there’s something that drove you there in the first place that makes you uniquely endowed with a perspective that might be worthwhile, there’s nothing wrong with learning about each other. And therefore helping each other tell stories. So I don’t have a sure-shot answer for that.
I will say, Mackenzie is not somebody who identifies as a lesbian. She was the only person in my mind that could have played this with me. Sometimes, artfully speaking, you’re just drawn to a certain group of people. I could defend that, but I’m sure that somebody with a different perspective could make me feel bad about that — and then make me renege on everything I’ve just said. I acknowledge the world that we live in. And I absolutely would never want to traipse on someone else’s opportunity to do that — I would feel terrible about that.
So my answer is fucking think about what you’re doing! And don’t be an asshole.
The 'Happiest Season' cast talk to GLAAD
Back in February, GLAAD’s Raina Deerwater had the opportunity to visit the set of the LGBTQ-inclusive holiday romantic comedy Happiest Season (coming to Hulu on November 23) as it was filming in Pittsburgh, PA and talk with the cast and creatives involved in making the film.
Happiest Season follows Abby (Kristen Stewart) who is going to meet her girlfriend Harper’s (Mackenzie Davis) family for the first time over the holidays. However, right before they arrive, Harper reveals that she is not out to her family yet, and that her and Abby will have to hide their relationship through Christmas. The film was co-written by out filmmaker and actor Clea DuVall and comedian Mary Holland, and directed by DuVall. GLAAD also spoke with producer Isaac Klausner and stars Davis, Stewart, Holland, Alison Brie, Victor Garber, Burl Mosely and Mary Steenburgen.
GLAAD also spoke with the cast and crew on set and talk to them about how the film came to life, the experience of working on a queer romantic comedy, and the joy in this particular movie genre!
“I love Christmas movies and I love how they become a part of our lives,” DuVall told GLAAD while taking a break from shooting, “But I had never really seen myself represented in one before. I had this idea for a really long time and I wrote this outline that sat on my computer for years. And I wanted to start working on it, but with comedy it's always so much more fun to work with another person. I met Mary [Holland] on Veep and we really got along and I asked her, ‘do you want to try to work on this thing with me?’ And she said yes. It really came together even more and we fleshed it out and it turned into this.”
Holland, who plays Harper’s sister, Jane, in the film in addition to co-writing the screenplay, provided most of the comic relief in a tense scene that a group of journalists watched film over the course of the day.
“Clea had this idea in her head for many, many years,” Holland told us, “This has been something that she's been mulling over for a long time. We met working on Veep together. We hit it off right away, had a real chemistry together. So we went out to coffee and she described this idea and sent me a rough summary of what the idea was, what the movie would be about. And then we started meeting and talking about it and then just got into writing it. Clea knew from the beginning that she wanted to direct this. She came into it guiding this whole process. She has such an amazing understanding of story structure and character development. The foundation of this script was really in her head. The image I had in my head was, ‘I'm chucking spaghetti at the wall and Clea's deciding what stays on the wall and what doesn't.’”
“My way into this project has everything to do with Clea,” Isaac Klauser, a producer on the film told us, “I got to see her film, The Intervention, which I loved, and it inspired me to reach out and try to get to know her. She was kind enough to sit down [with me] and she mentioned to me that there was this script that she and Mary Holland were working on based on both her love of the holidays and particularly holiday films and her own experiences in the holidays that had never quite been reflected on film. I was lucky enough that she shared an early draft of the script with me and we started talking about it really connecting. I had a very similar love of the genre and for me, as a Jewish man, it's also not often my experience. And yet it's such a way that we think about the spirit of family, sense of community and place and kind of love. And there were so many things that our script was doing that I immediately so deeply related to this experience on so many levels, that I just fell in love with it.”
“I really think Christmas movies are so significant to people,” Holland continued, “They're really formative in a lot of ways for many of us growing up. Those are the movies that became these pillars for us. There was that atmosphere and energy of family and love and what Christmas is all about, what the holidays are all about, which is being with those you love and, and being grateful for who's in your life. And everyone deserves a holiday movie, everyone deserves a Christmas movie and something that celebrates and represents their experience. As a straight cisgender woman myself, I'm really cognizant of the fact that this is a story that needs to be told and has long been overdue in being told. I really feel so honored that Clea asked me to be a part of this process with her, because it's so important to me that all of these people are represented. I'm just very humbled and very grateful to be a part of it and be able to support this story that she's telling.”
“[It’s] really exciting, especially with queer content,” DuVall added, “because at least for me, it's not just watching movies where gay people are tortured by being gay and then they get killed or beaten up or whatever. You can just be like normal people. I'm just a normal person in my life. And I have romantic experiences and sad and happy and all kinds of the spectrum. I think LGBTQ stories are not, are not given the privilege of the spectrum of what the experience really is. And so I really wanted to do that with this movie and I'm happy that other filmmakers and other writers are [too], and other studios are supporting.”
The actors of the film were in agreement about the impact of a queer Christmas romantic comedy.
“It's so exciting,” Alison Brie, who plays Harper’s sister Sloane told us. “This movie to me feels like an amazing leap in the right direction of having mainstream film reflect what actual society is like in current culture, in our nation. So, I think to showcase a same-sex relationship in a mainstream holiday movie, and just kind of de-stigmatize it, if it even is still stigmatized for certain people. I certainly am guilty of being in the liberal bubble. So on first read, I'm just like, ‘Oh, it's so great. What a beautiful love story, so funny.’ And then I take a step back and realize the cultural implications and how important a film like this is. And I feel extreme pride.”
“When I went through and I read the script,” Burl Mosely, who plays the role of Sloane’s husband Eric in the film said, “It actually reminded me of Crazy Rich Asians and everything that that did for the Asian community, taking the rom-com and doing that. And we're sort of doing a similar thing. And as I was reading it, I was like, this is so groundbreaking, but it really shouldn't be, this should be the norm. I was surprised that we've gone this long without this. You know what I mean? It just felt so right and so normal and so awesome. So, I feel really honored to be a part of it.”
“Well, I did Philadelphia,” Mary Steenburgen, who plays Harper’s mom, Tipper, and has a decades-long career in film and television, “and I was the bad guy which was, at the time, very weird for me because my roommate and dear, dear friend died a couple of days before I went there. So, that whole experience was huge. And it was very moving to see what a difference it made to certain people - not so much the choir preaching to the choir - but people who called themselves conservative, who saw that film and felt like they understood their son better because Tom Hanks had this family that loved him and surrounded him. And I got that feedback from people and it was very moving. This is so different. This is a comedy, but often comedies are the things that make change and that put a mirror up there for us to see that families have love. And this is just, this is a family that really truly at the end of the day loves each other.”
“It’s nice that we've come to this place,” Victor Garber, the out actor who plays Harper’s father Ted, and also has an illustrious film career. “It’s nice to be not there anymore. I just did the reboot of Tales of the City, but also I'm doing a new series in Canada. It's a Canadian series with a transgender woman who plays my secretary and that's discussed right away in the very first scenes. It feels so natural. And yes, we've come a long way. We're nowhere near where we have to be, but we're certainly, we've made steps or taking steps.”
The leads only had a few moments to chat with us, but both of them sang the praises of the environment on set.
“When we first started this movie,” Mackenzie Davis told GLAAD, “We were like, I would be so jealous if somebody else was doing this with Kristen and Clea. It's not just because of the social or political import of it, it's really great, and the people making it are really great. Every day is so wonderful and full of laughter and joy. I've never had this much fun making a movie before, so, on a very personal level, it's really wonderful to be a part of positive, non-tragic depictions of queer love, but don't always have to be an incredible struggle to get through and end in tragedy. The struggle is part of the genre [but] it has nothing to do with the queerness, which I think is a relief.”
“It’s so nice to catch that sense of freedom and fun,” Kristen Stewart added. “It's super contagious. I think that the way to spread love is definitely just through giving it. We were saying something before about [how] it feels great to [work on] something sweet and something nice. And it's nice to come to work and feel like I can say anything. I'm not implying that I've had inhibited experiences because of the lack of queerness and other movies that I've done. But in this, we all feel so visible to each other and so understood and therefore allowed. It's so permissive and it feels great.”
“As a filmmaker,” DuVall continued, “It's very important to me to tell universal stories. I want to tell stories that connect with as many people as possible. As a storyteller, my goal is connecting with as many people as I possibly can and having a lot of different kinds of representation. It's really just wanting to feel like I was seeing me in a movie like this, which I had never seen before. And my experience is not unique. I'm not the only one going through it. There have to be a lot of other people who are also feeling underrepresented. The truth is I just wanted to write a movie that I always wanted to watch. So, that's what I did.”
Happiest Season will be available to stream on Hulu on Wednesday, November 25.
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Friday, November 20, 2020
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Kristen at the 'Happiest Season' LA drive-in premiere - 17 November 2020
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