In her most recent film, The Contender, Allen plays a nominee for vice president of the United States whose confirmation is threatened by a sex scandal. She has a lot of threads to weave together — ambition, confidence, vulnerability, competence, pride. But to watch her as she faces her detractors, sitting erect and unflinching in a congressional heating room, is to believe she actually could be on Air Force Two.
“This notion of what does a thought look like on somebody’s face — it’s challenging, because it’s not anything that you’re conscious of when it’s happening. It becomes, I think, very tricky because you are working from yourself. And how many yous are there?” she says. “When I was in my twenties, I thought, ‘I can play this part and that part.’ I played Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman when I was in college, with gray streaks in my hair. It was insane. How could I possibly know what it was like to have her life? It was a great thing to go through, but now I would say, ‘Oh my God.’ I’ll read a script and I’ll say, ‘You know, somebody else would be better for this role than me.’
“The older you get, its kind of weird, but somehow you realize how much harder it is to be a good actor than you used to think it was. I remember hearing that phrase from Sandy Meisner, the acting coach — you know, ‘It takes 20 years to be an actor’–when I was in my twenties. And I said” — she snorts — “‘What is he talking about? Who is he?’ And now, on the other side of it, I see what he means.”
MIDNIGHT SCREAMS FROM the kitchen. Allen rises and returns with the bird on her finger. “Step up, Midnight,” she says, trying to cajole the parrot into its cage. Midnight resists, so she lets it stay perched on her pointer.
“What I’ve been able to do, fortunately, for a long time is believe in the situation when I’m doing it,” Allen says. “I just believe it. I don’t tend to do sense-memory work, thinking of something that really made me cry in order to cry. That takes me out of what’s happening. I tend to have this ability to just believe what’s on the page.”
For Nixon, Allen read biographies and stuffed a Barbara Walters interview to master Pat Nixon’s mannerisms. For last year’s When the Sky Falls, which was released in Europe but so far not in the United States, she read the work and visited the office of slain Irish journalist Veronica Guerin. The details that most enriched Allen’s portrayals, though, were those she learned about her characters’ childhoods.
“I just think it informs the adult you become,” she says, finally easing Midnight into its cage. “It’s amazing — and I haven’t really talked about this with anybody but a couple of friends — but I find the older I get, the more I become myself. The more I’m me, the less I change. I changed in my twenties and thirties, but then you sort of go back and become, sometimes, more who you are, what you always were.”
A perfect segue to her third choice, the 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful, in which Geraldine Page plays an elderly woman who decides to take one last journey to the place she was raised, Bountiful, Texas.
“I know I’m going to cry,” Allen warns. “My parents grew up in an area that looks very much like this on the Mississippi River,” she says as the scene — of Page finally reaching her family’s abandoned farmhouse — begins to play. “We went back to visit the old house where my mother grew up before they tore it down, and it looks like this house.”
A weary Page sits on what was once her family porch, listening to the calls of redbirds, a sound she hasn’t heard for years. “Ever since we got here, I’ve had half a feeling that my father and my mother would come out of this house and greet me and welcome me home,” Page tells the stranger who’s driven her on the last leg of her trip. “I guess when you’ve lived longer than your house and your family, you’ve lived long enough.”
