“So sweet,” Clarkson says, almost to herself. “What’s great is she’s playing this kind of dowdy woman, but she’s so good, so lovely in a whole different way, that you believe Owen when he says that. That’s her talent coming through.”
She looks at the videos on the table. “You want to stay in the emotional vein?” she asks, and points to Driving Miss Daisy. “When I first saw this movie, I had to be carried out. There’s something so moving about Tandy. You rarely see older people like that in movies.” Clarkson has chosen a scene late in the film when Miss Daisy has her first brush with senility. Frantic, she comes down the stairs in a pink housecoat, her white hair flying, thinking that she has lost some papers. Morgan Freeman tries to calm her down (“Your mind just took a turn this morning, that’s all,” he says).
“Look at her,” Clarkson says, her voice soft. “She has a kind of translucent paper quality — you can almost see through her. She’s like this ghostly presence.” When Tandy takes Freeman’s hand and delivers the film’s most emotional line, “You are my best friend. No, really, you are,” Clarkson is enthralled but dry-eyed. “She says that line without sentiment. Very simply. She’s almost angry,” Clarkson says. “There are just some moments in this film that startle me.”
Clarkson keeps fiddling with a red beaded bracelet that wraps around her left wrist. It is the only piece of jewelry she ever wears. She calls it “my talisman,” and her pale skin (“I’m the whitest person alive”) flushes a bit when she’s asked its origins (it was a gift from her boyfriend, the actor Campbell Scott). In late December, she and Scott wrapped The Dying Gaul, their first film together, in which he plays a bisexual Hollywood mogul and she plays his wife (a role that was challenging, she says, in part because “I have to wear a white bikini through much of it”).
“I could never play somebody’s lover or wife and hate them offscreen,” she says. “I’m not Little Miss Method, but I’m very organic. And I think the more you know the other actors in a film and feel connected to them, the better scenes are.” So making a movie with Scott must have been a breeze, then? She giggles
now, and it’s heartening to hear that even her giggles are sultry. “Campbell is very talented,” she says.
Which brings her back to sex — or more precisely, Sexy Beast. She has chosen the much-talked-about opening scene in which Winstone appears, roasting in the sun, in nothing but a yellow Speedo. “He makes no apologies for the Speedo, and that was kind of amazing,” Clarkson says, sounding like a woman who’s spent a lot of time in a white bikini. “But beyond that, he just has this thing going. He takes a character you think you kind of know — a thug — but the vulnerability he projects in his tough-guy persona blew me away.” Winstone picks up a cloth that’s been soaking in ice water and places it on his crotch. Clarkson shivers.
She flashes back on the scene in Driving Miss Daisy when Tandy, trying to collect herself, smooths her unruly hair with both palms, almost hugging herself as she does so. “It’s this one little moment of vanity,” Clarkson says, mimicking the motion, relishing it. “She does that, and there is a fragility and power that make it. And that exists in men, too.” She turns back to Winstone, all paunch and bluster, on the TV screen. “It’s surprising. Surprising. And you hope to surprise people.”
BENICIO DEL TORO
BENICIO DEL TORO is in love with a monster. She is dressed like an angel, with a wild, wavy mane that stands up on her head, and as Del Toro leans toward her, his own hair — black streaked with white, just like hers — protrudes like a tangle of snakes from underneath an ARIZONA trucker cap. The actor stares at her pale face, which is marked by the angry stitches that hold it together. “So beautiful,” he says, shaking his head.
“The bride of Frankenstein!” a voice booms from the oversize television. In perfect sync, Del Toro mouths the words. He smiles at the bride, then adds in a gravelly whisper: “Amazing.” Del Toro loves Elsa Lanchester, the actress who played Boris Karloff’s mate in the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. Her wide-eyed zombie — created from spare parts scavenged from the newly dead — appears only in the film’s final minutes, when a bolt of lightning sets her stolen heart beating.
