Laura Dern Is Stepping Into Her Power
About a week after I met Laura Dern, Kanye West was spotted wearing a T-shirt with her face on it. That’s not to imply a connection, just to note that Dern is literally an icon—the T-shirt makes it official. The image was a still from Blue Velvet, released in 1986, when Dern was 19 and an innocent girl next door with a scary underside. Now, more roles than birthdays later, she has entered the pantheon of cultural figures that other artists wear to look cool.
Seeing Dern’s face emblazoned on Kanye’s shirt is both surprising and not at all. Lately Dern has been visible everywhere, stealing scenes as Renata Klein on HBO’s Big Little Lies, which has netted her an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and popping up in roles as diverse as the Resistance officer Holdo in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, real life literary impostor Laura Albert in JT LeRoy, and the mysterious secretary Diane Evans on the revival of Twin Peaks.
This winter she’ll play the part of a nurturing but ruthless divorce attorney in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story before switching gears entirely to portray Marmee March in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. In fact, Dern’s ubiquity has prompted an apt, if unimaginative, Twitter hashtag: #Dernaissance.
The portmanteau refers to more than the 52-year-old actress’s high-profile roles. It also alludes to a cultural shift that she has had a hand in bringing about. Dern has a knack for creating archetypes that feel at once singular and thoroughly familiar.
It’s easy to imagine Renata Klein becoming shorthand for the type of alpha female who clings to her success like a life raft in a storm, and Dern’s performance in Marriage Story updates the onscreen lawyer to its merciless, kale salad–eating, 21st-century conclusion. She’s particularly adept at portraying the rich and powerful—she can send up their foibles while staying connected to their humanity.
In an industry that has traditionally required women to be “likable” (i.e., serene and well behaved), Dern has been a reliably destabilizing presence. Her characters are dreamers who wear their hearts on their sleeves, who bubble over with enthusiasm or pain, who can’t seem to contain or control themselves.
In her own life she never seems reckless, but she doesn’t shy away from challenges. In 2017, at the height of Hollywood’s backlash against sexual harassment, Dern—on the heels of playing a woman who realizes she was sexually abused as a child in The Tale—spoke publicly about her own experiences at age 14. She said of the #MeToo movement, “I felt very moved by people being honest and direct.”
The same year she was said to be a leading candidate to become president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which would have made her only the fourth woman to do so, and the first actress since Bette Davis, who served a two-month stint in the 1940s and quit in frustration. (Dern is thought to have taken herself out of consideration; casting director David Rubin ended up with the gig.)
On HBO’s short-lived but prescient 2011 series Enlightened, Dern played Amy Jellicoe, a pharmaceutical executive whose public breakdown leads to a problematic moral awakening. The series lasted only 18 episodes, but it developed a cult following that is still visible on social media today—something that Dern thinks signifies a shift in how her characters are perceived.
“At the time it was like, ‘Whoa, what’s wrong with her? Is she bipolar?’” Dern says. Eight years later the response is different. “People who are finding it now come up to me to go, ‘Oh my god, that’s me every day wanting to make a difference. I am Amy Jellicoe,’” Dern says. “A lot of men, interestingly.”
We’re used to seeing women like Jellicoe as villains or cautionary tales, but it was not until recently that we have begun to empathize and identify with them—to feel as if they could be us. That’s where Dern comes in; she’s at her best when she channels the anxiety that is the hallmark of our era, turning marginal female characters into heroines for modern times.
It’s late on a Thursday afternoon, and we’re sitting at Farmshop, in the Brentwood Country Mart in L.A., during the afternoon lull. Dern suggests we celebrate some good news I’ve received with a glass of rosé and copious amounts of cheese, which she orders without apology. After we dispatch the cheese, the chef treats us to a tomato salad, and the waiter, aware we are there to do an interview, assures us we’re both doing a great job. There’s something about Dern that makes people want to express their admiration. She comes across as genuine and friendly, comfortable in her skin and her fame.
And why wouldn’t she be? It’s a cliché to call someone Hollywood royalty, but Dern—the daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd—really qualifies. Indeed, the first time she was nominated for an Academy Award, in 1991 for Rambling Rose, she was in the Best Actress category, and her mom (also her co-star) was in the running for Best Supporting Actress. In 2010, when Dern got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, both of her parents were honored on the same day.
But Dern doesn’t buy into that sort of thing. Her parents divorced when she was two, and she was raised mostly by her mother. She grew up in L.A. at a time when actors thought of themselves as artists, not celebrities, and saw their work as a calling.
Reese Witherspoon says she and Dern, her co-star on Big Little Lies and in the 2014 movie Wild, initially bonded over having been raised by determined Southern mothers. “They made us say please and thank you, yes ma’am, no sir, write thank-you notes, and always have a story to tell at any dinner party,” Witherspoon says.
Still, Dern wasn’t too sheltered. She started appearing in movies when she was seven (her debut was as an extra in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and landed her first major role, with Jodie Foster in the 1980 flick Foxes, when she was 13. She attended the private Buckley School in the San Fernando Valley, where she served in student government and finished her coursework early, becoming legally emancipated at 16 years old. She moved out on her own (one early roommate was Mari-anne Williamson) and enrolled at UCLA but left after just a few days to film Blue Velvet.
When the movie was released, in 1986, it cemented Dern’s status as a rising star (the New York Times called her “as demure as Nancy Drew”). She would go on to appear in offbeat indies (Wild at Heart, Citizen Ruth), sitcoms (Frasier, Ellen), and blockbusters (two Jurassic Park installments—a third was recently announced) and to have high-profile relationships with actors including Jeff Goldblum and Kyle MacLachlan.
In 2005 she married musician Ben Harper, but seven years and two children later they divorced. Along the way Dern worked steadily, but it was landing the role of Renata Klein—an over-the-top helicopter mom who has been called “the pulsating id” of Big Little Lies—in 2017 that has made her as popular, and powerful, as she is today. (Dern has been mum about the possibility of a third season; one HBO executive recently said, “I just think it’s not realistic.”)
I tell Dern that Renata’s unraveling in season two of Big Little Lies, when it’s revealed her husband has driven them into bankruptcy (“I will not not be rich!” she memorably screams at him in one episode), reminded me of Jellicoe’s breakdown, which took me by surprise. Renata was the anti-Amy, after all, a paragon of control. But Dern points out that for both women dysfunction springs from the same source: “Renata’s more powerful in the world, and yet all her issues are coming from a place of not feeling powerful.”
In the past several years Dern seems to have stepped into her own power, especially following her divorce from Harper. “I remember when she got untethered,” her friend Irena Medavoy says. It was five years ago, and she and Dern were on vacation in French Polynesia. “I have a photo of her standing there. She’s with the kids and she’s looking at the horizon.” It struck Medavoy that, with her marriage behind her, Dern could finally concentrate on herself and her children. “She decided to go out there and stand in her life.”
Now, in Marriage Story and Little Women, Dern plays sure-footed women to whom -others look for guidance and strength. In Marriage Story, a sort of millennial Kramer vs. Kramer, Charlie (Adam Driver), a director, and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), an actress, find their desire to have an amicable divorce complicated by lawyers. Baumbach approached Dern—and Driver and Johansson—about the idea before he began writing. “Knowing they were going to play these parts helped me write it, and write it better,” he says.
Dern plays Nora Fanshaw, a divorce attorney as nurturing with her clients as she is ruthless with their spouses. (It’s worth noting that Dern’s own divorce was handled by legal titan and TMZ regular Laura Wasser.) “Nora is the turning of the screw in this piece,” Dern says, “in that they might have done it very differently if not for this one character.”
Baumbach says his intention was that the lawyers be seen as human beings operating within a terrible system. “Laura was able to do that brilliantly, to make her this great character and at the same time convey how actually good she is at what she’s doing,” he says. Dern (who says of her own split that “you don’t just give up, but you also have to be done when it’s really not healthy anymore”) was moved by the specificity of the story. “Reading Noah’s script, I wept,” she says, “because every moment feels true.”
After wrapping Marriage Story, Dern played Marmee March in Little Women for director Greta Gerwig, who is Baumbach’s offscreen romantic partner. The character is modeled on author Louisa May Alcott’s own mother, a suffragist and activist. But as progressive as Marmee was in real life, Alcott was careful not to deviate in her book from what was acceptable for women at the time. Still, Dern found a way to slip in clues here and there.
“Every time she came onto set, she was really bringing this whole person,” Gerwig says. “She never fails to find the truth.” -Medavoy expresses a similar sentiment. “Laura is fearless,” she says. “She can’t give you a false note, not in life and not on the screen.”
It’s a trait that has served her well. “When my parents started,” Dern says, “you didn’t get paid to be an actor. My childhood was filled with witnessing the hardship of making a choice that was of consequence.”
Now, after a career of consequential choices in a profession in which women’s careers are notoriously brief, Dern is busier than ever. “I’m being offered things that are very true about a woman’s sexuality,” she says. “Even a decade ago they might have thought, But she’s a 50-year-old actress—and cast a 27-year-old.” Now “there’s consideration for character and truth, and, I think, less fear.” It’s a sign that her decision to choose the more difficult path was the right one.
She tells me a story about something that happened recently to her 17-year-old son, Ellery. He was away on a summer program, and one day at lunch the kids were talking about Big Little Lies. Ellery didn’t know what to say, so he kept quiet. Eventually the others asked if he had seen it. He said he had. Not knowing what to make of his reticence, they asked if he hated it. Ellery confessed: “It’s not that. It’s just…my mom is Renata Klein.”
Dern cracks up imagining this scene. The kids thought he was speaking metaphorically. “They said, ‘Can you imagine?’ ” But Ellery insisted. Dern laughs. “I love that he didn’t say Laura Dern. He said his mom was Renata! I was like, ‘That this happened to you around that character, of all characters.’ Poor thing.”
But then, which of her roles would have been better? Dern’s characters are always so intimate that it’s almost uncomfortable. “There was one scene in Big Little Lies,” Witherspoon recalls, “where I got to see every extraordinary faculty that Laura has in her toolbox. She came in crying, told a joke, had us all laughing, became hysterical, cried again, and then had a dramatic, comedic exit. Just watching her do that scene was like a year of acting classes.” Baumbach adds, “It’s hard to explain the effect she has, but it is profound. You’re embarrassed to be alive, suddenly.”
Life is what Dern gives to all the people she plays, and that’s what has landed her at the top of her game—appealing to the Sunday night HBO crowd and awards season aficionados and being discussed by a table of teenagers. “I’ve always been drawn to characters that not only haven’t found their voice, they don’t even know they’re entitled to one,” she says. “That’s been a real theme to the women that I have fallen in love with.”
In the top image, Dern wears a Giorgio Armani blazer ($3,895); Oscar de la Renta jumpsuit ($3,790); and Tiffany & Co. bracelet ($26,500).
Hair by Ryan Trygstad for Kevin Murphy at the Wall Group. Makeup by Alice Lane at Tracey Mattingly for Chanel Les Beiges. Manicure by Deborah Lippmann at Starworks Artists. Tailoring by Lars Nord. Set design by Todd Wiggins at the Magnet Agency.
This story appears in the November 2019 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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