Laura Dern’s Sole Beauty Secret Involves Drugs — and She’s Never Said It Out Loud
Wait — so juicy roles dry up and turn into tumbleweeds once an actress turns 30? Someone never sent two-time Oscar nominee Laura Dern that particular memo.
She’s only in a handful of this year’s hottest properties.
On Friday, she’s Woody Harrelson’s broken, lonely ex-wife in the movie Wilson. Later this year, she’s in the reboot of Twin Peaks, followed by the December release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Oh yeah, and you can see Dern, 50, terrorizing fellow moms — especially those who dared to ignore her daughter’s birthday party — as the ferociously aggressive and aggressively protective Renata Klein on the HBO hit Big Little Lies.
Dern attributes her career success to her parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, and what they taught her about building a body of work, as opposed to chasing flash-in-the-pan, pretty-girl roles.
“My focus should be on character and complication and human behavior. That was my parents’ mission. I was on films, as a little girl, that they were making with Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese. My godmother was Shelley Winters,” Dern tells Yahoo Style. “Women are messy and sexy and broken and sad and lonely and pioneers and radicals and feminists. That made me want to become an actress.”
She’s also one of the few among her peers who proudly wear their laugh lines instead of zapping them into oblivion. Dern is brutally honest when asked whether she’s considered going the surgical or injectable route.
“Oh, I mean, it’s such an insidious part of our culture. It’s beyond temptation. You start to think about all of it. Are you supposed to be hiding something? Am I not part of the plan? Am I going to [be] an outcast because I’m not doing something everyone else is doing?” she muses. “Of course I have vanity and insecurity. I’m a female who is aging and an actress. I have all the thoughts, and I ask all the questions. What’s the natural way to keep the skin somewhat alive? I’m excited about homeopathy and healthy products. I love products. I care about what I put in my body and what I put on my face.”
Dern played a drug-addled pawn in the abortion wars in Citizen Ruth. She mothered Reese Witherspoon in the drama Wild. And she went on the run with Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart. Dern was raised on movie sets, where she witnessed plenty of drug use and addiction. It stuck with her. And it’s a message she’s shared with her children — Ellery Walker Harper, 15, and Jaya Harper, 12 — from her marriage to musician Ben Harper.
“I’ve never said [it] out loud,” says Dern. “I think my beauty secret — my only beauty secret —is I was never a drug user. If you don’t mess with your body and abuse it horribly, you’re going to look healthier. That’s the bottom line.”
Her focus is on clean living, particularly when it comes to her kids.
“The greatest beauty lessons I’d impart is to honor what they’ve got. I wasn’t great at that. I shamed a body part or two in my teenage or young adult years. Booty. I was so insecure about that. I was always shy about having [a butt],” she says.
Her focus, she says, is teaching her kids to love themselves for who they are, and to be comfortable in their own skin. And in that sense, yes, she can relate to Renata, who will throw down to protect her daughter.
“It’s been done with some more dignity, but I’ve had two incidents as a parent — no one is going to stop me. One was environmental-based; do not mess with our kids,” she says. “Renata is a bit in the zeitgeist. Don’t mess with women. We’ll get into the streets.”
Dern is warm and affectionate. She remembers everything. Case in point: A server puts a teapot in front of her during breakfast at the newly opened Whitby Hotel in midtown Manhattan. “You’re working so hard. I saw you here late, and now you’re here early in the day?” she asks.
It’s why she’s loathe to complain about doing press, even though she’s been up since 4 a.m. to do interviews. Dern will talk about pretty much anything — politics, reproductive rights, and her favorite wallpaper store in New York (Second Hand Rose). But she won’t spill a thing about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The movie will be released on December 15, and even Dern’s kids will have to wait for the film to learn about her role in it, because she doesn’t want them to have to keep secrets from their friends.
“It’s hard in our own house. ‘Mom, you can at least tell us who you play.’ I’d never put them in that position,” she says.
Read more from Yahoo Beauty + Style:
How Emma Watson Made Belle From ‘Beauty and the Beast’ a Modern Style Icon
Cate Blanchett Dresses Daughter in Boys’ Clothes for the Best Reason
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