WAYHER

HOLLYWOODNAOMI WATTS, ONE OF the greatest of leading ladies, DIDN’T MAKE IT BIG UNTIL

Photographs by VICTOR DEMARCHELIER

By TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER

SHE WAS 33. NOW THAT SHE AND PARTNER LIEV SCHREIBER ARE SPENDING MORE TIME IN L.A., SHE’S STRUGGLING TO NEGOTIATE A TOWN THAT prefers superheroes to actors.

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ALL THAT GLITTERS Naomi Watts in the Beverly

Hills home of Tony Duquette (see page 218). Céline jacket

($2,600); Bulgari bracelet (price on request). A silky

serum illuminates and improves skin texture: SK-II

Cellumination AuraBright.

Styled by Nicoletta Santoro

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HEN, AT THE TURNof this century, Naomi Watts was finally plucked �om obscu-rity by the director David Lynch—an excruciating obscurity that had included 10 years of bit parts in bit movies such as Tank Girl and Children of the Corn IV—fate was working in a mysterious way. �e role he was casting was the female lead in a television pilot, so he had been given a selection of headshots of people who could do a good job on TV—in other words, the sort of actress not famous enough to anchor (or sell) a feature film. Back then, of course, movie stars didn’t do TV.

He cast the show with unknowns (including a young upstart named Justin �eroux), but that TV pilot ended up being the 2001 feature film Mulholland Drive, a movie that came to define Lynch for a new generation of filmgoer, that grew to epitomize the seamier side of modern Los Angeles, and that introduced the world—finally, finally—to the 33-year-old Watts.

�e movie’s success was contingent on Watts’s de�ly playing Betty Elms, a wide-eyed gee-whiz of a character, newly arrived in L.A. and determined to make it as an actress. Watts overplays the role until the moment she’s in an audition, when she suddenly pulls out this other persona, that of a brilliant actress. It’s a disori-enting head fake, and the least of what’s to come. Soon enough Watts is embodying an entirely new character, Diane Selwyn. Call it an introduction to the spectrum of an actress who, a�er acing this very complicated double role, was suddenly a star.

I recently met Watts at a restaurant in Brentwood, a comfy local spot close to the house she shares with her partner Liev Schreiber and their two sons, Sasha and Kai. (Schreiber had, unbeknownst to her, been feeding pancakes to their nicely behaved boys at the restaurant before she arrived.) If it is possible to radiate the opposite of star energy, Watts does. She slips into the place—quiet, demure, her face bare—wearing a summery black and white Isabel Marant dress and carrying a pink Louis Vuitton bag with her initials on a tag around the straps. Her jew-elry is striking and delicate: a ring �om Jennifer Meyer, two necklace charms �om Jennifer Fisher, a Cartier watch, and a bracelet �om Bulgari, with whom she has “a relationship”; she loves the brand, and it, in turn, occasionally pro-vides her with red carpet sparkle.

Back in 1999, when Lynch o�ered Watts the role, no one was clamoring to drape her in bling. In fact, she was feeling pretty defeated, and even a�er all the success she has had since, those days of struggle still haunt her. She first visited L.A. in 1990, when her good �iend Nicole Kidman, with whom she had worked in Australian films, was finding success. (Kidman had just finished Days of �under, the movie that launched her career here.) Watts met with agents and managers and casting directors, all of them encouraging. “Come back!” they said. “We’ll have work for you.”

Watts went home to Sydney, packed up, and returned, optimis-tic about her chances, only to find rejection at every turn. “It was excruciating,” she says now. “I had a cruel shock of, ‘Wow, this isn’t going to be like I thought it would be.’ As someone who works �om the gut and was sure I was in touch with it… Let’s just say I was way o�.” �e worst part, though, was the post-audition feed-back. She wasn’t sexy enough. She was way too intense. “And I believed everything they said about me—negative, horrible stu�.”

She admits that auditions are not easy for her. “I’m an anxious person, and I hate being put in a position where I’m being tested. If I feel safe, I can be me, but if I don’t feel safe, I try to please. I think, ‘�is part is for a sexy girl, so I’m going to be really sexy!’ ” Watts laughs and reaches to the sky, shaking her fists. “And it was

like, it’s not working!”In short, L.A. does

not hold a lot of happy memories for Watts. One of the necklaces she’s wearing has a charm with a map of lower Manhattan, where Watts, Schreiber, and their kids mostly lived for nine years. But they rarely spend time there now; Schreiber’s Showtime series, Ray Donovan, is shot in L.A., and a�er the summer the family will primar-ily reside on the West Coast. It’s been a tough sell for Watts. “I find it easier to be anonymous in New York. �ey take

your picture and then they go,” she says of the paparazzi. “And you can lose them pretty easily, by taking the subway or getting into a taxi or simply going into your building.” In L.A., she says, they don’t leave you alone.

But her discomfort goes beyond the buzzing, incessant pho-tographers. Recently she went into the Beverly Hills outpost of Barneys to get a present for a �iend’s 50th birthday. �e other shoppers were in heels and full makeup. “I wore jeans and flip-flops and, you know, wet hair—just regular, like I am now. In New York no one would have looked twice. Here I felt as if people were staring at me because they knew who I was and I was such a disappointment.”

Watts puts her hands to her face and pulls the skin back, indicating why they were disappointed, inadvertently

“I’M AN anxious person, AND I HATE BEING PUT IN A POSITION where I’m being tested,” WATTS SAYS. “IF I FEEL SAFE, I CAN BE ME, BUT IF I DON’T FEEL SAFE, I try to please.”

A GILDED CAGE Strap yourself

in with metallics. Prada dress ($4,830);

Harry Winston bracelets and rings

(prices on request).

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parodying many of the women surrounding us in the restau-rant. She is lovely but, minus red carpet glamorizing, looks her age, albeit the very best 45 can be, which we all know is a liability in this business. Of surgeries and injections she says, “I’m really just feeling my way. �is being an industry town, that self-consciousness just pervades. �ere are days when I feel victorious that I have, you know, gotten this far,” she says of her decision not to partake of the nip and tuck bu�et. “But there are a million days when I look in the mirror and think, ‘I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it. I can’t live with this anymore.’ ”

�e advantages of L.A. are, for now, entirely children-related. Like having a big back yard and a pool for Sasha and Kai. Recently Watts took up gardening, something she couldn’t do in Manhattan. “You know you’re at that age when you want to spend $1,000 on gardening supplies instead of a dress,” she says with a laugh.

D AV I D LY N C H L I K E S TO S AY T H AT H Ehas never regretted anyone he has cast, but he tells me, “I have really never been happier that I picked someone than with Naomi.” He attributes much of Mulholland Drive’s cult suc-

cess and longevity to her performance. When he met with her about the part, he was struck by her self-e�acement and humility, which he considers very Australian. “�ey don’t have this kind of star ego thing,” he says. “�ey’re very regular, very real, honest, kind of straightforward people, and it’s very pleas-ant.” But Watts, who was born and raised in England and didn’t move to Sydney until she was 14, believes the characteristic on display is something else. “A sense of gratitude about every-thing, that’s also a very Australian thing,” she says. “You know, how the country was formed—all the convicts sent over, and look what we got. Instant gratitude.”

A�er Mulholland Drive, and its attendant laurels, Watts was nearly paralyzed when it came time to pick her next project. She was o�ered roles that played to the aforementioned intensity, which has been hard for her to shake. “I think I’m very sensitive, and I pick up the energies of other people strongly,” she says. “I absorb it all. And that possibly makes me intense. I don’t know.”

Following much deliberation, her agent finally convinced her in 2002 to do �e Ring, a low-budget horror film that became a runaway hit. As has happened many times since, Watts was the best thing about the movie, and, yes, it does have to do with the emotional potency (a.k.a., inten-sity) that she brings to every part. �ere’s a devastating scene with Sean Penn in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2003 movie 21 Grams, in which she plays a woman griev-ing over the sudden deaths of her husband and child. She’s lying on her bed, listening to her family’s last voicemail over and over. �e director of photography was so overcome he had to stop shooting.

Kidman describes her �iend as

always “honest and raw,” in films and life. “�at’s why Nai and I have been �iends for 30 years,” says the actress, who spent Mother’s Day with Watts and their respective kids.

Edward Norton �equently hosts the Watts-Schreiber brood at his Malibu home; he worked with Watts for the first time in the upcoming Birdman, also directed by Iñárritu. He likens the experience to playing sports with a natural athlete. “Naomi moves easily into any game and makes it seem e�ortless,” Nor-ton says. “Whatever the nature of the material, she seems to have very natural instincts, and she just slides into the scene and gets on with it. And what she delivers is always true and good.”

�ere are objective indications that Watts is doing something right: two Oscar nominations, for 21 Grams and the 2012 disas-

ter film �e Impossible. �e latter was based on the true story of a couple and their two children who survived a tsunami. It is as harrow-ing to watch as it was to make—“the hardest role I’ve ever done,” she says, in part because it was so physically grueling and “in part because it was a real thing we were reliving.” Yet despite the critical acclaim for Watts, it wasn’t the blockbuster it might have been. “Success is out of your control. It’s luck,” she says. “I’ve been surprised when films have done really well at the box o¯ce, and I’ve been surprised when they

haven’t. I simply can’t predict, so I try to go with my instinct.”�at gut again. “It’s such a hard thing to stay in touch with,”

Watts says, particularly in the cosseted bubble of Holly wood. As evidence, her decision to play the Princess of Wales in last year’s Diana. “I knew there were risks with the script, but I was hell-bent on taking on a transformative role,” she says, admitting that she uncharacteristically turned to others—“my agent, my manager, and �iends”—in deciding whether to take the part. But “more voices” create “the reverse e�ect of your instincts,” she says. “You try to do your best,” she adds politely. “I gave the producers my notes.” Watts was on a train out of Paris, read-ing a newspaper, when she saw something “horrendous” about the movie splashed across the �ont page and quickly stopped reading. (One critic called the film “laughably bad.”) “�ere are people out there who don’t care what people think, but I do. I wish I was better at not caring, but it’s not going to stop me �om taking a risk.”

�ese days, even choosing a dress for the red carpet can be a gamble. At a Metropolitan Museum of Art gala in May, Watts’s Givenchy Haute Couture gown was deemed “evil” by the Fug Girls on their website; one commenter

“IF ONLY I’D KNOWN BACK THEN—OVER THOSE 10 YEARS of trying to prove myself—WHAT I KNOW NOW, WHICH IS just be you. I didn’t trust that me was what people wanted.”

MULTIFACETEDDiamonds are still a girl’s best �iend. Rochas dress

($2,937); Donna Karan New York belt ($595);

Jimmy Choo shoes ($2,450); Harry Winston necklace

and bracelets (prices on request). For details

see page 231.

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Hair by Peter Gray using Easihair Pro. Makeup by Pati

Dubro� for the Wall Group. Manicure by April Foreman at the Wall Group. Tailoring

by Hasmik Kourinian �om Susie’s Custom Designs Inc.

Set design by Kaet Mac for Mary Howard. [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 3 0 ]

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Hollywood Her Way

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rather absurdly compared it to the swan dress Björk infa-mously wore to the 2001 Academy Awards. (�e Met gala is normally auspicious for Watts, who says that it was during a date at the 2002 event that she and Schreiber decided to get serious.) “�e Oscars red carpet favors Old Hollywood,” Watts says, but “the Met ball is supposed to be about taking chances.”

M U L H O L L A N D D R I V E D I D N ’ T J U S T launch Watts’s career; it was eerily prescient. At one point early in the film, Betty Elms, the more naive of Watts’s two characters, says, “I’d rather be known as a great actress than a movie star. Sometimes people end up being both.” Movie stars aren’t what they used to be, of course, particularly in America, where comic book characters and raunchy comedi-ans rule the box o¯ce. But, in a way, that has created an opportunity for a character-driven actress like Watts, who despite being beauti-ful has never been marketed as a beauty in the way, say, Kidman has, so that even in middle age she is as in demand as she ever was. More important, she can continue to favor uncom-mercial films, like her next two, both coming out this fall. In the darkly comic St. Vincent (co-starring Bill Murray and Melissa McCar-thy) Watts plays a pregnant Russian pros-titute. (She mastered the necessary cadence and weariness in Brooklyn nail parlors and on Russian mail order bride websites.) Birdman stars Michael Keaton as an actor who once played an iconic superhero and is trying to reclaim his glory in a Broadway play (which is where Watts and Norton come in).

In fact, the biggest risk for Watts might be to finally go Hollywood and accept a large amount of cash to star in a �anchise. And that, it turns out, is exactly what she’s doing. Watts recently signed on to play Evelyn, mother of �eo James’s Four, in the remaining chapters of the enormously successful Diver-gent �anchise. She typically worried over the choice but then realized, “I’d rather be a char-acter actress and have longevity—as much of it as I can—than kid myself into believing I’m always going to be a leading lady, you know?”

It’s not lost on Watts that aging has, to some extent, worked for her. She was never a mainstream sort of leading lady anyway. Watts laughs. “If only I’d known back then, over those 10 years of trying to prove myself, what I know now, which is just be you,” she says. “I didn’t trust that me was what people wanted.” •