The actress, 78, thought her politics would never harm her career. Now she tells Will Pavia she may never act in a big-budget Hollywood movie again.
“You wanna hear a story about Brando?” asks Susan Sarandon, her bouncy auburn hair sprayed out across her shoulders; those potent eyes of hers looking at me over Zoom from behind a pair of thick, grey-blue-framed glasses. It’s a gorgeous day in New York City’s West Village, sunshine warms the wall behind her and a tabby cat named Ida sprawls at her side.
Who wouldn’t want to hear a story from her about Marlon Brando? She shrugs her grey cardigan off her shoulders and gives me a look that says: hold on to your hat.
Jack Nicholson lives, she says, in a little house on Mulholland Drive, crammed with priceless works of art. “You would just see these extraordinary paintings worth millions, just hanging on the wall next to each other,” she says.
For years, Brando lived next door. The two houses shared a gate, their gardens merged. At any moment Brando could wander like a deer into Nicholson’s yard.
“Sometimes Brando would walk right in to Jack’s house and take things out of his refrigerator,” Sarandon says. “Jack put a lock on it. They had this big thing. But Jack had always said: ‘If you’re ever going to sell your house please let me know.’ So Brando calls one day and says: ‘All right. I’m gonna sell my house but this is the thing. You have to have US$15 million in a bag at the end of my driveway in three days.’”
It may not have been US$15 million, she says later. But it was a sum in the millions, and it was a Friday afternoon. “Jack says, ‘But you know the banks are gonna be closed. How am I gonna have it there by Sunday night?’”
Nicholson began working the phone, she says, calling businessmen he knew, organising wire transfers. “He goes crazy and he starts finding money,” she says. “He goes through all the machinations.”
By Sunday, he had several million dollars in cash in a bag. “He calls Brando back. He says, ‘OK, I got it, I got it. I’m going to put it at the bottom of your driveway.’ And Brando says, ‘Hey Jack. What is today?’”
“April 1,” Sarandon says. “Those are the kind of jokes these guys play on each other.”
She nods, approvingly. “Things that get set up months in advance. Robert Redford and Paul Newman were like that too. Sawing people’s desks in half, filling trailers full of chickens in the heat. Just crazy, big idea jokes.”
Now 78, she is regarded in the same light. She does not go around filling people’s trailers with chickens. But she, like them, is Hollywood royalty. She has a career that stretches from the golden age to the gilded plastic of the DC and Marvel Universe, from Billy Wilder to Ben Stiller.
Lately though, Sarandon feels she has been blacklisted in Tinseltown following remarks she made at a pro-Palestinian rally last November. Standing on the back of a lorry at the protest in New York City, and apparently speaking off the cuff, she said a lot of people were “afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence”.
She quickly apologised, saying that she had intended to express concern over antisemitic attacks and made “a terrible mistake” in the way she phrased it, by implying that “until recently Jews have been strangers to persecution when the opposite is true”.
The fallout was immediate. “I was dropped by my agency, my projects were pulled,” she says. “I’ve been used as an example of what not to do if you want to continue to work.”
Sarandon is not alone. Another actress, Melissa Barrera, was dropped from the cast of Scream 7 for sharing posts on social media that accused Israel of genocide, while a prominent agent at Creative Artists Agency was demoted but kept her job, according to Variety, after her client, Tom Cruise, indicated that she had his support.
“There are so many people out of work right now [since] November of last year … who have lost their jobs as custodians, as writers, as painters, as people working in the cafeteria, substitute teachers who have been fired because they tweeted something, or liked a tweet, or asked for a ceasefire,” Sarandon says.
She is not unused to causing offence. There is still a cohort of liberals who have not forgiven her for declining to back Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for supporting Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, who would then be blamed for chiselling away enough voters from the Democrats in three swing states to help Donald Trump over the line. We are speaking 12 days before the 2024 election. When I ask how she feels this time, she suggests that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats would get her vote.
“I think there’s a revolution happening among unions and among young people who are not born into a party,” she says. “I’m feeling that both parties are owned corporately. I think there’s a great difference culturally - in what they talk about - but not in policy, and so I’m supporting humanity.”
I’ve seen her say in the past that Hollywood would not penalise her over her politics. Now she seems less sure.
Not all her work has dried up, however. We’re here to discuss a low-budget bowling movie she’s starring in, called The Gutter. It has been written by an American comedian called Yassir Lester, who has also directed the film with his brother, Isaiah. Sarandon did not know either of them but she liked the script. “It was outrageous,” she says. It reminded her of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, another independent film that was her first big hit nearly 50 years ago. The Gutter is similar in that at times it seems “to invite the audience to throw something at the screen”, she says.
It’s about a young black man named Walt who discovers by accident that he is a fabulously gifted bowler. He gives himself a bowling name featuring the N-word and insists that it is written on the large cheques that he is given for winning tournaments. The Lester brothers wanted Sarandon to play the part of Linda Curson, a retired bowling champ who returns to the game to crush him. Curson at times feels like an amalgam of characters Sarandon has played in the past: imperious, sexy, spouting plumes of cigarette smoke as she talks. “She’s a narcissist and a racist in that kind of unconscious way, and obviously a horrible mother,” Sarandon says. “All of those things are so much fun to play.”
Before filming, she went to meet the directors. “They were sweet and I thought, well, first of all, thank God they are black,” she says, given the racially charged script. At one point her character says derisively: “Walt could be something some day, like a garbage man or a janitor in Wakanda.”
They brought in a lot of stand-up comedians for the smaller roles. I wonder what it was like for all these people when Susan Sarandon walked on set.
“They all claim they were nervous before I came, but it was perfectly fine,” she says.
Sarandon was once a shy and dreamy girl but this was more or less knocked out of her by growing up as an eldest child with eight siblings. She had to look after them. Her father, Phillip Tomalin, had been a big band singer and then, during the Second World War, became head of entertainment for troops stationed in Italy. After the war he came back, “knocked up my mom right away”, and went to work in television and then in advertising.
The Tomalins lived in Queens and then moved to New Jersey to a ranch house set in a field full of rocks, which the children were tasked with pulling from the ground. Her father commuted into the city to work and “my mom was always pregnant and overwhelmed”. Her siblings remember that “I was the one to bathe them and put them to bed and it took me a long time not to bring that … into my relationships.”
She had a tendency to mother people. “It’s really reassuring for me and it’s, you know, the curse of the competent woman. You get used to doing it and you do it well.” It was only much later, wondering what went wrong when a relationship came to an end, that she would think: “Oh, yeah … maybe I should have just backed off and let him do more for me.”
Susan Tomalin, as she was then, wanted to study literature and ended up at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC aged 17, lodging with her grandparents and paying her way by working on the telephone switchboard of the drama department. The department put on a lot of Shakespeare and one of its stars was a graduate student named Chris Sarandon. She never considered being in those plays herself. “My voice was not seen as something that would even qualify to be on stage in a Shakespearean show,” she says. “I am still intimidated by thinking of myself as being able to handle that language.” Also, “I don’t find the women’s parts in Shakespeare very seductive, honestly.”
But she read a lot and learnt “about all the great writers” and about the theatre. She fell in love with Sarandon and married him in 1967, aged 20, taking his surname. After he finished college she accompanied him to see an agent who wanted to represent them both. The agent sent her to audition for a film called Joe, by a company that was branching out from making soft porn films.
“They asked me to improv,” she says. “The first thing I had to do was pretend I was on some undesignated drug and trash a store on 14th Street,” she says. “I was, like, ‘This is so fun.’ ” More parts followed. “I think maybe because I didn’t want it so badly. I just thought it was really funny, that I was very lucky, and after a while I thought, well, I guess this is clearly what I do.”
She and Chris divorced in 1979. They had no children - a doctor had told her she could not have them. But six years and several relationships later, at the age of 39 and to her great surprise, Sarandon became pregnant while dating the Italian film-maker Franco Amurri. They had a daughter, Eva, who is now 39 and also an actress. Sarandon would go on to have two sons - Jack Henry, now 35 and a film-maker, and Miles, 32, an actor - with her longtime partner, the actor Tim Robbins, whom she met in 1987 on the set of the baseball film Bull Durham.
Sarandon and Robbins were together until 2009. Each had their own Academy Award, she for Dead Man Walking, which he directed, and they were thought to be uncommonly sane for a Hollywood couple. “I still run into people who were devastated when we broke up,” she says. “I feel so bad for them.” She’s still friends with him. “You have kids … you don’t have any choice.”
Would she still work with him? “If he brings me something I like, yeah,” she says. “Imagine if people in Hollywood didn’t work with the people they slept with.”
The whole place would cease production tomorrow.
I ask if she ever thought of dropping the name Sarandon after separating from Chris. “He was a very kind man and he kept me alive, you know, so I’m happy to have that name,” she says. Her only regret is that she did not change her first name. “Sigourney Weaver, Tuesday Weld and Stockard Channing all started out Susans and they had the sense to change that name and I’m stuck with Susan,” she says. “It’s kind of nice to do a rechristening as you start to realise who you are.”
She mentions David Bowie, who was born David Jones. Sarandon shot a horror film with him called The Hunger in 1983 and dated him for a while. With Bowie, I presume the name change allowed him to separate his persona as a superstar from his life as a normal human being.
She shakes her head. “I think he was always pretty amazing,” she says.
I ask if her children ever find it hard to have a cool mum who once dated Bowie.
“It’s hard for them not to be his child,” she replies.
Before Bowie and The Hunger came two big films that she made with the director Louis Malle. The first, Pretty Baby in 1978, caused a terrific controversy as it starred Brooke Shields, aged 11, as a pre-teen growing up in a brothel whose virginity is sold off in an auction. Sarandon played her mother. I interviewed Shields a few years ago and she recalled a chaotic set.
“It was a war zone,” Sarandon says. The crew were rowdy and the coolers were stocked only with alcoholic drinks. She remembers opening her hotel door one evening to see crew members racing naked down the corridor, shooting each other with fire extinguishers. The cast was not much better. “Malle, in his hubris, had picked out most of the actors from Mardi Gras and those gals didn’t really understand continuity,” she says.
Sarandon thinks that “Pretty Baby just made people crazy, even though [Shields] is not touched in the movie, even though she’s not naked in the movie, because she’s really the only one that’s not a victim … There was something about that that was unacceptable and maybe stirred up some feelings in people that they didn’t like. Because Brooke had a kind of mean sexuality - at 11. She was really strong.”
Sarandon began a relationship with Malle and appeared in his next film, Atlantic City (1980), alongside Burt Lancaster. She played a young waitress working in a casino; he was the much older boy next door, a former small-time gangster in his twilight years.
Malle had considered Robert Mitchum for the part “but he thought Mitchum wouldn’t go there, in terms of looking older”. Lancaster would. “He was a pretty ballsy guy,” she says. “They made his hair even whiter and, you know, leaving his pot belly out.” It was a big deal at the time. She remembers gawkers staring when they were shooting outside, and crying: “What happened to Burt Lancaster? He’s old!”
More worrying to Lancaster, apparently, was a scene where Sarandon comes towards him, unbuttoning her shirt, and he does not immediately jump on her. Lancaster felt he had a reputation to keep up. “He said to Louis, ‘People expect that I should just take her and throw her to the ground, you know?’ ”
Malle, the director, did not like talking to actors, so she told Lancaster the scene was powerful and that he looked extraordinarily charismatic in it. “And to his credit he did it the way it was written, which was just [being] still and … me bringing myself [closer] and offering myself with no obvious culmination. That was a big step for him.”
After Sarandon became a mother, she would bring her children with her to work. “Most of the time those big films - The Client, Thelma & Louise - were shot during the summer,” she says. “Then when they got to be teenagers they wanted me to leave and they wanted to stay home. But up until then I dragged them everywhere.”
I like the idea that she shot Thelma & Louise - a film about two self-reliant women taking control of their lives, leaving various dreadful men behind - with kids in the trailer.
At the start of the shoot she asked the director, Ridley Scott: “Am I definitely going to die?” Or would he perhaps decide to let them live? “He said, ‘Well, you will definitely go over the cliff. We’ll see about her.’ ” Meaning Thelma, the Geena Davis character. “Maybe you push her out at the last minute.’”
He left that final scene, the two women trapped by the police on the edge of the Grand Canyon, for the final day of filming. In the late afternoon, the “golden hour” when everything looks fabulous, Davis and Sarandon sat in their Thunderbird, staring over the cliff. They only had time for one take. It was “a little worrisome”, she says. By then “we had kind of earned the right to go over together”, Sarandon says. “Then I said, ‘I’d like to kiss her … What do you think?’ And Scott was, like, ‘OK.’ " And then they did it. “It felt like a stunt,” she says. “Because we only had the one take.”
To hear her talk about it, you’d think she and Davis actually went on that road trip. “Yeah. Geena and I are still friends,” she says. “We thought we were just making a cowboy movie with women and trucks, you know. It wasn’t supposed to be a liberation of any kind and, actually, when it came out … very few critics picked up on the rape” - the fact that Louise, who kills a would-be rapist, was raped herself in Texas years earlier and so does not think that anyone will believe them if they go to the police. “That kind of slid by, you know, until fairly recently,” she says.
I ask if she thinks she’ll be offered any more big films now. “I don’t know,” she says. Not, she suspects, “anything in Hollywood”. She’s working on another low-budget film.
She no longer lives, as one writer put it, like Gertrude Stein, in a vast two-floor apartment with artists and other lodgers.
“When all my kids left and Tim and I split we sold our huge loft, which wasn’t too far from here,” she says. Her new place is in a smart, doorman building. “It’s a tiny little apartment filled with cats, but it has a nice terrace, and on the street there’s lots of writers and painters,” she says.
How many cats in the apartment?
“Three,” she sighs. “Which is kind of Grey Gardens adjacent.”
Ida, an elderly and slightly feral tabby, she got after her dog died during the pandemic. She adopted another female to keep Ida company but Ida tried to kill her, so she introduced a third - a young male - to see if this would shift the dynamic. It did, “but just not exactly the way that I’d hoped”.
One of her sons, who also has cats, recommended that when looking for a man she should focus on cat owners, who are better able to “adjust to independent women”, she says.
She is currently single - “unattached” is how she would rather put it.
I ask her about age and whether it matters in relationships - she has dated much older men and also much younger ones. “There are different people who are, you know, younger, but have lived a very full life that are more mature, more interesting,” she says. “It’s very hard to find a much older guy who’s still curious and not just trying to hold on to things the way they were.”
Occasionally she has suggested that she would be perfectly happy dating a woman. “It has to be somebody who has curiosity, a sense of humour, intelligence and appetite for life,” she says now. “So God bless you if you manage to find somebody who fulfils any of those things, whether they’re younger, whether they’re older, whether they’re female or male, whether they’re gender-fluid, whatever. Those are just details. I think the big thing is finding someone with an open heart and open mind who’s still curious.”
She’s fun to talk to and seems willing to discuss anything. Though maybe it’s just that she tells great stories, like a proper Hollywood star, while at the same time giving you the idea that she is still holding something back.
I ask why she has not written a memoir. “I have sworn never to do that. The things that are really interesting I just can’t talk about,” she says. “I’m pretty private, actually.”
When a memoir was mooted in past, she shut it down. “I said, ‘What about a book about all the people I could have slept with and didn’t?’”
The world, according to Sarandon, needs the love of the Sixties. “I think that the Beatles were right,” she says. “What is the line? ‘The love you take is equal to the love you make.’ I think it’s very hard these days, when we’re being assailed by so much negativity and selfishness and greed, to hold a place of love and possibility that people can find when the dust settles.”
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London