Olivia Colman as Leda Caruso in The Lost Daughter. Photo / Netflix
The actress and her fellow stars of the Elena Ferrante adaptation talk about mothers who leave their children.
Two Americans, an Irishwoman and a Brit walk into a Zoom — first up, Hollywood royalty Maggie Gyllenhaal, an actress best known for Secretary and The Dark Knight, who has turned director. She is energetic and chatty, at least compared with the former Fifty Shades star Dakota Johnson, who is sitting next to her, all cool and Californian spacey. Closer to home, we also have Jessie Buckley, star of the country music film Wild Rose. Last but not least is Olivia Colman.
All women with fine careers, now together for The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel that is a shoo-in for Oscar nominations. It is a superb take on a literary favourite that tackles the taboo that all parents want to walk out on their kids — at least for a bit. We will get to that tinderbox, but first, the lead in the film, Colman, and what an odd, brilliant career she has had.
What is she best known for? Do you go to her first act — comedy, with Peep Show? Or her second — television drama, with Broadchurch and The Crown? Or the third — the Hollywood A-lister she is now? The Lost Daughter will almost certainly bring Colman her third Oscar nomination. In 2019 she won for The Favourite and last year she was in the running for The Father.
In person, the 47-year-old is humble about her success to the point of mundaneness. "It's someone else who's very clever writing the words and I just try to remember them." Fine, but last month Paul Thomas Anderson — the greatest director of his generation — said Colman was the actress he most wanted to work with.
"Amazing!" she says with a gasp. Colman is polite and friendly, speaking with that slightly clipped nervous voice of hers. "He probably meant Olivia Williams," she says, laughing. It is understandable that she feels overwhelmed. With little fanfare and less fuss, Colman has gone from Peep Show to annual Oscar contender. Gyllenhaal takes over, praising a visibly awkward Colman for the comic timing that she brings to her ostensibly non-comic role in The Lost Daughter. She makes the unnatural seem natural, which is her gift.
"I'm as surprised as you are!" Colman says, smiling, about her career trajectory. "I just wanted to work, so I took work and I loved comedy. Then it took somebody like Paddy [Considine, who cast Colman in his brutal abuse drama Tyrannosaur] to take a punt. There is a comedy list and a drama list and you're not allowed to cross over, until someone takes a punt."
She drifts a bit, talking about how hard comedy is and how its actors should not be under-estimated. Her co-stars look on rather adoringly. If there is a similarity between Colman and the Queen, whom she played for two seasons of The Crown, it is that when she speaks, everyone listens.
"I've gone off on a tangent," Colman says. "I'm sorry. I am thrilled I'm working. That's all I ever dreamt of doing and I hope to do it until I'm really old."
Especially, as with The Lost Daughter, if the work is on a Greek island during a pandemic? "Yes. That was a big plus, being in Greece," she admits. "I want to do a film every year on a Greek island," Buckley adds. "We would all sit outside, drink wine, have sing-songs and go swimming."
This is the biggest adaptation of a Ferrante novel yet. There has been a play at the National, plus a well-received TV show based on her best-known book, My Brilliant Friend. But The Lost Daughter will vie for awards and be available on Netflix's global platform — both bringing in new audiences for an Italian writer who remains anonymous despite selling millions of books and counting Hillary Clinton and Jonathan Franzen as fans.
Gyllenhaal, who directs the drama like a thriller, acquired the rights to Ferrante's 2006 novel three years ago. It was done secretly, of course. And since the deal was done, Ferrante has left Gyllenhaal to it. The author has yet to see the film. The Lost Daughter is one of the Italian author's lesser-known works — it is not part of the heralded Neapolitan Novels — but still focuses on the feminist themes that made Ferrante such a phenomenon.
Leda (Colman) is on a sad, solo holiday in Greece, where she strikes up a friendship with the edgy but kind Nina (Johnson), which reawakens upsetting memories of bringing up her own daughters. Young Leda (Buckley) fills in the gaps via flashbacks and it is hefty stuff — imagine Shirley Valentine meets Wild, in which Reese Witherspoon wanders off to find herself. As one line in the novel reads: "The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand."
The genius of The Lost Daughter is that it deftly presents Leda's decision as sane: parenting is hard, imagine if you took a holiday from it. "As children," says Gyllenhaal, a mother of two, "our survival depends on our parents having a huge investment in us. We can't allow the possibility they are ambivalent and that stays in us when we're adults. But how can you not feel ambivalent? I had all these things on my mind [as a mother], but didn't see them represented anywhere. What Leda does is extreme. I'm not going to leave my kids, but no parent has not thought of just walking out that f***ing door."
"The film makes it okay to have complicated feelings about being a mother," says Johnson, who is in a relationship with Coldplay's Chris Martin. "For somebody like me, who isn't yet a mother and maybe doesn't want to be a mother, it makes that okay. Complicated, but okay."
Gyllenhaal says Ferrante's books explode the limits of how women are written in fiction. "You go, 'That is speaking my language,'" she says, beaming. "It's hot." In the past few years there has been a rush of complex female characters on television in shows such as Fleabag, Mare of Easttown, I May Destroy You and I Hate Suzie. "Aren't you in half of them?" Johnson asks, grinning at Colman. "Well, one," Fleabag's stepmother replies. "I May Destroy You wouldn't have been made a few years ago and it's important just to be honest about how everyone feels [in real life]. "
"There's an interesting conversation to be had about what it means to be a young woman," adds Buckley, who is 31. "There used to be this pastiche of a woman being attractive and appealing. But the scripts have changed."
What made Gyllenhaal direct The Lost Daughter now? "Something happened to me when Trump was elected," she says. "When he said he can grab women's pussies, it was just so deeply misogynist, but there were no consequences. Something changed in me. I got radicalised — I thought, 'I'm going to tell the truth about what I've been keeping quiet about.'"
"And #MeToo," Colman adds, "was a moment when everyone went, 'Hang on a minute — no.'" But Colman, a mother of three who has just finished working with her writer husband on the drama Landscapers, speaks up for men. "Let's not pooh-pooh our male counterparts — the men I know and love are also multifaceted, fantastic, gentle men. And they're now allowed to say that it's okay to be a gentle man. A lot of positivity is going in all directions."
"Still, at the same time," Gyllenhaal says carefully, "mothering is as important to me as anything I could make a film about. I say this because here I am — a professional, educated artist. I've made a film which is an expression of me and it's about mothering. Because my identity as a mother is a massive part of who I am and that's true for many women."
The conversation winds on. On the topic of Cambridge University, which announced seminars on fertility for women, Johnson says: "It would also be cool if Cambridge offered to freeze eggs." She says this seriously, if with a slight smile. "With technology, you can have a biological child until you're 50. That's cool."
Ferrante could write a novel about that. The Lost Daughter might be the most stressful film about parenting since Room — in which a woman is held captive with her son — but it sure makes us think.
The Lost Daughter is out in cinemas from December 16 and on Netflix from December 31
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
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