Sigourney Weaver talks to Joanna Wane about playing women who don’t walk away from a fight
What did I learn about Sigourney Weaver in our 20-minute Zoom call? It was audio only, so she might have been in her PJs for all I know. Alien’s Ripley, one of the world’s most enduring kick-ass feminist icons, is in her early 70s now but I just can’t picture her wearing anything as mundane as slippers.
No surprise to hear she’s right behind the #MeToo movement: “I admire so much these women who’ve come forward about the abuses and crimes in our business. I hope men are paying attention.” Or that she’s pro-choice. In Call Jane, one of four films Weaver starred in last year, she plays the leader of an underground abortion network in the 1960s.
“Look at the women in our country who voted for Donald Trump, for goodness sake, and who don’t want to pass the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment],” she says, with exasperation. “It’s incredible to me that there are women who don’t respect other women and their individual choices. I feel like we have a long way to go.”
Next year, she’d like to spend her 40th wedding anniversary travelling around New Zealand (Weaver and her husband, stage director Jim Simpson, split their time between New York and a place upstate, near the Canadian border.) She’s cuddled a baby wombat but doesn’t like snakes. And she’s quick to push back at the suggestion that her career shows a particular attraction to playing strong female roles. “To me, women are strong,” she says, with the emphasis on ‘women’, and I feel somewhat put in my place.
“Women are often on the front lines of huge disasters all over the world. They’re the ones who take care of the children, who take care of the older people. Everything stands or falls with them. I see the resilience of women, the determination of women, the resourcefulness of women. I don’t think of them as strong women. I just think of them as women.”
What I really learn about Weaver, though, is that she’s an absolute professional, firmly steering every question I ask her straight back to the project she was there to talk to me about in the first place.
Australian author Holly Ringland burst out of nowhere with her debut novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart in 2019. Named best fiction at the Australian Book Industry Awards, the international bestseller — described by one reviewer as “delicate and dark as a fairytale” — has been adapted as a seven-part drama series, with the first three episodes being released on August 4.
Weaver plays the grandmother of a traumatised young girl, Alice Hart, who loses the power of speech after the death of her parents. June, who lives on a remote flower farm that’s also a refuge for abused women, turns out to have a few unspoken secrets of her own. In a nod to an old Victorian tradition, she takes Alice in and teaches her how to use the language of Australian native flowers as a way of communicating things that are too hard to say out loud. Stuart’s desert pea: “Have courage, take heart”. Spinifex: “Dangerous pleasures”.
The book’s opening line sets the tone for a story that traverses some grim and disturbing territory: “In the weatherboard house at the end of the lane, nine-year-old Alice Hart sat at her desk by the window and dreamed of ways to set her father on fire.” Primarily shot on location in northern New South Wales and the red-desert landscape around Alice Springs, the story has been faithfully translated for the screen by Amazon Studios and Made Up Stories, the production company behind Big Little Lies.
Among the cast is Kiwi actress Frankie Adams as one of the “lost flowers” rescued by June and her longtime partner Twig. Played with enormous emotional warmth by indigenous actress Leah Purcell, Twig is the heart of the story where June — the steely matriarch who patrols the farm at night with a loaded rifle — is its unflinching steel.
Executive producer Bruna Papandrea says Weaver was the first person they thought of when imagining the role. “She has incredible strength but also incredible vulnerability, both of which are crucial for the character of June.”
Weaver was 71 when the film was shot and jokes that playing the weathered June didn’t require a whole lot of makeup, despite the arc of the story spanning 10 years. The biggest challenge for her personal hair and makeup artist, Wellington’s Georgia Lockhart-Adams, was the bruised and bloodied aftermath of a beating June is given after she confronts the violent husband of a woman in her care.
Lockhart-Adams, who first met Weaver on Avatar and worked with her again last year on the Paul Schrader thriller Master Gardener, was flown over from New Zealand for the Lost Flowers shoot. “Georgia is so skilful and I have such complete faith in her,” says Weaver, who’s equally generous with her praise for the rest of the crew. “I also had two wonderful wigs from the man who made my wigs in Galaxy Quest [the 1999 science-fiction comedy is still one of Weaver’s favourites] and the hair goes a long way to telling the story of the ageing process.”
Weaver describes her journey into June as both fascinating and terrifying. It’s not only a challenging role but often an unsympathetic one. Damaged by past trauma of her own, June is emotionally shuttered, keeping her pain hidden and her secrets close. Some of the choices she makes and their impact on Alice border on unforgivable. Did Weaver find her hard to love?
“Once you learn her true history, you understand the decisions she makes, even if they’re not rational, because it’s the only way she has of being sure she can protect the people she loves,” she says. “It’s almost like she builds a dam across the past and does everything within her power to keep that dam up, because she’s afraid of what will happen if it breaks down. But it’s so dogged and uncompromising. It must be hard for Twig to love her.”
It’s more than four decades since Weaver seared herself into popular culture as Ellen Ripley in Ridley Scott’s Alien, a groundbreaking film when it was released in 1979. The part, originally written for a man, was her first significant screen role. Five years later, she played a cellist possessed by a demon in another huge international hit, Ghostbusters, followed by three Oscar nominations within the space of two years for Aliens (James Cameron’s equally revered sequel), Working Girl and Gorillas in the Mist.
Famously tall, Weaver has talked about how she felt like a “giant spider” as a kid and changed her name to Sigourney (a minor character from The Great Gatsby) at the age of 14 because being called Susan or Sue just didn’t sit right. She still rocks the red carpet, “oozing elegance” in a black gown with a plunging neckline at the Golden Globes this year and wearing a “figure-hugging Givenchy dress” to the Oscars.
Weaver is refreshingly candid and engages genuinely in our conversation, despite what must have been the usual haul of interminable publicity interviews. Alongside domestic abuse, Lost Flowers explores the danger of leaving things unspoken. I tell Weaver that I found the toxic nature of secrets to be one of the most powerful themes in the story. “I think you’re so right and their power grows the more you try to keep them secret,” she says.
“My mother [actress Elizabeth Inglis] was English, so she came very much from a society where people don’t talk about things. It’s not far away for me to understand that. For decades, and I think in New Zealand, too, there were many things that were never talked about and terrible things that happened within families were often kept secret.”
Alycia Debnam-Carey, a seven-season regular on the post-apocalyptic horror series Fear the Walking Dead, plays Alice in her early 20s, still searching for the truth about her past. She’s luminous in the role, but it’s Alyla Browne as the young Alice who gives the most haunting performance.
It had been 40 years since Weaver last worked in Australia, filming The Year of Living Dangerously with Peter Weir. This time, she flew into an emerging Covid pandemic and spent her birthday in quarantine, with guards outside the door. The art department sent her huge bouquets of Australian flowers that appear in the script: wattle, paper daisies, flannel flower, kangaroo paws. “I’d never seen anything like them,” Weaver says. “To be surrounded by that kind of strange beauty was one of the great joys of doing the show.”
Shooting on location for scenes at the flower farm was magical. A mob of curious kangaroos lived a couple of fields away and would hop over to visit the set at dusk most days. “We also had — what’s that thing called that’s rather like a bear and begins with ‘w’ and has big claws? That’s it! A wombat.”
It was Browne, who’s still at primary school, who helped Weaver adjust to the more perilous forms of wildlife. “I’d be complaining about the fact that there were always these snakes around and as a New Yorker, I’m not used to that at all, especially since they can kill you,” Weaver says, with a laugh. “And then Alyla would say, ‘Oh, we have a python that hangs over our doorway’ and ‘You mustn’t try to kill the funnel web spider. It’s part of nature.’ She taught me a lot about the science of Australia. She has the most challenging role and was an absolute pro. She’s so talented. It just bubbles right up out of her. And as a person, great fun to know.”
Weaver first came to New Zealand in 2017 for Avatar, returning briefly for the recently released sequel, The Way of Water — by the magic of technology, she plays the 14-year-old biological daughter of her original character, Dr Grace Augustine, who died at the end of the first film. With director James Cameron now a full-time resident in New Zealand and still three more films to come in the series, she’s hoping to get the opportunity to spend more time here. Doing a road trip with her husband (a keen surfer) is on her bucket list.
In many ways, June Hart sits comfortably alongside the likes of Ellen Ripley, Grace Augustine, naturalist Dian Fossey (Gorillas in the Mist) and Linda, the autistic mother she plays in Snow Cake. “Women hold the world together,” says Weaver, despite her irritation with those misguided Trump supporters, “and I like to tell stories about a woman who finds that in herself.
“These women [in Lost Flowers] find in each other and in themselves the courage to go on; to make a fresh start and find joy and love in normal, everyday life in spite of the trauma they may have experienced in the past. There’s a lot of light in this story as well as dark. And it’s the light that interests me, because towards the light is where we all want to go.”
- The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart goes live on Amazon’s Prime Video from August 4.