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It felt like Naomi Watts covered it all in a Zurich Film Festival masterclass on Sunday afternoon: dreams, drama and, of course, the menopause.
The British star opened up with host Max Loong about struggling for around a decade auditioning in Los Angeles before she would go on to meet David Lynch and star in his career-transforming Mulholland Drive. Watts was speaking the day after a glitzy Zurich ceremony in which she accepted the fest’s prestigious Golden Eye award for her latest feature, The Housewife.
The conversation began with Watts’ childhood and acting aspirations. Her ambitions were made a little more complicated when Watts’ mother moved the family from the U.K. to Australia when she was only a young teenager.
In a bizarre way, meeting the late, great Lynch — whom Watts did an impeccable impression of, pretend cigarette and all — was almost like therapy for the actress, who landed that breakout role at the age of 31. She was worn down by Hollywood’s faux interest in her talent and the fickle nature with which casting directors operated. “[You’d] line up and see 10 or 15 girls, running their lines, looking much better for the part than you do, and it was really a grind,” Watts told the room.
“That 10 years before I met David Lynch, I just became so locked up and I felt worthless,” she continued. “My agent actually pulled me aside because she put together a reel with some of the work I’d done in Australia — little bits of things — and she said, ‘We need to have a heart-to-heart. Come in and talk to me because I don’t understand why you’re not getting these jobs.'”
Watts was told by that agent: “‘Honey, you’re too intense. You’re freaking people out.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, no shit. I’m desperate. I’m three months behind on my rent. I’m getting evicted! They told me I wasn’t funny last week. I’m trying to be funny now. They told me I wasn’t sexy. I’m trying to be sexy!'” she said, likely validating a lot of women in the room vying for a foot in the door. “You reshape yourself to try and read the tone of what is needed, and it becomes freaky. And I just couldn’t be myself. I was either an extreme version of myself or a diluted version. I was further and further away from myself, and it took a genius like David Lynch to be able to see beyond all of that weirdness that I had built up and undo it and get to the real me.”
At the Cannes Film Festival premiere of the beloved Mulholland Drive, in which Watts plays an aspiring actress who arrives in L.A. and befriends a car crash victim, she remembers sitting in the car with co-star Justin Theroux, about to hit the iconic red carpet, when a sentimental song came on the radio. “The crowds are there waiting, and the song changed to Cat Stevens’ ‘Morning Has Broken,’ and this was the song that had played at my dad’s funeral.”
Watts became teary at this point in the conversation, earning a raucous round of applause from the crowd. Her father, Peter Watts, a road manager and audio engineer who went on the road with Pink Floyd, died of an apparent heroin overdose when she was just seven years old. “It was always a very meaningful song, and I just remember turning to Justin and went, ‘Oh my God, that song!’ […] Thank God I wasn’t alone in that car [and had] Justin because all I could think about was my mascara running down my [face]. He just grabbed my hand and he was like, ‘Come on. Let’s go. Let’s do it.’ I put my head up and off we went onto the red carpet, and it was wonderful. David was obviously very beloved and we just held on tight to each other.”
Mulholland Drive is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time, and made an international superstar out of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Watts. It was a modest commercial success, making around $20 million on a $15 million budget.
Towards the end of the masterclass, Watts took a moment to talk about her menopause activism, revealing how her four-year-old menopause and wellness company, Stripes Beauty, came to be. “Menopause has become a huge topic of conversations [and a] passion because I went into it early on in my life and had no clues about what was going on with my body and there was no open conversation,” she said. “Once I talked about it with my partner, who’s now my husband, and he was encouraging of it, I just thought: ‘How about I just own this story? How about I get ahead of it? I’m in on the joke that is not actually a joke, but why should we suffer?'” Watts’ goal was to inject normalcy into menopause, whether it’s through “humor, storytelling, just connectivity, or product solution.”
She lauded her husband of three years, fellow actor Billy Crudup, for being curious about menopause — and implored other men to replicate his openness. “I was hiding in the bathroom trying to scratch off my estrogen patch, and he was like, ‘Is everything okay?’ And I told him what was going on, and I really was so nervous and thinking, ‘Oh God, I bet he’s not going to want to be with me now. He knows I’m in menopause.'”
Crudup’s reaction was quite the opposite. “He was like, ‘Hold on a second. We’re the same age, and that’s great that you’re taking care of yourself. Love science, love medicine. And why are you ashamed? That’s fantastic. Thanks for telling me.’ And so instantly, I felt, ‘Oh my God, this is so sweet and generous and sexy!’ Like, that just felt really intimate. And I felt safer than I’d ever felt,” continued Watts. “And I told him that I wanted to create a company for women who are not clued in, and the company would be about hydration from scalp to vag.”
Watts comes to Zurich promoting The Housewife, directed by Ben Shirinian and co-starring Tye Sheridan, Michael Imperioli and Luke Evans. It is based on a true story and set in 1964 New York. When a young journalist tracks down a potential Nazi officer living secretly in Queens, he befriends the lead suspect’s charming wife. But the investigation soon takes a disturbing turn.
Her fellow Golden Eye recipients include John Turturro and Tom Hiddleston this year. The 22nd Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24-Oct. 4.
English (US) ·