When Laura Dern’s daughter Jaya was little, she paid a visit to the set of HBO’s “Enlightened” and told her mother that she noticed something different about her.
“She was like, ‘Mom, you seem more at home here than at home,’” recalls Dern, adding that what Jaya spotted was the ease of someone who, as the child of actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, has been on soundstages and location shoots since infancy. “I’ve spent my life on set. I love it. I feel so comfortable.”
Dern’s journey into the family profession began at age 6, when she appeared as an extra alongside Ladd in the Burt Reynolds car-chase film “White Lighting.” The following year she was a bespectacled “girl at counter” in mom’s vicinity in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” where Martin Scorsese famously gave her an early lesson in moviemaking rigor, having her eat 19 ice cream cones, across an equal amount of takes, until he was satisfied with the shot.
By the time her old friend Bradley Cooper reached out and asked if she’d be in “Is This Thing On?,” directed by Cooper and co-written by Cooper, Will Arnett and Mark Chappell, she was aware of the stamina that’d be required of her. Though she’d never acted in one of Cooper’s films, he had, for years, passed along his script drafts, shared audition tapes and screened different cuts of films he’s directed.
“I’ve never seen a harder worker in my life in any profession,” says Dern. “To know someone like that inspires a level of discipline in me I don’t think I’ve had before.”
Laura Dern.
(Bexx Francois / For The Times)
Part of Cooper’s pitch was that he wanted her to participate in shaping her role of Tess, a onetime Olympic volleyball player, now stay-at-home mom and currently separated from husband Alex (Arnett). “He said, ‘Let’s find her together.’”
Though there is no moving footage of Tess on court, Dern trained with volleyball coach Kirk Myers and had long conversations with her friend, pro volleyball player Gabrielle Reece, about the mind of a competitive athlete. Then there was the month of soul-baring sessions between her and Arnett at Cooper’s house, where they excavated all “the unspoken stuff — vulnerabilities, favorite things, childhood memories, dreams we’ve had,” says Dern. “We had to have this history because it’s not in the dialogue. We had to trust and know each other, and look in each other’s eyes, and feel the 20 years [of their marriage].”
“It sort of helped us find the shared experience in this potential loss,” says Arnett, who specializes in playing preening egotists and is open about the fact that painstaking self-examination wasn’t required in his previous projects. But as a fan of Dern’s Emmy- and Oscar-winning performances, he knew she’d bring a bracing authenticity to the part. He also appreciated that, at 5 feet 11, Dern is tall enough that they’d be on equal footing. “She told me that she’s done scenes where the actor has to stand on an apple box, and I’ve had that same experience,” says the 6 feet 2 Arnett, adding, “A big part of the character is that she has a physical command to her, that she felt like a real force to be reckoned with.”
As for Dern, she found Tess refreshingly strong of will. “I’ve been privileged to play some pretty boundaryless women in my life, and that’s freeing in its own way,” says Dern, who perfected the art of untamed Southern belles and impetuous free spirits, particularly in her many collaborations with David Lynch. “But to play a woman who holds power, who owns her body and strength, who can say exactly what she means, who has a goal? It’s very meticulous and that’s not how I’ve ever lived my life.”
Her fleeting part as the personal publicist of a narcissistic movie star (George Clooney) in Netflix’s “Jay Kelly” is another example of how much Dern is luxuriating in the sensible-grown-ups phase of her career. As for Clooney, whose feature film debut at 22 was playing the boyfriend of Dern, then 16 and legally emancipated, in the 1983 horror sequel “Grizzly II: Revenge,” he knows that something extra she brings to Liz, a handler who understands work-life balance.
“[Laura] was a kid when she got into this business. To her, a publicist was like a parent, someone who looked out for her,” says Clooney, who also recalls stepping in as surrogate big brother when the “Grizzly II” production went bankrupt and they found themselves stuck in communist Hungary. That’s when the panicked entreaties from Dern’s mother began. “I’d be on the phone, and she’d be like, ‘You make sure my daughter is OK.’ And I’d be like, ‘Diane, you got it.’”
In November, when Dern was in the middle of a heavy promotional season, Ladd died at 89. The magic that Dern and Ladd generated onscreen together was captured in at least nine films and TV shows, including “Wild at Heart” and “Citizen Ruth.” Though she scaled back her schedule, Dern needed to ask herself: Did she really want to discuss a loss that’s still so fresh?
“I thought, ‘This is going to be hard because I’m going to have to talk about my parents,’” says Dern in a tight voice. “Then I thought, ‘They are my muses, my guides, my teachers. I’ve never done an interview without talking about my parents, and that will be the case for the rest of my life.’”
