She may look like a silver-screen goddess, but NAOMI WATTS’ best-known films – from Mulholland Drive to The Ring – are firmly on Hollywood’s dark side. She tells EMILY CRONIN why she’s no cookie-cutter actress.
ow to parent when you’re famous, by Naomi Watts, rule number one: Don’t bother sharing your oeuvre with your offspring. It’s a policy based on experience, from the one occasion she gave in to her young sons’ repeated requests to see a snippet of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, in which she starred in 2005. “There are pictures in the house of Mommy in a big gorilla’s arms. What child wouldn’t want to know about that?” says Watts, with a good impression of an ‘exasperated mom’ shrug. “But very quickly into the trailer, my little one starts going” – wide-eyed – “‘Gaaaasp,’ because he sees Mommy in trouble. And there you have it. There really are no advantages to showing your kids your work.”
For Watts, maintaining a division between work and home life seems the wise choice. At work, she’s the cool blond from Mulholland Drive, The Ring, Funny Games and many other movies certain to make you look over your shoulder long after you leave the cinema. At home, she’s a co-parent with partner and fellow actor Liev Schreiber to two sons, Alexander, eight, and Samuel, seven. Parenthood may have altered her and Schreiber’s logistical considerations when it comes to accepting movie projects, but Watts’ taste in challenging roles remains constant.
“I’ve been in violent films, I’ve been in provocative films and incredibly weird, twisted films. Now that I have kids, do I want to do cookie-cutter sweet? No. I’m authentically who I am,” says the actress. “Your taste is your taste, and you connect with that. Even though I’ve tried a bit more comedy lately, I’ll always come back to that [intense] kind of role, because I think it’s fun and juicy and different.”
Watts, 47, is just as blond, fine- featured and blue-eyed in person as she is on screen. Across a café table in New York, she’s also thoughtful and softly spoken, her accent a lilting blend of British, Australian and American – vocal evidence of an early life spent moving between three continents.
“[There was] lots of adventure [growing up]. Lots of spontaneity and travel and packing up and going places,” she recalls. “At the time, you didn’t really question it, because it’s what you know, and you just follow the lead of your parents… It always felt like we were on the road.”
Watts’ father, a one-time road manager for Pink Floyd, died of an apparent overdose when she was seven years old, and her mother moved the family from England to Australia when Watts was in her early teens. Her bohemian upbringing has made the actress intent on stability for her own family. “I definitely would like more structure for my children. But I really don’t want to overcompensate, and I think there is a tendency to do that when you’ve had certain things go on in your childhood.”
In Australia, she won small television and film roles, including a part in comedy-drama Flirting alongside her friend, Nicole Kidman. Watts followed Kidman to Los Angeles and spent the next decade in a grind of auditions and rejections.
“I tried to find a way to extricate myself many times, and I couldn’t,” says Watts. “I couldn’t let it go. Firstly because I knew I loved it, and I knew deep down that I did have something, even though I was being told that I had nothing.” Cult director David Lynch agreed, casting her in Mulholland Drive in 2001 and launching her career in spectacular form.
She went on to earn a Best Actress Oscar nomination for 21 Grams in 2003, and more recently has balanced indie films like Birdman, While We’re Young and About Ray with blockbuster projects like The Divergent Series, in which she plays the combative Evelyn Johnson-Eaton, mother of Shailene Woodley’s love-interest Tobias (played by Theo James).
“The longer the life, the richer it gets, and the [movie] roles generally reflect that,” says Watts. “Mid-forties, you’ve accumulated a fair amount of experiences – tragedies, good things, bad things, divorce, loss, things like that – and those make for good stories to tell. Although, your kids start getting older and older and older in movies to the point that it’s like, please! But, hey, that is the industry that we live and work in, and I am not going to get caught up in getting bitter about that.”
The actress has less equanimity for wage inequality. “There are films I’ve worked on where I’ve been asked to work at such a low fee when I know the leading man is working at a proper-sized fee, and it’s really upsetting,” she reveals. But she detects a shift: “I went through 10 years without working with female filmmakers, and the good news is that lately I have worked with quite a few… Voices are being heard.”
This year will see the release of several films for Watts, including thriller Shut In and the third Divergent film, Allegiant. Along with her full workload, there is bicoastal family life to manage, red-carpet appearances, and she might even carve out time to see Kidman. “We’re busy people that live in different places,” says Watts. “The thing about Nic and I is that we have so many years of history now, that even after big gaps, we just take up where we left off. We know we have limited time together, so we go strong; we cover big topics in a really limited amount of time. It’s just like, boom, we’re back.”
The family spend half the year in New York and half in Los Angeles, where Schreiber films TV series Ray Donovan. “It’s all constant negotiation and seeing how things go,” says Watts. Beyond logistical prowess, what makes their relationship function is being “inspired by each other, and I think there’s great respect for one another’s work. He’s got major [acting] chops and he’s incredibly bright and funny. I just love his mind.” As a family, they adore “ice skating, biking, scooting...” They recently completed renovations on a Tribeca flat, and Watts adores the neighborhood for its surplus of parks and outdoor activities.
he simplest pleasures of life clearly matter a great deal – such as the ability to walk the boys to school, which still feels like a revelation. It helps that it is very easy for her to be “completely anonymous” when it comes to walking around in the city: “I’m very small,” she says, “and I think that I look completely different than I do on the red carpet… I don’t wear any makeup, and I think I blend in very easily.” She is hesitant to offer up any parenting tips, though, recognizing the specificity of her experience in a way that in itself seems universal. “There are days when you struggle with the [work/life] balance, and there are days when you feel like, ‘I can pull this off. I have superpowers.’ I really just want them to be polite children who are kind to each other.”
Time is up and off Watts strides into the New York winter, happily anonymous, but not even a little invisible, not at all.
The Divergent Series: Allegiant is out March 18 (US)
Jonathan Anderson - Designer, Creative Director of J.W. Anderson & Loewe (6 Viewers)
Harper’s Bazaar Australia & New Zealand February 2025 : Xiao Wen Ju by Jacky Tam (3 Viewers)
