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Tips from a waitress
The American TV star Keri Russell is reborn as a waitress in a wry comedy about pregnancy
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Kevin Maher
Keri Russell is born again. No, not in that way – in the movie way. And in other more subtle ways, too. The preternaturally perky 31-year-old actress, once famed as the star of the American TV smash Felicity, has returned to the flash-bulb glare of centre stage thanks to a movie about the unexpected pregnancy of a smalltown Southern waitress who has a gift for baking pies.
Waitress is a wry and thoughtful riposte to the summer’s raucous pregnancy-themed Knocked Up. Unlike that comedy, it is entirely devoid of fratboy humour and instead takes a darkly witty look at what happens to Jenna, a downtrodden table jockey (Russell), and her hick husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto) when an unwanted pregnancy strikes. Hint: Jenna has an affair with the local obstetrician Dr Pomatter (Nathan Fillion), while Earl’s behaviour becomes dangerously erratic. The movie was written and directed by the former indie movie siren Adrienne Shelly, who was randomly murdered in her New York office last November, and thus never witnessed how the finished film was a darling of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
It’s strangely poignant then that the movie, so linked with the death of its creator, has also become something of a professional rebirth of its star. Russell, who says that the death of Shelly hasn’t really sunk in yet, has been duly fêted for her charismatic central turn. It’s the sort of performance that you could hang an entire career on so it’s hardly surprising that Russell’s forthcoming movie projects now include the highly anticipated David Auburn debut The Girl in the Park, the fantasy drama August Rush, and an unnerving German horror flick Rohtenburg. Add this to the recent arrival of a baby boy (her first child with her new husband Shane Deary), and you have a woman who’s locked in the midst of life-changing events.
“I know, it’s all about birth,” she says, giggling coyly. “This is a good time for me, for sure, and I’m enjoying myself more than I ever did.” She immediately adds a note of caution, however. “There’s an ebb and flow to this business, so it would be great to have fun with it while it lasts.” This, you discover, is typical Russell-speak. She is sceptical about her own talent, ambiguous about her sex appeal and proudly immune to the trappings of fame. “Fame is just a freaky thing,” she says. “If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, then you’re a little crazy.”
It is nearly impossible over here to comprehend just how famous Russell became overnight because of Felicity. The show was created by the then emerging industry tyro J. J. Abrams, whose subsequent hits have included Alias, Lost and Mission Impossible III. It featured a Californian highschooler called Felicity Porter (Russell) who follows her classroom crush out to university in New York and gets caught in the emotional Sturm und Drang of college life. Most importantly, it was buttressed by a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that sold Russell to Americans as the new Jennifer Aniston or Calista Flockhart.
“You’re so visible, it was horrifying for me,” says Russell, a Californian who was then a 23-year-old dancer and former Mickey Mouse Club performer with some low-rent TV to her name. “I remember being driven home from one of the late-night talk shows I was on, and watching this random girl my age walking a dog on the street, and just crying: ‘Oh god, I wish I could be that girl, I’m not good at this!’”
But Russell was good at Felicity. The whipsmart writing and her kooky screwball performance, all cuddly sweaters and entropic sex appeal, she became an official American Sweetheart. Her image was so fixed that when her trademark curls were shorn at the beginning of Felicity’s second season, there was a national outcry. The public felt betrayed and the programming chief at Warner Bros announced that the haircut had been directly responsible for a slump in ratings.
“It was so funny that people cared so much,” says Russell. “I thought the whole point of Felicity was that she wasn’t a fashion maven. But maybe, then, she was.”
It was as if Russell’s fame was contingent upon remaining slightly virginal and unthreatening on camera. Fuzzy hair and fluffy jumpers were in; lip-gloss and vampy, man-eater crew cuts were out. “Doing that show really messed me up for when I was trying to be beautiful and sexy,” she eventually concedes. “It made me uncomfortable with trying to be va-va-voom.”
Russell took much needed time off when Felicity finished in 2002. She says that over the course of a year she got drunk in New York bars, went dancing with friends and read books. She had become jaundiced by the intense work rate and indifferent to her own profession. “I was reading scripts and just thinking that everything was horrible. I was probably reading amazing screenplays but I couldn’t care less.”
She says that she never wanted to be an actress in the first place. She was just this kid from Fountain Valley, the daughter of a Nissan car exec, who wanted to be a dancer. “If I hadn’t taken that year off,” she muses, “I would’ve probably done one more movie and then married someone and gone to live on a ranch and had eight kids.”
As it happened Russell eventually took baby steps back in to her craft, with small roles in Kevin Costner’s The Upside of Angerand the cowboy mini-series Into the West. It helped too that Abrams had publicly declared of Russell: “I’ve never seen an actor who is more intuitively aware of her craft. You think she’s this little ingénue and then all of a sudden it’s, ‘Oh my God! She’s amazing!’ ” Waitress is the first time that she appears as a whole woman on screen, complete with, at last, a dash of va-va-voom. “It’s funny, because that’s all I am right now – pure va-va-voom,” she deadpans, referring to the nonstop routines of early motherhood. She adds that she finds it hard even to read a full script these days without breaking off for River duties (her son is River Russell Deary).
In the meantime she says, she knows how to deal with the second coming of fame. “I’ve learnt that it doesn’t help to deny it,” she says. “At some point you have to sit back and say to yourself, ‘Relax, it’s happening’.”
The Waitress opens in the UK on Aug 10
| Tips from a waitress - Times Online |