Jena Malone

EO

You’ve been in the industry for a long time, and I was thinking about who your contemporaries even are. There are people like Chloë Sevigny who came up through a particular scene, or people who have had these long, strange careers that have moved through different versions of Hollywood. I’m curious how you feel about your career now, and how you feel about working in the industry today. I’m less interested in asking, “How has Hollywood changed?” than in talking to people who have actually lived through these different eras of it.

JM

Well, how I feel about working in it today is a very different question from how I feel about my career. For whatever reason—the death throes of capitalism, recovering from grind culture—we all have these things that we’re trying to overthrow or recover from. When I think about my career and moving through it, I have some very abstract and conflicting ideas. On one hand, I’ve been working for over thirty years. In any other field, I would be a valued member of the upper echelon of that profession. If I had been a dentist for fucking thirty years, people would be like, “Honey, sit down. You’ve got this. Come into the room.” People would pay attention when I talked because I had been doing this thing for so long.

In acting and Hollywood, it means nothing. It’s so crunchy and almost shameful to celebrate or herald yourself in a career. To say, “Yeah, I’m an actor who has been doing this for thirty years,” feels strange. It feels like you’re constantly at ground zero, having to prove yourself. There’s no doctorate I can get. There’s no bachelor’s degree. There’s nothing I can point to and say, “Hey, I did this, so now I can do this.” There’s nothing linear like that.

We can celebrate each other, we can celebrate ourselves, my family celebrates me, and we have fan bases that celebrate us. But if I think about what a career means, it means that I can look at it in comparison to other things, right? Your career, my career. It’s this genderless thing that we’re all striving to own or have. But for whatever reason, acting has this gelatinous, nonlinear, very sci-fi quality. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a really good career moment, and sometimes I feel like I’m at the bottom of the barrel. I’m like, how has thirty years of experience gotten me to a point where I’m literally scraping crust and wondering, “Can I feed my family?”

But it’s also cool. I feel like that’s kind of an “artist’s journey.” I’m glad that I’m not a dentist. I really am. It’s also strange to genuflect and say, “Let me look over my career,” because the career highlights for me were when I was really young.

EO

What do you mean by young? Which young?

JM

Different youngs. It’s also nonlinear, too. The preteen was a wilderness in herself. Ten to thirteen, when I was trying to break in and had just become a working actor, was a really interesting beginning road of self-discovery—figuring out what my voice was and how to lean into it. But in the same breath, I was experiencing all of that in my hormonal body. It was a really potent and powerful time to be a tiny femme and a tiny artist in a hormonal body, asking, “What is my voice? What is my breath? What is my body? What are my choices in the world?” It was really cool.

EO

But what about that period? You can name ground zero now, but did it feel like ground zero then? From ten to thirteen, you were entering acting in a very particular cultural moment. Child acting is obviously different from adult acting, but you got into it when it still felt like this strange job rather than the kind of hyper-managed system it later became.

JM

I got in at a time when child acting was this potent scam world. It was the nineties. You could answer an ad in the back of a newspaper. There were all these weird classes and this whole science-fiction area in the Valley where they were just breeding child actors. It was a very strange world. I don’t think they’re doing that anymore.

EO

That’s what interests me. You were part of this experimental class, this weird, almost haptic moment, and then you crossed over into something else and the industry has continued to change. But still, it wasn’t quite adult acting yet.

JM

I jumped over to teenage acting, for sure. But all teenagers consider themselves adults, whether anyone validates that or not. I think it’s such an adult experience having that body at that time.

EO

Can you talk about the experimentation or the sci-fi quality of that period? Almost like an Area 51, and then what it meant to transition out of it?

JM

I love this. Basically, I entered Area 51: Child Actor in 1992. Circa Lankershim and Hesby, living the dream. And I was like, “Why is no one questioning this?” I was the ten-year-old weirdo saying, “I’m not going to do commercial auditions. I’m not going out for The Parent Trap. That’s not what I want to do.” I remember every single adult in the room looking at me, then looking at my mother, then looking back at me and being like, “Oh, isn’t that cute?” They thought I was this novelty. And I was like, “Well, that’s not what I want.”

EO

Why not The Parent Trap?

JM

I remember going to an audition and it just felt serious to me. For whatever reason, I was going to be a serious actor. At ten years old, that’s what I wanted. I had no interest in comedy. I had no interest in anything else. I was Daniel Day-Lewis at ten years old, and nobody else saw it. No one believed in me, but that was what I wanted.

Imagine being a ten-year-old girl in a ten-year-old girl’s body, and you’re Daniel Day-Lewis on the inside. No one knows how to deal with that person. You really have to show up. So basically, the product line at Area 51, circa 1992, Lankershim and Hesby, was: you get a manager, you get an agent, you get a headshot, you go to acting classes, and you start auditioning for everything. You get in your car, you have wardrobe changes in your trunk, and you must always have snacks. You negotiate deals at school where you can do makeup time. Mothers are styling their children. I mean, it’s not pageantry, but it’s really fucking close.

And so I’m entering this world as a wildly beautiful, white-trash feral child. I grew up with no money. We grew up really poor. I had never had an extracurricular activity, neither did I even know what that was. I grew up going to school and then going to play in the forest. So I came in and was like, “Whoa, what is all of this?” These other kids were taking singing classes, their moms were styling their hair, and these other ten years old girls were plucking their own eyebrows. I was instantly like, “This is not me. I don’t know how to do that.” All I knew how to do was act.

EO

But what is that? What is acting? What was it then, and what has it become?

JM

I was just a truth seeker. I wanted to do things that really felt true. I wanted to read a script and be like, “I want this to be really true. I want to break someone’s heart. I want to make someone feel something.” I grew up with films with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. I watched Thelma & Louise way too early. The Shawshank Redemption. Those kinds of films where they’re going to rip your fucking heart out and you have no idea it’s coming. They’re so human. They’re so interesting.

Even Rain Man, I remember seeing it as a kid and being like, “Yeah, I’m going to do that one day.” I wasn’t watching whatever was being marketed toward me and thinking, “That’s the kind of acting I want to do.” I just took it really seriously. I don’t know why. But I would love to go back in time and be like, “What’s up, Jena? Have some fun. Why are you so serious?”

EO

I’m curious what you feel like you’re doing when you’re acting. You’re describing this thing where you’re saying, “I want to break people’s hearts. I want this to be real.” But those are words. I want to know what it’s like to be in your body, to be in that body and on that set. Where in the process do you meet the character? Do you meet them on the page? Are you writing in your scripts, watching other source material? What conditions do you need to make these characters real? Where do you make the choices?

JM

I mean, I wish that I was that kind of actor. And I honestly don’t think there is any actor who is. The human body is nothing but fallible, right? It’s constantly changing, disappointing us. We think we can do something in a gym, and then we wake up and tweak our neck. My instrument is my body. It can only go as far as that. I can’t take acting out of my body, put it in a paper cup, and dial something in.

Everything you’re saying sounds so linear. Of course, sometimes you make choices in the script, in the meeting, or in the subway. Sometimes you’re making choices in the hot flash of a moment. Sometimes you’re making choices with a director—it’s a game plan, it’s a conversation. Sometimes they’re shouting things at you while the camera is rolling and you’re just doing what they’re saying. Sometimes you never discover it. And it’s empty.

It’s a fucking gray wall that haunts you until the end of time. You come home, and your inability to find the choice that was going to feel transcendent makes you feel like a fucking scumbag. So I’ve never been able to formulate, “This is exactly how I do it.” All I know is that I have a bag of tricks. I have a tool belt that helps me in different environments.

I am an environmental actor. In this environment, I bring these tools. In this environment, I bring this tool. I’m also an environmental human. I feel differently on the top of a mountain. I feel differently in a desert. I feel different in a kindergarten playroom. I feel different in jail. I’m an atmospheric creature. I’m just going to keep changing no matter what. So I don’t have a “This is exactly what I do.”

Sometimes I come to set heartbroken for no reason other than just being a human alive, and I have to play a scene where I’m happy and celebrating my son’s sixth birthday. There’s not supposed to be any heartbreak in it, but here I am, human, fallible, and impossibly complicated. I’m bringing my heartbreak to this scene now, and I don’t want to. So I shove it to the side, I shove it to the side, and then all of a sudden it comes pouring out in some moment. That choice never should have happened, but now it’s captured on film and it actually works so beautifully.

The only thing I’ve ever learned as an actor is that I have to be open to the experience and let it change me in ways that I’ll never expect and cannot control. And I have to make sure that I feel safe in that. It’s about living in risk with full safety, full permission. Full permission, full risk. You don’t want to hurt yourself and you don’t want to be abused, and you want things to be moderately consensual. But that’s all the stuff for when the cameras stop rolling, when you have to advocate for yourself. You have to be an ally.

The real work of an actor is when the cameras aren’t rolling. Everything else is just turning off all the lights and taking your shoes off and fucking diving in. At least for me. But I was never trained. I just came at it raw. Raw style.

EO

With all of that in mind, can you walk me through the decades? The nineties, the aughts, the tens. What was the atmosphere of each period, and what did each one give you?

JM

The nineties were the trauma wound turned genius, right? I thought I could do it. I thought I could act. I thought it would be something that would lift me out of the life that felt like it was about to start punishing me. And it did. I grew up around Lake Tahoe, but when my mom split up when I was ten, I moved to Las Vegas with my main mom, my blood mom. I hated Vegas. I spent every morning looking through the newspaper, which I had done previously, helping my mom find garage sales, jobs, free items, better apartments, whatever. And then I found an acting seminar. I was about to turn ten, and I was like, “I just want to get out of Las Vegas. I’m going to get a job. I’m going to start providing for this family.” I felt like the world was going to crush me. It was blind faith. It was a blind-faith movement for me.

I ended up booking the very first audition I got, which was for a student film, a full-length feature funded by a Japanese pen company. Martin Landau’s granddaughter, Camille Landau, was directing it through UCLA. She had written it, and I was the lead. I was in every scene. The fact that this was the first thing I did was crazy. It was a drama. I had to cry. It was a really crazy story.

I walked on set that first day bluffing. I didn’t know how to act. I was just like, “Yeah, I can do this.” The trauma wound of putting myself in such a high-risk experiment became the inner workings of my own genius. I used the trauma, the stress, the anxiety of not knowing what the fuck I was doing to harness it into learning how to play in risk. So I feel like the nineties were me harnessing that and learning it: too much, too little, too much, too little, too narrow, and not expansive enough. Figuring out that trauma wound. A little bit more of this, a little bit more of that.

EO

Did you feel like you had contemporaries in that feeling? Not necessarily people who shared the same relationship to truth, but people whose careers were held up against yours. Were industry folk saying, “Your career is like so-and-so’s, you should do more of that”? Were there guardrails around that experimentation or the kind of form you were making?

JM

I think people thought of Jodie Foster, obviously. She was a young child actor who did a lot of different things and then started doing more serious work. So I think a lot of people used her as a template for someone like me. But those were the nineties. It was discovering that I could play in this space of risk, anxiety, trauma, or whatever it was. I was like, “I can do this.” And I was kind of rewriting the rules. Everyone wanted me to go right, and I always went left. Go right, I went left.

The Parent Trap thing was part of that. I just kept getting jobs and jobs and jobs. I would go out on commercial auditions, and eventually I told my manager, “I don’t ever want to go out on a commercial audition again. I hate them.” You walk in, they treat you like a child, they treat you like a dog. You have to hold a box and pretend to smile. I was like, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my life, and I’m never doing it again.” Luckily, I had a parent who was like, “Okay, Jena.” My mom never forced me to do anything. I forced myself if and when I ever wanted it bad enough.

EO

So those were the nineties. Then you moved out when you were fourteen. You turned sixteen in 2001. What did the early 2000s feel like? I’m thinking about Donnie Darko and that whole period. How do you feel about that version of yourself now?

JM

I love it. I’m so happy. I really like that Jena who was in the 2000s. I really respect and admire her. I was living on my own. I chose all the hardest paths, and I didn’t become a drug addict. I had no help, no support system, barely any family, and nothing to fall back on. I didn’t have any of that stuff. For whatever reason, I just had this blind passion that was like, “I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it so well, and it’s so serious to and for me.” And it worked. It just kept working. That Donnie Darko time was a really cool time. I remember I was one of the first cast members to be cast. I thought, “Oh, that’s cool. They’re really starting to see me.”

I felt like I really understood what independent film was. I understood my voice and had learned how to take risks. I really knew filmmaking at that time. Prior to that, I was still learning. I was still a kid.Throughout the 2000s, I was really finding my legs and, in typical style, continuing the rebellion of it all. Then I quit acting when I was eighteen. I left Hollywood. I shaved my head. At the peak of my career—we’re talking about careers, the legs that we can stand on—I decided to chop my legs off. I was like, “Well, let’s not do that anymore.”

EO

When you talk about independent film in the early 2000s, I’m interested in how you understood it in relation to commercial film and television. Weirdly, it makes me think about Gilmore Girls and the parallel between you and Alexis Bledel—the idea of the all-American girl. What context did you feel like you were operating in at that time? What did Hollywood think you were?

JM

I kept getting cast as the Catholic schoolgirl, the girl next door. The thing is, Hollywood’s imagination is so acute. It’s not an obtuse triangle. It’s so tiny. You have to get in and fit in however you can. And of course, I was a tiny little white girl with long dark brown hair, and I looked like that type. Though inside my brain, inside my body, I wanted to be Daniel Day-Lewis. I wanted to be rough. I wanted to be scary. I wanted to be violent. I wanted to be a character actor. But I was in the body of a girl next door, so that was the lane I kept being given.

EO

But from project to project, did you feel like you were able to inhabit the method of it all?

JM

I did. I just think it’s so hard to break form. It’s so hard to break. I was still learning how to do it. There were no thirteen-year-old method actors. Everyone was like, “Well, you’ll become a real actor when you’re older. Right now, you just take the roles that you can take.”

And I was like, “No. I want to froth at the mouth. I want to scare myself. I want to scare the camera crew a little bit. I want to intimidate people.” I was learning how to do that. I don’t think I fully came into it until my twenties realistically, though.

EO

How would you classify the aughts, then? Were there particular projects or moments where you could see the trajectory shifting, especially in terms of typecasting? Because when I hear you say you were typecast, there’s this dissociation between what you looked like and symbolized to Hollywood and who you actually were.

And there’s something interesting about the way history rewrites a career. Going back to Donnie Darko now changes how I understand you in that film because you’re still here. Something like Love Lies Bleeding continues to rewrite that earlier work. Suddenly you look back and think, “Oh, that’s who she was in Donnie Darko.” You were already inside this strange independent film, even if the character itself was different.

So after the rebellion, what happened? What choices did you have to make outside of the movies themselves to communicate your own sovereignty?

JM

What felt different about Donnie Darko was that I wore eyeliner and I was considered a love interest for the first time. Again, I started at ten, and slowly I was making these little choices that felt and were monumental because they did move me forward in tangible ways. I remember doing For Love of the Game, and I was wearing this miniskirt. They aged me to eighteen. I was supposed to be going to college, and there was a second where I was like, “Wow, I’m starting to play in this older space.”

But I was such a tomboy at that age. That was my societal understanding of what I was. Pushing into my sexuality was something that felt like all Hollywood wanted me to do, and it was the thing I was least interested in. Donnie Darko felt like a place that allowed me to explore being a leading lady in the way that I wanted. It wasn’t pushing my tits up. It wasn’t doing what Life as a House did.

When I did Life as a House, they wanted to change every single aspect of me. They spray-tanned me. They gave me fake breasts. They wanted me to whiten my teeth. It was this whole thing where I was like, “Oh, they’re trying to turn me into this love interest on screen.” I fought it. I hated it. I never wanted to do it again. But it was a good script. I loved Kevin Kline. I thought Irwin Winkler would be great. I loved that. I mean, I had the worst time in the world. I didn’t like it at all, but it’s okay. You take a risk, right?

EO

We love us some Kevin Kline.

JM

That’s what acting is. It’s taking risks and finding lifeboats in them. That’s really the toolkit you want to build: How do you float in risk and not be sunk by it? Donnie Darko was that. And then it slowly started shifting, where I was like, “Huh, is this a space that I want to explore? Do I want to explore being this thing that everyone wants me to be?”

At that point, it was pre-MeToo. They would be like, “How fuckable is she? Is she fuckable? Is she beautiful?” And I wasn’t. I was a teenage girl. I wasn’t a leading lady. But I was also working a lot, so I was kind of proving them wrong. I was like, “No, I can also do this.”

I think that’s why I left Hollywood. I did Saved!, I did Donnie Darko, I did The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. There were all these things I was doing, and I was like, “Gosh, I’m mounting to something, and they all want me to be something that I’m not.” I realized that I didn’t know how to become a woman in Los Angeles. I had been living on my own in Los Angeles since I was fourteen. I was at Wilton and Hollywood. I had a little bachelor pad at the tip of Thai Town.

EO

Were there no moments of television, or thinking about television?

JM

That was a different world in the 2000s. Doing television as an indie-film actor was career death. Once you started doing TV, you would never go back to making films. So I just never did it.

I did TV movies of the week. That’s how I started. But they were like films that just aired on television. That was the world I knew. I knew independent film, I knew big-budget film, I knew filmmaking, I knew feature-length. I didn’t really understand TV. I never really did television until my late thirties, after I had a kid.

EO

Okay, thank you. That’s what I needed you to say. So there’s this tension between becoming a woman and being in LA. What happened when you left?

JM

I left LA. I shaved my head. I took a year off. I went to community college. I moved back to Lake Tahoe.

But you asked earlier, “How did you find sovereignty?” I’ll tell you a really strange thing. It’s come up in a few poems that I’ve been working on: sovereignty is written on her body, and it’s written into her hair. Every single time I’ve claimed sovereignty or an expression of independence, I’ve cut my hair. I shaved my head. Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with a shaved-headed woman.

It’s this constantly beautiful space where, if you want space and you want to reclaim your choices—where you’re no longer being typecast and now you’re going to have to really find your own path—shave your head. Shave your head. I mean, as a woman. Men get to sort of do whatever they want in a thousand ways. I don’t know what it’s like to be a male actor. I don’t understand them. It’s so different. I only know how to be me.

So sovereignty was built into my hair. I dyed it blonde for this. You do it for this. It’s always the first expression of method acting: changing your hair. And then when I got rid of it, I was like, “Now I’m free. I’m free of Hollywood. I’m free of expectations. I can learn how to be a woman quietly in the mountains, all by myself.”

Probably around twenty-four was when I was finally ready. I moved back to LA and was like, “Okay, I know how to do this now.” It was around the time of Sucker Punch and then The Hunger Games. It sort of felt like a rebirth. I had been really successful, then I took some time off, and now I wanted to do it in a different way. I understood how to do it. I knew what I wanted. I felt confident that I wasn’t going to be changed by it, but rather that I was in control of what I wanted and how I wanted to express my sexuality and being a woman.

EO

But we skipped over Pride & Prejudice.

JM

Pride & Prejudice was during that eighteen-to-twenty-four period where I was taking tiny little parts. Again, I really wanted to be a character actor. So I was very much into, “Give me something that no one else is getting.”

When my agents were like, “Well, they’re not seeing Americans,” I was like, “Get me in the room. Get me in the room.” And it ended up working. I don’t know. I had such crazy confidence back then.

EO

And Howl’s Moving Castle?

JM

I wrote him a letter.

EO

Come on.

JM

Yeah. I love—I mean, for me, Miyazaki is everything. I love his work. Howl’s Moving Castle is incredible. I’m so proud to be a part of that.

When I moved to Tahoe and kind of quit acting, it wasn’t that I quit acting. It’s that I wanted to get away from Hollywood. I wanted to do it in my own way. I was still reading scripts, but I wasn’t letting it rule my world. I started writing letters to directors that I really cared about.

Miyazaki was one of them. He wrote back and was like, “Well, great. I have a tiny part for you in this one thing. Why don’t you come in and do it?” Another one was Lukas Moodysson. I loved his work. We got to do this very experimental film. I flew to Sweden during that time and did Container, which is wild, batshit crazy.

I did Into the Wild. That was another thing where I started learning how to do auditions on tape. No one was doing auditions on tape back then. I just started working with the camera. It was a very creative, fruitful time. I started making music at that point. It was really just being all alone and doing whatever you want.

EO

You used the word “artist” in the beginning, and I think it’s interesting that you think of yourself as an artist. It makes a lot of sense in terms of the world you’ve built. But when did you know to start reaching out to directors? Was that common among your peers? Were you talking to other actors and asking, “How did you get that part?” What were the mechanics of gaming it?

JM

I never reached out to actors. I started writing letters to directors.

EO

But you weren’t talking among your friends like, “I want this movie. How are you doing it?”

JM

No. I had some friends who were actors, but I didn’t have many. I felt kind of isolated. I think because I was such an independent actor, most people thought I was fine just doing my own thing.

I didn’t have a lot of check-ins like, “Are you doing okay?” When I left Hollywood at eighteen, everyone was like, “Okay, that’s typical Jena.” Just being a weirdo. It’s hard to have a community. I had a community of film people, but not necessarily actors at that age.

EO

So when you had this rebirth, how did you rebuild everything? You were reaching out to these directors and getting these roles, but how did you meet the other parts of your creative practice? How did you meet music? How did you meet writing?

JM

At a young age, I thought I wanted to be a DP. When I was about twelve years old, just from being on set, I picked up a camera and decided to start with photography. I wanted to understand a single frame before I got into the moving image. I took UCLA Extension programs. I studied it when I went to community college at eighteen. I developed a whole practice, fell in love with it, and was like, “Okay, I’m ready to get a camera.” I started shooting some stuff. I shot some really interesting auditions and little short things.

Right as I started shooting, I put it into iMovie and started editing. And I was like, “Oh, I need sound. This isn’t going to work without sound.” So I opened GarageBand, and I pretty much never went back. As soon as I opened it and put headphones on, I was like, “This is the world that I was meant to create in. This is my storytelling space.” I found it so freeing.

Actors are so shackled to their bodies, right? Here I was, this twenty-, twenty-one-year-old girl. Everyone wanted me to be something, and inside I felt like I had a whole world that I couldn’t show. I can’t play a sixty-year-old man. I can’t play a four-year-old girl. With music, as soon as I started developing the practice of creating stories through music, I was like, “I can be anyone. This is the riskiest space I’ve ever taken in my life.”

And much like theater, you build it from the ground up. You’re building the bones, you’re building the structure, you’re building the plumbing, you’re building the lighting, you’re building the tone, you’re building the words. It’s all yours. I thought I was just opening GarageBand to create a little music for something I had shot on my way to becoming a DP, and I never went back. I just started making music and I never stopped. I still take photos. Photography is definitely a tool that I love, love, love. But music is my number-one risk space these days.

EO

You keep referring to all of these things as risks, but I’m still trying to get you to answer the acting question. You keep evading me.

JM

You’re right.

EO

So when are you writing the character? You’ve got to give me something. When you’re doing research, how do you build the world around the character? When you show up to the Miyazaki moment, how do you enter it?

JM

Miyazaki was very specific. I’m just saying, it’s always a different process. With Miyazaki, they had already drawn the character and all the movements, so you study that. You’re trying to put yourself in that body. That’s all I get.

But then with Pride & Prejudice, obviously there’s a whole world. I got to learn ballroom dancing and corsets, read more about the Regency era, and learn different accents. That was like a whole college education before I even got on screen. Donnie Darko was very intuitive. I felt like I wanted to know very little about the world. I wanted to develop a very brutal inner world that felt like it seeped out and penetrated everything. That was a choice.

Sometimes you’re building the character through the wardrobe. Sometimes the wardrobe is so bad that I have to find it in other ways. Sometimes I don’t even find the character until halfway through shooting. And it’s not my fault. She just didn’t want to arrive.

I think it’s a courting process. You court the character this way, you court the character that way. You try: Is it through research? Is it through liminal space? Is it somatic? Is it through music? Is it through scent? There are a lot of different approaches. The reason I don’t have a one-way approach is because all of them have failed me in the moment at some point or another.

EO

But when did you learn that? Especially with something like Pride & Prejudice, how have those monumental, world-building experiences changed you? Because every project might be ground zero, and I understand that you have to approach each one differently, but you can’t just say that you wanted to be Daniel Day-Lewis. We have to show it. I love the anecdote of you watching the hands. I’m watching the hands as I’m listening to you. I love when you explain it in that way.

You’ve been an architect of your own career. You’ve pursued these people and these projects. What has surprised you most? Was there ever a project you were least excited about that then became this defining thing? Because the pieces are starting to come together differently now. You’re entering this zone where the work tells a different story than it did when you made it. You’re also a person who reflects the time. You’re almost like a software update that happens periodically, a kind of barometer for the time.

JM

That’s a very big compliment. I love the software update. I don’t quite know what it means. But one thing I wanted to say that might help you understand the Daniel Day-Lewis reference is that I wanted to be Daniel Day-Lewis without knowing who Daniel Day-Lewis was. I wanted to be something that I didn’t even know was out there. I say that in hindsight.

I say that I was a tiny girl who wanted to be Daniel Day-Lewis, but really I was a tiny girl who wanted to be taken seriously as an actor and not as a ten-year-old girl. The only way I could understand how to do that was to strive to be a character actor, to want to be something outside of my body. And I think what’s interesting is that if you take all of the training out of it—people train for years, there are incredible things to study, and I’ve never done any of it. I probably should. It would be so fun, maybe in my final chapter.

If you’re ten years old and you don’t know anything about acting, and someone says, “Scream like you’re scared,” or, “Cry because you’re upset,” you just do it. It’s not acting. You go into the method. You become that person. You have to just do it because I didn’t know how to be an actor.

I didn’t know technique or breathing or how to imagine the world or paint a picture. In a weird way, method is the most human. It’s just the first entrance in. It’s very somatic. It’s like, this person loves to paint, so what do you do? You learn how to paint. You can’t understand that if you don’t know how to do it yourself.

In some ways, because I was so untrained, wanting to become more of a character actor and using more method methodologies was just the entry point for me. I was wildly untrained and a little feral in it.

EO

But was that commonplace at the time? Was method acting in the ether as a path to go down or something to aspire to?

JM

No. Daniel Day-Lewis. That’s all I knew about.

EO

Where did you encounter method, then? When did you realize, “Oh, that’s what this is”? When I made the Meryl Streep and Bernadette Peters comparison earlier, I was trying to deconstruct that difference. They live in different parts of the process. So what is it about method that you gravitate toward?

JM

I am not a doctor. I’m not a method actor. All I’m saying is that when I first started, I knew no technique. And the only technique that emerged from my first inclination was method. I knew nothing else.

Oddly and interestingly, if you know nothing, method is potentially the first thing you reach for. You don’t know anything, so they say, “She’s a woodcutter.” Well, you better start cutting wood. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you.

Because I was so wildly uneducated in it, the first tool that I reached for was method. It’s interesting how people think of method as this highbrow thing, but for me it’s very thematic. It’s very childlike. It’s the first thing you reach for. I don’t think of it as this highbrow technique. I understand that people think it is, but that’s not where I was coming from.

EO

But that’s the point. People want these digestible narratives, and I’m trying to understand where you place the work and where you place yourself. There’s Jodie Foster, but then there’s you as an actor who becomes a vehicle for a very specific kind of career.

Looking at your work, I see Sydney Sweeney. I see Zendaya. I see Timothée Chalamet. That’s what I mean by you being a barometer. It’s actually a very contemporary career. A lot of actors now are making choices in a similar vein: you do the independent film, then the limited series, then something commercial. You’ve weirdly been in and out of time.

The independent filmmakers who once existed in one context are now making commercial films. So when you think about the industry now, do you still think like the person who wrote to Miyazaki? Are you still approaching it with that same sense of possibility?

JM

Here’s the difference: context. When I was reaching out to Miyazaki, I was in a bit of my heyday of creativity and rebirth and form and rebellion. I could work very little and still get paid enough to survive. I could take a year off and have savings. I was living, contextually, in the heyday of independent film.

Looking back at that period from 2000 to 2010, it was the most beautiful curve. I don’t think we’ll ever see that kind of curve again. Hollywood now is such a dumpster fire. It’s so hard to get anything made. The bread and butter for me were independent filmmakers and independent producers making movies for under three million dollars. That was basically my entire career. Small, tiny independent films.

You cannot make a movie for three million dollars anymore because of inflation. It’s so hard. Those one-million-dollar films that were my bread and butter in the 2000s are now five-to-ten-million-dollar films. And we have seventeen cooks in the kitchen. We have all of these producers and studios trying to push agendas or hit demographics or whatever.

For me, it’s a different Hollywood. I’m now an actor in a completely different Hollywood, and I’m learning how to navigate it. I’m still like, “Gosh, how do I do this?” I feel like the most punk-rock thing to do in this new Hollywood that’s a dumpster fire is become a politician. Build community. Rebuild society. Put creative energy and artistry there so that potentially we’ll be able to make and remake Hollywood, and make different art that’s more equitable, more inspiring.

EO

We have to wrap soon, but I want to quickly go through the 2010s into the 2020s. How do you synthesize that period? I’m thinking about being in The Hunger Games and that particular moment, where suddenly you’re inside this enormous franchise. It feels like another experiment.

JM

Yeah, I’m in this experimental space where I was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to do big-budget. I’m going to try this big-budget thing.” And I really only did it because I thought the character was so cool. I was like, “I can really do something with this.”

EO

Who are the young and the hungry?

JM

Listen, we’re all building it brick by brick. But the thing is, why do we have to rebuild this? We’ve been doing this for years. Donnie Darko was made so long ago. That was made by a twenty-four-year-old first-time filmmaker. He was given a budget. People believed in him. Why are we still questioning that format? Why are we still having to fight for it?

I think it’s amazing what’s happening in horror right now. Horror is always a wildly potent auteur-creating genre. It allows people to push political ideology, political dismantling, and societal beliefs that are a little intense and hard to fathom. It’s a real punk-rock genre, and mostly it’s being given, delivered, and funded to young filmmakers, which is amazing. I just wish we could have more of that in all genres, in all spaces. It doesn’t need to just be horror.

There’s less being made. It’s too expensive to make movies. No one’s making them in the States. We’re all going to Romania. We’re all going to Budapest. And that’s been happening for years.

That’s why I’m saying, hold on, we need to rewrite things. It’s not that we can’t make great films. We can continue making incredible stories. We have incredible filmmakers. I loved Obsession. I just saw Obsession, this twenty-five-year-old filmmaker. I thought it was fucking beautiful and haunting and funny and satirical. And I’m reading about Backrooms, and he was nineteen and made it.

There are so many cool things that are still happening. It’s just tiny—the few and the rare.

EO

That’s really the question I’m asking: What is happening in Hollywood right now? Horror is interesting because there’s this haunting quality to it. You came out of that experimental moment in the early 2000s, and now, twenty-six years later, we’re in this place where horror is once again a space for experimentation and smaller-budget films can become cult phenomena.

So what does Hollywood feel like to you now? When you’re interfacing with all of this, how are you orienting yourself? What’s your North Star?

JM

The North Star almost hasn’t changed. When I was sixteen, I wanted to work with visionary directors, auteurs, and first-time filmmakers. I loved working between those two worlds. I wanted to find someone who didn’t have the shackles of “You can do this, you can do that.” I loved working with first-time filmmakers. They always wrote the most interesting scripts.

And it’s still the same. I’m still hungry for that. I’m still asking, “Hey, who’s writing things? Who needs help? How can I push a person’s narrative forward?” But there’s less. There’s just less of that. There’s less cultivation of that.

I think that’s what happens when all of the big-budget film companies are owned by tech companies. Whereas in the nineties, we had really cool indie companies and really cool big-budget companies—movie studios that were run by humans who had been making movies and had been in moviemaking their whole lives. Now we have tech titans that sell toilet paper. It creates this dissonance of: Who’s casting? Who’s making these choices? Who’s greenlighting these things?

I think there’s potentially some really interesting punk-rock artistry to explore in verticals. I’m really interested in watching where verticals go because I think anytime art is created specifically for a format, its first five years are wildly potent. So I’m interested in that. And it’s cheaper. I love trying to make filmmaking cheaper. I don’t think it needs to be so expensive. It doesn’t need to be so out of touch with everyday humans.

EO

What about Love Lies Bleeding? That was incredible, but it also had a bigger budget.

JM

That was a beautiful heart-birth baby that is so rare. And it’s part of this whole side genre that I love: the female scumbag. I feel like that is a genre I want to get behind for the next twenty years.

The entire architecture of cinema in the 1970s is written on a male scumbag’s back. And if we’re going to lift humanity in a new way, I think potentially, instead of only exploring the healing stories, we need to explore the female scumbag stories. I think there are wild, potent seeds there that, if we swallow them, could have really interesting birthing moments.

I think Love Lies Bleeding is an outlier. That does not happen all the time. It happens because Kristen Stewart said yes to something that’s so wildly fucking cool. That movie is so weird and so fun.

EO

So cunty.

JM

Yeah. It’s so cunty. I love that.

EO

If nothing has changed, and we can’t simply change the industry, then what actually feels possible? I’m bored by conversations that stop at, “The industry needs to be different. Racism, sexism, all the things.” You’re already inside it. You have a name, a face, recognition, and real work behind you.

So if we think beyond the shackles of the industry, what is realistic? And I don’t mean, “What should we accept?” I mean: How do we strategize within the existing framework to make something happen? Are we asking the wrong questions by waiting for permission instead of thinking about how to game the system?

JM

Anyone can make movies these days. It’s distribution. There are so many components, right? You’re right, we’re potentially asking the wrong questions because it’s one body and we’re talking about the food we’re putting into it, when really the problem is in the digestion. It’s how it’s being delivered. It’s the distribution.

You can put any food you want in it. We’ve had wildly rich food. We have such cool filmmakers, we have such cool actors, we have such cool stories. Globally, we’re making really wild, fucked-up, beautiful pieces of art.

But no one’s seeing them. No one’s seeing them. It’s so hard to see them. We’re inundated with too much. Even me—I love movies, I love cinema—and it’s so hard for me to be like, “What have I seen? What do I turn on? What do I watch?” I’m in paralysis.

EO

We’ve talked a lot about community. Do you feel like other people around you are thinking about these same things? Or is it simply that everyone can read the writing on the wall?

JM

I don’t think I would have been ready to even have the community conversation until I became a parent. I was way too rebel. Let’s figure out all the tools we have, just between us. No metaphor. Let’s just talk about physical tools, and we’ll get to the metaphorical tools after that. Let’s all start tool-shed shares in our neighborhoods. Start there. Figure out what you own and what your value is.

Great, I have three hammers and a good ladder. Let’s work together. Let’s build some stuff. The more I come into those smaller senses of purpose, it’s like, “Yeah, hey, I’m the lady with the biggest ladder on the block.” And everyone knows it. Everyone comes over and they’re like, “Oh, can I come use your ladder?” And I’m like, “Of course. What do you have?”

I want to feel of service. I want to feel of value. I want to feel like I have a purpose. And if I feel that intrinsically in the place that I live, no one is getting me to do things that I don’t want to do. I will not need to then express my will, express my power over others. I can be small.

EO

And how does that relate to how you think about work now?

JM

To be able to be needed and to be of purpose to the community of my neighborhood, that’s all I need. If I really break down what I need at the end of the day, I need enough money to feed my kid and take care of my stuff. You can be a global citizen, but you’re nothing without having a sense of purpose in your own backyard. You have to have a sense of purpose there, or it will be inflated and picked apart and only given to you by others. You have to figure out your own self-determination, your own purpose in your own neighborhood.

It is cool for me. I think it’s really fucking cool. And that’s the community that I think needs our attention far more. Once we build that, the filmmaking community will only thrive from it. The film community is an abstraction. It’s not real. It’s a choice. We choose to see it.

We’re all making the same thing—cute. We live in totally different areas. We’re interacting with totally different people. I think the real community we have to build is not egotistical. It’s not cool. Your neighbor. Your grocery store. I feel like that’s the community that we need to invest our time and creativity in.

I think the film community will always exist. It always has. But it’s an invisible element in the room. And she can only be as pretty and beautiful and interacted with as we show up for our own actual community.

EO

I hear you talking about two very different things. There’s the filmmaking community or the arts community—

JM

I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about neighborhoods. I’m talking about the actual community that you live with. I’m talking about your relationship to the sidewalk, to your soil.