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
