Marisa Tomei: 'A Lot of People are Scared of Actors!'

In the new comedy Cyrus, Jonah Hill and John C. Reilly may have the showiest roles, but Marisa Tomei has the trickiest. While Hill (as her son) and Reilly (as her suitor) spar for her affections, Tomei has to make her Molly attractive but attainable, naive but not stupid, and loving but fundamentally misguided. Those are a whole lot of contradictions to play for any actor, but as Tomei explains it, it was all part of the process of working with directors Jay and Mark Duplass. The pair encourage the actors to make not just the characters but the dialogue and blocking their own, and Academy Award winner Tomei had plenty of ideas on how to do exactly that.

The actress talked to Movieline this week about some of the challenges inherent in that process, how she reconceived the character counter to what the Duplasses had originally intended, and how Hollywood has a problem with allowing women be funny.

The Duplass brothers said that they're not great at writing female characters, but that you fixed that. Is that just self-deprecation, or do you really have room to co-create this character?

That may or may not be true, but I did see the character differently than they saw it. I thought that she should be more of a dynamic personality so it would make sense that her son would [be so attached]. Like, they're good friends and they really enjoy each other, and I thought that would help to make sense of why he hasn't gone off and found rooting elsewhere yet. I guess they saw her more as an Everywoman, so I think we met in the middle.

So how do you approach that with them? Do you go in from your first meeting and say, "This is what I'd like to do with the character," or...

I will now! [Laughs] Actually, I think I'm more conscious of that in retrospect than I was at the beginning. I mean, it seemed like we were all on the same page, and then as we got into it -- especially in terms of the look -- they were like, "Sweatpants and t-shirt," and I was like, "Platform shoes and an afro." [Laughs]

They wanted her to be a little schlubbier?

Yeah, I think so. Earthy, yes, but what I thought was that she was a modern-day earthy. She had soul. I think things changed a lot anyway because it's a studio movie, and yet they kept what's so amazing about their work. Their transformation to this kind of budget has been incredible. They're very clear about their vision, that they like to shoot in order, and that they do long takes with a loose approach but an extreme focus underneath it.

Have you ever shot a movie in sequence before?

No. I've shot movies where my scenes happened to be in order, but not where the movie was in order.

That must be a nice luxury as an actor.

I was so lucky. It's liberating, too -- it takes so much anxiety out of thinking, "How would this scene go when I haven't done this other scene yet?" Or, "Oh, that didn't go the way I thought it would, so how do I bridge these two scenes?" Does that make sense? It's hard to explain.

Oh yeah. I don't know how actors do that stuff out of sequence.

That's where you just have to trust the directors, and these guys looked after each character. They didn't hang any of us out to dry -- no one looked the fool, no one looked one-note. My character could have looked so blind in another person's version. There's usually a sacrificial character who, for the plot to go forward, they have to seem like half a moron. [Laughs] But they didn't do it. They treated every character with compassion while also letting their tushies show.

They like a very intimate set. Jay's even the camera operator.

Mark's an actor and Jay has the camera on his body. Jay has to be emotionally available in the scenes with the actors! He has to be where the action is, where the juice is. There's no setup where he's removed and stands back and looks through a lens -- he has to be feeling it with us to know where he's going to train the lens. It costs him something emotionally as well, and that's unusual. A lot of people are scared of actors! They're not.

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