Naomi Watts on Fair Game, Short Attention Spans and How You Get to Know a Spy

Naomi Watts freely admits she had a hard time getting to know Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA agent notoriously outed by a Bush Administration henchman in 2003. But it wasn't because of what Plame couldn't tell the actress in preparation for Fair Game, the new film starring Watts as the newly exposed covert operative. It's because of the intimate yet necessary details of a marriage that, as a result of the scandal, nearly became some of the Iraq War's most infamous collateral damage.

Watts and Plame finally sorted that out, of course. What emerged is director Doug Liman's two-pronged tale of Plame's struggle to protect her nuclear counterproliferation missions in the Middle East, all the while battling to save her marriage to the outraged former ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), whose critical New York Times editorial mobilized the White House against Plame in the first place. It's a tricky balance Watts manages with typical aplomb -- not that it didn't take a while, the Oscar-nominee told Movieline during a chat last month in New York.

I met with Valerie Plame a few months ago, which was interesting to say the least. So we have that experience in common; what was your first encounter like?

The first one, we were both very careful with each other. We'd had quite a few e-mails and phone calls leading up to it, trying to plan something. She lives in Santa Fe; I live in New York. We figured out that it was 12 hours of travel door-to-door. I'd just had a baby; she's got kids. So it was going to be really difficult. But she said, "We could meet halfway. How about Chicago? The airport?" I said, "At the airport? Who meets at the airport?" A CIA agent does! So anyway, we had a laugh about things leading up to it, and then we finally met, we met in kind of a noisy restaurant. So it wasn't the best way to fall into it quickly. But we were very careful with each other.

We obviously have very different jobs, but they're similar in that we study people. We're always looking for nuance or characteristics or... you know. Just observing how the other operates. That's part of her job, that's part of my job. Very different in most respects, but we were both being careful. And she says this herself when you ask her how she avoided telling her friends [she was CIA], or withholding the truth about where she was all the time: It's funny how willing people always are to talk about themselves. You can always just turn it back -- always avoiding. So it was really hard to slip into it -- to work out who each other was. I was wanting her to come forward, she was wanting me to come forward, and we both sort of wound up on the sidelines watching.

How long did it take to become comfortable with each other?

Not long. I think after the first meeting, we had one other meeting where it was a "careful" one, and then it was like, "Crunch time! I've got to get into this now." I stopped thinking [twice] about asking the silly questions -- well, interesting questions, though they may seem silly to her. Or the questions you're tempted to ask a CIA agent; I mean, forget those. She's not going to answer them anyway. Focus on who she was as a woman. Who is she? Focus on how she dealt with this level of betrayal, how she dealt with the conflict in her own home, the juxtaposition of being someone who lived in total secrecy and then had to speak out about who she was in public.

There was one dinner that took place -- I think I'd already shot one day with her around. I took her to dinner and ordered a bottle of wine and said, "These are my questions." And they were very personal, confronting questions. And she was fine answering them.

"With her around"? Like on set? Were you comfortable with that?

In the beginning... Well, look: It's always scary playing a character who's lived -- who we're all familiar with. Because you feel that you own them. When you feel like that as an actor, you want to possess that character; you want it to belong to you. And when other people know them, they feel they have ownership. So it's scary! You want to get it right. Now, the fact that she was very much alive and there -- not on a daily basis, but often, quite a few times -- that definitely upped the ante. Yeah.

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