Jacki Weaver Experiences ‘Magic in the Moonlight’By Max Evry
July 25, 2014
Actress Jacki Weaver, a longtime vet of the Australian movie scene, took the world by storm with her riveting portrayal of an icy gang family matriarch in “Animal Kingdom,” which nabbed her an Oscar nomination in 2011. In 2012 she got nominated again for the dramedy “Silver Linings Playbook,” affixing her position as a late-career wunderkind not unlike Christoph Waltz.
Now at age 67 she’s landed another coup with a delightful co-starring role in Woody Allen’s latest romantic farce, “Magic in the Moonlight,” in which Colin Firth tries to debunk a clairvoyant played by Emma Stone and winds up falling for her. Weaver plays the elderly widow whose dead husband Stone is trying to communicate with.
We sat down in New York with the lively Miss Weaver for an exclusive chat about working under Woody Allen’s direction, finding unexpected success in Hollywood, and her unpredictable choices in roles.
What was it like working with Mr. Allen?
JACKI WEAVER: It was extraordinary to be with one of the great living filmmakers. To actually be cast by him in one of his projects was just extraordinary, I felt so lucky. I’ve been a huge devotee of all his stuff for decades, since I was a kid. We used to be able to do his stand-up routines off his vinyl records when we were kids. All his early films, “Zelig” was a great favorite of mine, and “Broadway Danny Rose” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” The other stuff like “Crimes & Misdemeanors” and “Husbands & Wives” and “Hannah & Her Sisters”…
The more dramatic ones.
WEAVER: Yes. That’s the other great thing about him, he’s so diverse. He can just do so many different things. Also, he’s a philosopher, he thinks about life and what it is to be human. He’s a man of our time. All of my life I thought he was an extraordinary artist, but then for him to say, “I want you in my next film” is wonderful. It was never even something that was on my agenda, it was something that I never even thought was possible. I didn’t think an American career was possible, that was never on my agenda as much as I love American films and I’m passionate about a lot of American culture. I was perfectly content with a very fulfilling career in Australia for almost 50-years, and then suddenly America came and put me on its lap!
What’s exceptional is that it was an Australian film that gave you your entrée into the American limelight.
WEAVER: Yeah. And of course a lot of Americans never saw “Animal Kingdom.” I meet Americans all the time who have only seen me in “Silver Linings Playbook” and get a shock that I speak like this because (laughs) they don’t realize I’m Australian.
The movie you were really fantastic in was “Stoker.”
WEAVER: Oh really? He’s another great filmmaker, those films look brilliant. We used to call him “Director Park.” He was very gentlemanly, courteous and polite, yet he makes these gory, terrifying films.
To me the character you played in that was sort of similar to the character you play in “Magic in the Moonlight” in that they’re both these almost sickly sweet women, very different from the character you played in “Animal Kingdom.” Do you intentionally try to shift gears?
WEAVER: No, that’s just being the way it goes. I have played some villains. I did a film with John Cusack last year called “Reclaim” where she’s quite different. I just played a doctor in a film and she’s very hardbitten. So, no, they’re not all sweet and gentle aunty types.
In “Stoker” that aunty-type character was playing at being innocent even though she knew there was some nasty stuff going on.
WEAVER: She was about to tell them when he killed her, yeah. Of course in “Parkland” the character I played was horrible (laughs), she was an awful piece of work, and I based her on tapes I saw of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother. She was quite deluded, narcissistic, very strange woman.
Grace in “Magic in the Moonlight” is very innocent, the wealthy matron, the perfect mark.
WEAVER: Gullible, needy, in mourning. The perfect victim for these kind of exploiters. They come from very poor circumstances, the Emma Stone and Marcia Gay Harden characters, so you can understand why they would be doing this sort of scene.
Have you had any run-ins with the supernatural or any other occult business?
WEAVER: When I was just a kid in my teens a boy took me to a séance that his mother was running. Things happened during the séance. In retrospect I think she probably rigged it. Like a lot of people I get feelings about places. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, I’ve moved around in my life. Some places you can feel unhappiness. Sometimes they’re redolent with tension. It’s as though when tragic things happen in a house it sort of sits in the walls… “The Amityville Horror!” I believe that the Chateau Marmont and the Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles are haunted, but I think the haunting in Sunset Tower is happy ghosts, whereas the haunting in Chateau Marmont is very sad ghosts.
John Belushi and all those people.
WEAVER: I guess! (laughs)
You did a horror movie last year, “Haunt”.
WEAVER: I did “Haunt” and I did something called “The Voices” by Marjane Satrapi that hasn’t been released yet. That’s a sort of horror movie with Ryan Reynolds. I don’t know what’s happened to “Voices,” you might be able to find out better than me!
That’s the one where Ryan plays a blue collar worker who’s under suspicion for a murder?
WEAVER: Yeah, and I’m his psychiatrist. (laughs) We had fun doing that. We shot that in Berlin, at Babelsberg Studios which is wonderful. I felt there were ghosts in those studios!
It’s a very old, storied studio.
WEAVER: Yeah, going back to Marlene Dietrich and Erich von Stroheim.
You’ve been nominated twice now, how has that changed your process of choosing between projects? Do you pick something based on where it might get you careerwise, or is it more like, “Oh, it would be fun to go to Berlin”?
WEAVER: It’s always the story and the character, that’s my main objective. I wouldn’t care where they shot it… Well, I might. I don’t particularly want to go to Syria. (laughs) They all get vetted. All the scripts go to my agent Hildy Gottlieb at ICM and my manger Alex Cole at Elevate. I depend on them enormously to make my decisions. In the end the decision is always mine, and we don’t always agree. Sometimes they’ll say, “This is ridiculous, you don’t want to do this,” but my only criteria is if I like the character enough, and if I’m more impressed with one director over another. I love working with as many people as possible, and I love working with young directors. Even though there’s nothing new under the sun there’s a freshness and enthusiasm you get with all young people that we had when we were young.
Like when you were working with Peter Weir.
WEAVER: Yeah, that was his first movie, “Picnic At Hanging Rock.”
And now you get to work with wonderful young people like Woody Allen! (laughs)
WEAVER: Yes, exactly! (laughs) Even Woody’s quite a lot older than I am.
“Magic in the Moonlight” opens in limited release this Friday.
