Backstage 5 With...
Marielle Heller By Casey Mink
Anya Taylor-Joy’s chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, may be the ever-cunning figure at the center of Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit”; but it’s her relationship with her adoptive mother, Alma Wheatley, played by Marielle Heller, that gives the show its heart. In the midst of her first Emmys campaign, the acclaimed filmmaker recounts being lured back to her acting roots by series co-creator Scott Frank, and by the role itself, which she calls “sweet and sort of tragic.”
What is one performance every actor should see and why? Carmela Soprano [on “The Sopranos,” played by] Edie Falco, particularly when she and Tony are getting divorced, in Season 4, I think. Their big fight. In some way, I sort of thought about her when I was playing Alma, because she’s such a woman who would be overlooked in so many ways. She’s such a kind of a stereotype of a mob wife, but with this enormous depth underneath the surface.
and anything in my power to convince Phoebe [Gloeckner], who wrote the book, and her agent that I was the right person to adapt this book—including taking pictures of my cats and sending them to Phoebe, going to visit her in Ann Arbor, staying at her house and cooking dinner in her kitchen, trying to let her know I was not a crazy person.
Do you have an audition horror story you wouldn’t mind sharing? I was going to my third commercial audition of the day, and I was supposed to wear a bikini, and it was a snowstorm. So I put my bikini on under my winter coat and went into some gross office, and had to take off my clothes and hit a beach ball in the middle of January in New York. I didn’t have any lines; I just had to gasp. And I just left this audition going, “I went to theater school and studied ‘Macbeth’ to do this? What am I doing?” It was sort of when I was like: I gotta get more in control of my own creative life. And it was part of what led me to writing and then directing— dissatisfaction with that life.
How did you get your SAG membership? My husband was a PA for “Spin City” back in the day, and I had him slip my headshot on top of the casting pile and came in and auditioned for a guest part on that show. We didn’t even tell people that he knew me. We made it this secret. And then I booked a guest-starring role on “Spin City” back in, I wanna say, 2000 or something. And, yeah, I had a scene with Charlie Sheen. That’s how I got my SAG card.
What’s the wildest thing you ever did to get a job, either as an actor or filmmaker? Truthfully, when I was trying to get the rights to adapt “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” I did everything
“It was so nice to just get to focus on acting instead of thinking about every single thing for the shoot.”
BACKSTAGE 06.03.21
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ILLUSTRATION: NATHAN ARIZONA/PHOTO: RICH POLK
What advice would you give your younger self? Don’t waste too much time auditioning for dumb commercials! But, really, that nobody was going to do it for me—that I needed to figure out a way to make my own art and make my own projects, and stop waiting for somebody to cast me in something and, instead, do it myself.
