Harpers Bazaar – November 2000

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Uma Up Close

By Lloyd Grove

After series of brilliant supporting roles and extended baby hiatus, Uma Thurman steps down from the part of intelligent ice princess and steps up to Leading lady status. Lloyd Grove talks to Merchant Ivory’s newest star. Photographed by Craig McDean.

Not that she’d ever tell me, but Uma Thurman hates the quiet back-corner table where I’ve settled in with my martini and tape recorder. As soon as she arrives at Il Cantinori, a bustling neighborhood restaurant in Greenwich Village, near the house she shares with husband Ethan Hawke and their two-year-old daughter, Maya Ray, Thurman dispatches a waiter to carry the message. I greet her standing near the bar – six vertical feet of ethereal blonde amazon in white chinos and a little pink “touch me” angora sweater, her blue eyes limpid and her hair an exquisite mop.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Thurman murmurs in her patrician patois (befitting the daughter of an Ivy League professor and a Swedish model turned psychotherapist), and she leads me to a noisy, cramped table in a better location: smack-dab in the middle of the action.

The reason for this dinner (Thurman picks at her Italian sausage with broccoli; I devour my pasta and much of her meal while attempting to ply her with Chianti) is the new Merchant Ivory movie, The Golden Bowl In this sumptuous adaptation of Henry James’s novel of thwarted romance-filmed in Italian palazzi and English country houses-Thurman plays the dangerously beautiful American expatriate Charlotte Stant. A perpetual weekend guest of the upper class Europeans to whom she has attached herself like a turn of the century Pamela Harriman, Charlotte is torn between her attraction to a dashing Italian prince (married, alas, to her best friend) and the brute magnetism of the widowed industrialist who is her best friend’s father.

At 30, Thurman has 23 films under her belt, including Vatel, a 17th-century French period drama costarring Gerard Depardieu and scheduled for a December U.S. release, as well as her share of real-life adventures and traumas. Among them are a yearlong marriage to British actor Gary Oldman and passionate romances with such leading men as Timothy Hutton, whom she met while filming the 1996 movie Beautiful Girls. So it’s no surprise that she is a compelling Charlotte, harnessing a kind of subterranean hysteria; Thurman is the standout in an A-List ensemble that includes Anjelica Huston and Nick Nolte.

“I have a mixed career, but a number of times I’ve been asked to play very cool characters,” Thurman says, describing a film resume that begins at age 16, with her hard bitten portrayal of the sexually precocious Laura Pasholensky in the low budget Kiss Daddy Goodnight, continues with her memorably detached Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction, and runs from such catoony creatures as Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin and Emma Peel in The Avengers to her new role (starting next year) as her sultry self in Lancome ads. She has forged a career on playing femmes fatales – Charlotte Stant included.

“The raw emotionalism of this part which may or may not be more true of me was certainly something that I was really desperate to bring out in my work,” Thurman says. “Charlotte’s passion, her blindness and her love and her ultimate stupidity, combined with incredibly clever manipulative skills. I found her to be probably the most complex character I’ve ever been offered really a part like the Great Wall of China to throw yourself against.”

As I labor to melt Thurman’s elegant defenses with my warm (unsettling?) grin, and to lull her with my searching (woozy?) gaze into answering my questions, it occurs to me that she, too, might be something of a wall. Initially she sticks to general philosophical principles taking her cue, perhaps, from the Dalai Lama, Columbia University professor Robert Thurman’s close friend since before his daughter was born. “I just don’t think it’s polite or valuable to evoke negative things,” Thurman, named after a Hindu goddess, explains with Zen like serenity. “I know I must be such a jerk to interview.” If Thurman is a wall, she’s a wall against which any reasonably red blooded male should be happy to throw himself. So I batter away.

Will you read this article?

“No. I don’t read anything about me and I don’t read anything about him,” meaning the actor she’s married to. “I stopped. I felt it wasn’t productive. I felt that the things that flatter one don’t necessarily help, and the things that are less kind don’t encourage trust, which one has to operate with. And I just thought, How can someone who doesn’t know you, and whom you don’t know, sit down with you for two hours and possibly represent something that you’d recognize?”

Will you look at the pictures?

“Yes, I will look. A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Any requests?

“Anything that screams `moron,’ please call and allow me to clarify it. And just make it really short.” Noting my lingering dissatisfaction with her first answer, she adds, “I’ll make an agreement with you: If it’s under 500 words, I will read it.” I entertain and quickly reject the notion of making up outrageous quotes concerning her unhealthy obsession with me.

What is your general idea of men?

“My idea of men are these the Harper’s Bazaar questions? Ha ha.” Thurman produces a pack of Marlboro Lights from her tiny white purse, extracts a cigarette with her long, tapered fingers (no nail polish), fires up, and inhales. Now I see why we’re sitting at this table – it’s in the smoking section. “Yes. Okay, I can answer about men. I love men, I love boys, I love womanizers, I love scoundrels, I love angels. I love children. I love grandfathers. I love patriarchs. I love underdogs. I love guys. There you go; that’s a good sort of pat answer.” She adds, “I grew up with three brothers”﷓one older and two younger – “and a very strong father” – who happens to be a Tibetan scholar and a Buddhist monk “so I grew up with men. I didn’t grow up with women. Not that I understand men any better. But I’m familiar with them.”

Your thoughts on the nature of relationships?

“When you’re in a relationship, it’s better to be with somebody who has an affair than with somebody who doesn’t flush the toilet.” She adds, “I’m talking humorously about the challenges of relationships. I don’t want people to think I’m saying that about my beloved husband.”

Speaking of whom, after dinner we leave the restaurant and she introduces me to 29 year old Ethan Hawke, the younger man who won her heart on the set of Gattaca and married her in May 1998, two months before she gave birth to their daughter. I have agreed to Thurman’s charming request (really an exceedingly polite demand) that I not reveal exactly where I meet the unshaven, T shined Hawke who is “scruffy” in the movie star sense of the word. All I can say is that we are somewhere in the postcard pretty psychic landscape of Umaland. Hawke has been at home taking care of Maya Ray and was hoping to catch the late show of the re-released Coen brothers movie Blood Simple.

Oh, sweetie, did you miss it?” Thurman asks Hawke. “No, I actually didn’t miss it,” he answers. “It doesn’t start until 11. I’m thinking about going anyway.” “Well, why don’t you go anyway? “Is that all right with you?” “I don’t mind at all.” “There’s an unbelievable moon out tonight. A giant.”

When Ethan shows you his novels in progress, how do you respond? “I try to be very supportive. I think you must be very carefully honest. If someone’s in the process of something, you don’t want to throw a bunch of lusty opinions around and get them off track or something. As director Joel Schumacher once said to me, “Never show a fool unfinished work.”

Back in Umaland, she addresses her husband: “Honey?” “Yes.” “Have you checked on her?” “I’ll go check on her right now.”

Before Hawke leaves to look in on his sleeping daughter, I ask if he’s seen The Golden Bowl. “Isn’t she great in it?” he gushes, and turns to his wife. “It’s my favorite thing you’ve done since Henry & June. I think you’re absolutely amazing in it.”

“Thank you, honey,” she says. But enough of marital bliss.

What makes you angry?

“What do I have to be angry about? I’m so lucky. I have a beautiful child, a healthy child. I raise the child with the father, who loves the child very much and me. Should I ever lose her, my life will be over and I will kill myself.”

How was childbirth?

“It’s a pretty scary thing. When you think of something that big inside you, and then have to get it out of you, it’s either going to be the knife or you that’s going to get it out. I was in labor for a very long time – about 18 hours. [The drug] Pitocin is what pushed me over the edge, because it artificially stimulates you. Ethan was there for all of it, and he got high accolades from the doctor. But we don’t talk about it. Very few things are personal to me. The birth and the child are very difficult to keep private because people can ask and it’s very hard to shut down a conversation about your baby. It’s your favorite f__king subject excuse my language.”

What the f__k is wrong with your language?

“I find being foulmouthed kind of unattractive﷓only in myself. So I just try to avoid the truck driver in me. There’s a truck driver in everybody, particularly on the highway. Goddamn!”

Has being a mother lessened your ambition?

“Yeah, I think so.” Thurman recounts how producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory sent her the screenplay for The Golden Bowl shortly after Maya Ray was born. “It was overwhelming to me as a new mother with the emotional energy that it takes – and the piece sort of scared me. I wasn’t ready to leave the country, and I think I was intimidated by the emotionalism of the part. So I said, “I’m so sorry, but I think I can’t do it.” And then, months later, I was sitting with my friend Natasha Richardson, who has two children, and talking about acting, and we were kind of complaining about parts and movies, and she said, “Excuse me, but did you pass on The Golden Bowl?” And I said, “Yeah, I did.” And she said, “Well, I think you’re just crazy.” Chastened, Thurman called Merchant and Ivory back, and the part of Charlotte was hers.

Are you decisive in your life?

“I labor over the decisions that I make wrong; and the decisions I make right, I know immediately what to do. I’ve been wrong in those cases, too. But anything that I really, really think about for too long is usually questionable, because intuitively I know that I shouldn’t do it.”

Are you decisive in your work?

“Probably more elusive. I mean, I’m sneaky. I probably would not go and do something really head on commercial. Or maybe I would next time. I tend to sort of slip and slide and try to find things that appear to me, at least on the surface, to be organic. And if it feels to me like an organic event, it gives me a kind of deep sense of confidence in it. I try not to force events in my creative process. Anything set up, I can’t deal with. It’s always failure.”

Why do you suffer?

“If I suffer, I suffer at my own hand. I’m smoking again. I’ve got to get rid of it. I’m still trying to make my time more valuable. I’ve got a huge problem with getting time to read since my daughter was born a great luxury, I know, but my mind is rotting. And I try to balance the intense drive to creatively grow and the incredible resentment of anything that interferes with my child’s care. Guilt is an inherent part of being a working mother, and that’s such a stupid waste of time.

What’s your take on the culture of celebrity?

“I think it’s more the culture of commercialization, and it’s certainly more product than celebrity. A celebrity is somebody who kills somebody, somebody who’s an artist, somebody who’s a politician, somebody who’s many different things some of them useful, some of them not. Personally, I just find the kind of ruthless submission to capitalism on every single level to be more distressing. I was in Prague shooting Les Miserables four years ago, and I remember looking around and not being able to figure out what was so different about it. It looked kind of like Europe but then not like Europe, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. And finally I realized what it was: There were no billboards. And it was so beautiful, just to see the buildings and the sky and the vegetation.”

Is it true that Lancome paid you millions for only a few days’ work on the Miracle fragrance ad campaign?

“That’s not true,” she answers. “But, I mean, I wouldn’t want to talk about it.” Thurman ultimately relents, however. “The thing that I did with them will be used in Europe this fall and probably in America in the spring. But the figures are exaggerated, inflated.” She admits to deep ambivalence about becoming the face of a cosmetics giant: “It’s just not what I do, so I was kind of afraid to do something I don’t do.” As for using her image to push product, she says, “Well, that’s the part that I didn’t particularly like. What I did like was that when I was younger, when I was a pubescent girl, I loved their campaigns. I thought that they were beautiful, just beautiful portraiture the Isabella Rossellini pieces and stuff. So I think in some way it flattered me to be asked. But it seemed like something that would encourage a lot of creative freedom in the sense of not being forced to work. Not being forced to take material, financially and otherwise, unless I really wanted to.” So is Lancome giving her that coveted “f__k you” money? “Well,” she says, laughing, “you could say that if you wanted to, of course.”

What is the toughest thing you’ve ever experienced?

“Actually, I think the toughest things are ahead rather than behind. The hard part is in front. Probably just because I haven’t done it yet.”

How do you feel about getting old?

“My bet, from all the women I know, is you’re going to become a lot more interesting. Just because the current culture says get out when your collagen level drops and your estrogen dips doesn’t mean anything to the history of time. I do look forward to it, literally. If you’re not looking forward, you’re looking backward or to the side, and you’re going to smack into something really hard. All life is change, and certainly physical things are always transient. And yes, there are going to be some harsh cuts. But I think I’m poised to take them gracefully. Doesn’t mean I will. Doesn’t mean it won’t hurt – but I’m poised to.”