Olivia Thirlby Just Wants To Be Happy
Thirlby picked up stakes for Los Angeles last year, though she spent much of 2010 on the road. She went to Antarctica to shoot an experimental film (The Red Knot, by the artist Scott Cohen) on an ice breaker, to Cape Town for the upcoming Dredd, and Moscow, for three months, for The Darkest Hour. “I just got to live in a really, really different, really foreign city for three months, and I was working my ass off, but you can’t help but pick up where you are.” It’s her favorite perk of the job: “It’s pretty awesome to be able to travel and actually come out financially on top.”
For films like The Darkest Hour, Thirlby allows that “the dominant part of what you have to get down on camera is not based on being in touch with the truest of human emotions. Run from the alien or the alien will shred you into dust. It’s a simple emotion but at the same time there’s nothing in my life that I can relate to about that, so it requires a lot of imagination, and it can be really challenging to sustain yourself on imagination alone. But it’s also kind of the coolest part at the same time.” Still, even playing “the girl in the horror movie,” she prefers to “concoct almost every detail, just because it allows ease with improvisation.”
For Being Flynn—as the adaptation of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City has been retitled—backstory was especially important, because her character “has this troubled past, which she actively hides from all the people around her. So that was kind of an interesting thing to play around with, knowing that the way that she conducts herself in the world is with a mask on.” She plays Paul Dano’s love interest, who encourages him to start working in a homeless shelter—another good-listener role. For Thirlby, “if you’re able to listen, truly listen to someone in a moment, you’re able to react naturally and that can be just as therapeutic” as a personal connection to the material; acting can be a reminder, like her ampersand tattoo, of her moment in the universe, and the feeling is “elating—is that a word?”
Acting on stage—where, unlike the choppy filmmaking process, her abandonment in the moment is continuous, and there’s no permanent record of her past self—is, Thirlby says, what she finds most elating (it’s in spellcheck and everything). She was in the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of Beau Willimon’s Farragut North (in the film version, Ides of March, the role is played by Evan Rachel Wood), but it’s been a couple of years since she’s been on stage “and that is just a sad, sad tale.” Moving to Los Angeles from New York, she acknowledges, isn’t exactly an ideal strategy for building a career in the legit theater—at this point, she leans into my voice recorder and announces, “Theater directors! Please offer me jobs! Or: I’ll audition!” Live theater was very much a part of her upbringing; she cites Christopher Plummer’s Lear, which she saw at Lincoln Center as a high school student, as a signal experience.
Another point of entry into the holy moment can be friendship: one Sunday while Thirlby was living in the West Village, she went over to her friend and neighbor Daryl Wein’s apartment to shoot a couple of scenes for Breaking Upwards, the 2009 feature he directed and cowrote and costarred in with his girlfriend Zoe Lister-Jones. “If you’re comfortable, and you love and admire the people around you,” it’s the best, most organic kind of preparation. For this profile, she appreciated the opportunity to be photographed by her friend, iO, “to run around and do what we would have done anyway,” while wearing her own clothes. That’s new for her, and nice—“they always dress you, they always style you… it’s part of playing the game.”
