ROUND-TABLE: 'Rachel Getting Married' actress Rosemarie DeWitt

Go see Rachel Getting Married. Right now. Go do it. Read this interview when you get back. Look, I avoid giving these sorts of orders to my readers; I love the people I interview, but I try to avoid being too forceful because, come on, I'm not a sales rep. But I want all of you to see this movie, because I have not seen such a good new film in at least a year. Possibly not in several. The film revolves around one weekend for one family, during which their eldest daughter Rachel is getting married... and her younger sister Kym gets out of rehab just in time to enter amidst the festivities. Familial tensions rise to a painful high and a heartbreaking incedent from the family's past is brought to the surface. Recently I got to attend the press day for the film, where I spoke with actress Rosemarie DeWitt, who plays Rachel. Enjoy the interview.

How did this role for you come about? Did you audition, or was it…
I did. I think I was one of the only people who actually auditioned for this movie. I was in New York and I just went in to Bernie Telsey—he’s this amazing casting director who does primarily but not limited to theater, so I knew him from that. But everybody else? I was sitting one day, we were shooting a scene, I was out in the grass and I’m listening to all the people on the movie saying, “How did you meet Jonathan?” “I met Jonathan in a bookstore in Maine.” “I met Jonathan in New Orleans at my restaurant.” “I met Jonathan…” And they all went, and someone was like [to me], “How do you know Jonathan?” I’m like, “I just auditioned… you know, how you get cast in a movie.”

[laughter] Because you have all this theater experience, there are some aspects of this film that have sort of a theater-like quality. Did you feel “Ah, I’ve got a handle on this more than these others”?
I actually felt the opposite initially because I thought, “Ooh, I’m just starting to get a little bit of a handle on this film, working with the camera.” And then I’m saying to Jonathan “So, how tight are we?” You know, in the shot. He’s like, “Don’t worry about it,” and I’ll be like, “Yeah, but I want to know,” and then I’d sneak around and I’d be like “I just want to look behind at the monitor,” and he’s like “No, no, no, no one’s looking at the monitor!” I’m like, “What are you doing? Now I’m finally understanding working with the camera!” So then when I finally surrendered, I would be like, “I get this medium better; it’s just like being on stage.”

How easy or tough was it to get into the character?
I would say on this one it was fairly easy because I think it was in the script. There were certain lines that at each of my auditions I would get a real hit, like I’d get welled up just saying the words. And, as an actor, I always think that’s a really good sign, when you just instantly have a visceral reaction to the actual words.

Do you have a sister yourself?
I have four half sisters, but I didn’t grow up with them in the house. So I get what the great love is and worrying about them and wanting them to thrive and be happy but we weren’t fighting over car keys or getting put in the bath together as toddlers. So I had to ask a lot of my girlfriends, I’d say, “Tell me stories! What’s it like?” and every single one of them told me great stories where they laughed so hard they cried and then they cried so hard they laughed, and I was like, “Oooh it’s so complicated!”—like sisters.

It’s the love and hate relationship that grows between them, you don’t know when it begins and when it ends, it’s completely intertwined.
At all moments.

At all moments, exactly, which is very complicated to portray.
Annie [Hathaway] doesn’t have a sister that she grew up with, either, so I think we just sort of looked at each other and said, “You’re my sister!” Whatever that means.

So that’s how you made it work between the two of you.
I think so. We didn’t do—I was about to say a tremendous amount—we didn’t do any sort of buddy-bonding trips to get Tasti-D-Lite. We didn’t do any of that. We just had dinner one night and I instinctually thought, “Let’s stay away from each other,” because she’s instantly loveable, and I thought, “Oh, shoot, how am I going to be horrible to her in this movie if I like her this much?” So I just kind of put my Walkman on every morning and said “Good morning,” and turned around and was like [in the scene], “You—” You know.

[laughter] And when you auditioned did you audition scenes with her?
I did. My first audition I just went on tape, I think [Jonathan Demme] watched it, and then I had a five minute meeting with him. And then we went to his apartment, and he held a camera and shot Annie and I doing maybe four or five different scenes from the movie, and she was just trying it on. You know, she had been cast a year earlier, but I think this was her first real contact with it, so she was sort of working on an exciting level right from day one, and it was—it’s the best way to audition.

Was there some moment you hit it, you understand things when you work like that?
There was a moment where—it’s not even in the script, we were just making it work with whatever you had in Jonathan’s apartment—she was putting a necklace on and it was just the way our bodies were wrapping around [as I helped her], our limbs were all intertwined, like, “This feels good, this feels like she could be my sister.”

I was curious cause I had a flash in the middle of the movie to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and thinking about how much of a leap it is now for an interracial marriage to be happening and all these cultures coming together I wanted to find out how you felt like all that inter-culture stuff was handled, and was it exciting to be visually around this family that’s more American than is revealed usually?
Yeah, totally. I thought it was so exciting, and one of the actors when we were shooting the rehearsal dinner said—We had a lot of fun shooting that scene, and it was the first time we’d all been in the room together, and it sort of looks like the UN, you know what I mean, like there’s all these different people at the table. And it’s in the movie when Sidney’s mom gets up and says, “This rehearsal, this is what it’s like in heaven.” And everybody—There’s so much stuff that will probably be in the DVD footage, but we all got really choked up, and I think there was a point where we were all singing a song—I don’t know, a lot of stuff that’s probably not in the movie. And one of the other actresses said to me, “I wonder what audiences will think of this. Like, I wonder if they’ll think, ‘This is not what it’s like in my neighborhood!’” And I remember thinking, “But it is. It is!” It is when you don’t highlight it. If you really look around your life that’s what it looks like. I mean, maybe not your marriage, necessarily, but your friends and the people that you work with. And the fact that Jonathan doesn’t comment on it makes it more true to life because it doesn’t need to be about that.

Have you ever been to a wedding like that?
No, I don’t think I’ve ever been at a wedding that was so cool. [laughter] I just thought today, actually, I was doing a phone interview, and I said, “Oh, God, this is the first wedding where the focus—even though they’re planning, you know, and it’s about—the flowers are fine, the mother’s doing the flowers, the music is awesome, the dad’s a record producer—like ,all those elements are good, if we just don’t kill each other!” It’s really not about the dress, and maybe that’s the way it is in every family.

Because the sister relationship—I mean, sister relationships are already so complicated, but then they’ve got this very traumatic moment in their past that not only affected them but kind of just warped the entire family, which at least doubly if not triply or quadruply intensifies the complexity of the relationship.
I agree. It’s interesting, because earlier someone said to me, “That’s not what my family looks like; we just won’t sit down and hash it out; we won’t say those things to each other.” And I think that when you have that kind of tragedy, maybe you have to in order to go on. All families have lots of dysfunction and difficult, I think, dynamics, but I think when you have something that big I don’t know how you move forward if you don’t address it.

Do you think your character was profoundly changed as a result? Not just because you got married, but—
Sure, that was a given, right? I do, because I think sometimes the most subtle shifts are the ones that have the most a profound affect on your life. And I think that, even if it’s just cause Rachel is such a control freak and she’s getting her PhD because she thinks she can fix the family and she can be the glue and if she can solve Kym’s problems she can solve everybody’s, I think there is a moment where she lets go and says Kym has to face her own destiny. For her, that’s huge, right? Because then she can stop the rest of her life checking and seeing what she’s drinking and if she’s eating, so that’s huge. That affects like every moment of your life, but it’s subtle.

I find she’s terribly lonely, though.
Kym?

No, Rachel.
They both are.

[Rachel] misses that female relationship when the mom is leaving the wedding and she’s like, “No, you can’t leave, I need more of this. I need more relationship with you, I need more connection with you.” And Kym leaves and the mother leaves; everybody—okay, she’s getting a husband, but I think from the female perspective she’s extremely lonely, she seems like she needs more of that.
Well, we do, right? She says at that moment, “I need my mother and my sister.” We don’t get it necessarily all the time but we don’t stop wanting it. And then I think you go out in the world and you find it in your husband or your girlfriends. I do think you project. He was interesting to me because he didn’t have a big part, the character of Sidney on the page, yet everything about her was moving toward this man. So I think he just—I feel like there was a marriage in the traditional sense, and a marriage of, “I’m not going to have my mom and I’m not going to have my sister, but I’m going to have you. And I maybe I’ll be a mom someday—well, I will be a few months from now.”

Is Rachel, I know she has a lot of anger toward Kim, but is she at all jealous of her?
Oh, yeah, yeah. I think it’s a great, a great example of, I guess whatever I understand sibling rivalry to be in all. I remember saying—Jonathan was telling this story at Q&A earlier and he said “At the wrap party—” He was making fun of me, and he’s like “At the wrap party, Rosemarie was having a beer and saying, ‘I’m not Rachel! I’m not Rachel!’” And I remember really wanting to tell him that I think—because I’m so Rachel probably—because I was so embarrassed by how I had to tap into that emotion, that jealousy. You know, because you can try to rise above it and be like, it’s my wedding day, but there’s also something about saying, “I want to be seen! Everybody’s looking over there but I have the dress on!” And I think it’s a hard thing—

And it’s also that she gets away with everything. Is she jealous of that? Not you, is Rachel jealous of that?
I think she’s jealous of all of it. It’s so primal especially in the family dynamic. You can cover better when you go out in the world, and maybe in your jobs or something a coworker gets accolades and you had contributed to it too and you say, well, I’m an adult. But I think at home you can’t do it. And you say, I’m not going to do it and you walk in and by dinner time you walk in and you’re all fighting with each other.

If you can talk about Debra Winger and Bill Irwin are such powerful, amazing forces on screen. Could you just talk about working with…
Well that was huge to me for so many reasons. I’ve admired Bill on stage for so long, like in his clown work and in all his stuff. And someone said to me before going to work with him that he’s the kindest man in show business and he really is. Like, he’s just delightful to be around. Not only is his talent up there on the screen, just to become friends with him was an awesome part of playing Rachel. And Debra Winger was one of those actresses that you just—like, I can’t see the seams in her performance. It’s my favorite kind of acting, so to get to act with her, I can’t, I just can’t see it. When I go back and watch her early things—or I don’t understand why Terms of Endearment, when it’s on TV, even if I only catch the last five minutes I always cry. I don’t know what that is, but I know that happens. So, I didn’t re-watch anything cause I knew I had one scene with her, like just a two hander, and I was afraid that I’d get heady, or weird about it. And for some reason the day we shot this very simple little scene in the bedroom, it was raining, it was so easy, we didn’t rehearse, we didn’t do anything, we did it, we ended obscenely early, I could’ve went all day. But there was a moment in the day, in the scene, where I forgot, I’m just doing this with Debra Winger, I look out the window, it’s raining, and I turn back and she was smiling at me, and I’m like “Oh, my God it’s Debra Winger.” Because her smile is so radiant, I’m like—“I’m out, I’m out! I gotta get back in the scene!” But it was just one moment.

This is just sort of an extension of the jealousy question—it’s touched upon the fact that Kym was a model; Rachel even says to her, “You wore the lilac sweater on the cover of Seventeen.” But the interesting thing is that it’s not focused on at all. It just seems like a background factor. Do you think that probably contributed a great deal to the jealousy that Rachel might have had of her sister?
I think if anything it probably contributed to where she chose to excel and develop herself. You know “If she’s the one with the beauty then I’ll be the one with the brains.” They’re so similar and yet—it looks like good sister, bad sister, and I think a lot of that is actually because they’re so similar and because it’s so difficult to coexist that they try to—they get apart, and then I love that when the shit really hits the fan and her baby sister comes home hurt, bruised, and cut up, there’s none of it; it all falls away she hugs her and brings her in and gives her a bath.

So how are you changed by this?
Oh, God, I don’t know. I mean, changed in terms of working with Jonathan, the degree to which you need to give yourself permission to be creative, I learned so much from him, I can’t even begin to tell you. And as a person it is interesting, I’ve just been, really—when you talk in the press about your relationships with your family, you’re a real hypocrite if then you don’t go home and fix something if you figure it out. You know what I mean? If I say, I have four half-sisters—well, after the first round of press I had to write them all a letter, and I was crying writing it because you can’t talk about it and not really connect to it in your life. So the gift of being an actor is that it just brings up self-awareness and you can do with it what you will. This job, definitely.

What are you doing, coming up?
I’m doing a Showtime series with Toni Colette [called The United States of Tara]. Diablo Cody wrote it, Steven Spielberg’s idea.

You play another sister, right?
I’m only playing sisters to remarkable women. It would be hard to play a brother! I’m taking that as a challenge, though. [laughter] You look out for it.

Tune in on Tuesday for the next round-table interview. And go see the movie if it's playing in your area. I'm not kidding.