Cover Story: Jennifer Connelly
Connelly makes a comedy? Get out.
You won’t believe how many years it’s been since Jennifer Connelly made her last funny movie. But the solemn actor finally goes for laughs with the ensemble rom-com He’s Just Not That Into You
By Bob Strauss
Jennifer Connelly needed a break.
After winning the 2001 Supporting Actress Oscar for the psychodrama A Beautiful Mind, the New Yorker had appeared in a series of emotionally searing films — House of Sand and Fog, Little Children, Blood Diamond.
Her venture into horror, Dark Water, was seriously grim when most of its ilk are escapist scary. And even Connelly’s sci-fi entertainments demanded more than the usual sit-back-and-let-the-CGI-do-the-work approach; 2003’s Hulk was directed by Brokeback Mountain’s Ang Lee, of all people; and in the recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Connelly’s character had to save the very planet by locating, and touching, the deep inner humanity of…Keanu Reeves.
The girl needed to lighten up, big time. So it’s no wonder she was eager to make He’s Just Not That Into You, her first comedy since Career Opportunities way back in 1991.
“It’s entirely lighthearted, so it’s a complete departure for me,” acknowledges the 38-year-old actor, looking skinny in a floral-print sundress on a warm December day in Los Angeles. “The last job I’d done before that was Reservation Road, which was the most harrowing subject matter [she played a grieving mother]. I was just, ‘I…can’t…do…it…again! Frankly, I don’t want to see myself do it, I’m sick of that, it’s just time to do something entirely different.’”
From left: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer
Aniston and Jennifer Connelly in
He's Just Not That Into You
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Adapted from Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s best-selling advice book,
the film’s studded with stars — Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore,
Scarlett Johansson — playing ladies whose ideas about how men should
love them clash with reality.
“My character is named Janine,” Connelly notes. “Ginnifer Goodwin is my
best friend Gigi, I work in an office with her. Janine is incredibly
optimistic and really committed to being a great girlfriend to her
friend. She’s really obsessive, incredibly tidy and really convinced
that something’s going on with her husband…which is right, but she has
it entirely focused on the wrong thing.”
Sounds funny. Or could be, anyway. Might be kind of heartbreaking, actually, depending on how it’s played.
“What I go through in He’s Just Not That Into You is quite a serious
event,” Connelly admits. “But tonally, it’s handled in a different way.
The film is very obviously made in a different spirit.”
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Working with such an amazing cast of funny women must have been a
welcome change from the drama that’s dominated Connelly’s career since
she started making movies as an adolescent, beginning with Sergio
Leone’s 1984 underworld epic Once Upon a Time in America.
Or it would have been a welcome change if those women had been a little more available. Apparently, the movie’s male characters weren’t the only ones who had other things to do with their time.
“It was great, I wish there was more of it,” Connelly says of the female bonding. “All of those women were so busy, their schedules were kind of compartmentalized. So there wasn’t much hanging out on the set, or like everyone’s there at the same time. People would come and go. I had some days with Scarlett, who I thought was lovely and really liked. Jennifer Aniston, I think we had two days together and I was completely…I felt like a weird stalker! I was like, ‘I wanna be your friend, I think you’re really great, where are you going?’ She seemed like a very nice person.”
Connelly’s been pretty busy herself most of this decade. And although many of her post-Oscar movies have been perceived as financial disappointments, there is no arguing that, dark as much of it was, she has chosen challenging and provocative work whenever given the opportunity.
“It didn’t change the way I feel internally, in terms of how I feel about my work and the demands I place on myself,” she says of her Academy Award. “I just read scripts and pursue things that I feel drawn to: parts that I find interesting, filmmakers that I want to work with. And y’know, it’s not always a perfect scenario.
Sometimes I decide to work on something and I know that all of the elements aren’t exactly how I want them to be. But those jobs don’t come up all the time, so I try to pick the ones that I think have the most things going in the right direction.”
Next up is Creation, a film about Charles Darwin in which she plays the evolution pioneer’s beloved and devoutly religious wife, Emma. Sounds like another helping of deep-dish, angst-ridden drama.
And maybe it will be. But making the film in England opposite Darwin portrayer Paul Bettany, Connelly’s British-born husband and the father of her five-year-old son, was all smiles, she happily reports.
“It was fantastic, such a joy to work with him,” says Connelly, who hasn’t done so since the couple met while making A Beautiful Mind. “We were like giggly kids. We were like, ‘Can you believe we get to ride to work together in the morning?’ It was really nice.”
Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies and filmmakers.
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Self-help me turn this into a good movie
Before it became a movie, He’s Just Not That Into You was a best-selling self-help book by Sex and the City writers Liz Tuccillo and Greg Behrendt.
Divided into 16 brutally honest chapters, it taught women how to tell when the men in their lives were not truly invested in their relationships, ie. “He’s Not Calling You,” “He’s Not Having Sex with You,” “He’s Having Sex with Someone Else,” “He Disappeared on You.”
Being a self-help book it had no story, no plot twists, no character arcs. So how do you turn a series of non-fiction relationship tips into a star-studded romantic comedy?
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“It’s really hard and it’s really easy,” says Tuccillo while in Toronto to promote her novel How to Be Single. “It’s not like there was a plot they could base the movie on...but the good news is that because there was no story the writers [Never Been Kissed scribes Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein] were able to make it up however they wanted.”
So how did they connect the movie to the book?
“The plotlines of the movie are titled by the chapter titles,” explains Tuccillo, “and then you see that chapter played out in this relationship. It’s so smart to do it that way, rather than having to spend a lot of time talking about it.”
Tuccillo, who has a small cameo as a minister, says she was nervous when she was first sent the finished screenplay.
“I was just afraid that it was going to be bad and I was going to be embarrassed,” she says. “I was so close to it, I didn’t understand how they were going to be able to weave the philosophy into an ensemble film. [But] they honoured the book more than I imagined they could have, or would have. They were very true to the book while being this complete fictional ensemble comedy.”
—Marni Weisz