35: The Perfect Cast Part 2: Jennifer Jason Leigh

There’s a certain kind of conversation that happens in the world. It’s happened in taverns and cocktail parties since those things have existed. It’s happened on the internet since its creation, from exchanges on usenet forums all the way to twitter dot com.  It’s happened between strangers and it’s happened between best friends.  The conversation is one of superlatives. “Who is the most ____ at something”.  Who is the most overrated rock drummer?* Who’s the biggest underdog in baseball?** What’s the most overlooked yet important historical event?*** Film and television acting inspires this kind of discussion a lot, especially in the realm of underrated actors: people who have been delivering incredibly nuanced and impressive performances, often for long periods of time but who do not get the same kind of accolades for it that folks like Laurence Olivier or Nicole Kidman or Meryl Streep do. Until his death caused enough people to speak well of him to no longer be qualified as “underrated”, Phillip Seymour Hoffman was commonly spoken of this way.  Today one might hear people talking about Walton Goggins or Paul Giamatti or JK Simmons in this way. Among the dozens of clickbait listicles of “underrated actors” I clicked through to research this very paragraph, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s name did not appear once, only proving that she is not merely an underrated actor, but is potentially the most underrated actor. 

Jennifer Jason Leigh was born for show business. Her father was Vic Morrow, a television actor known primarily for the ABC WW2 drama series Combat!. Her mother was Barbara Turner, a television screenwriter who wrote for shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Kraft Suspense Theatre in the 1960s. Her stepfather was television director Reza Badiyi who had a long and productive career working on shows from Hawaii Five-O and Mission: Impossible all the way up to Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

A young Leigh would work on an episode of Baretta her stepfather directed when she was 15, continuing to get periodic television roles until her big break, a role in the Cameron Crowe penned ensemble star-making teen film Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982), a film that also broke the careers of Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Forest Whittaker, and Sean Penn. While Fast Times is a stellar example of the genre, it’s also at heart a teensploitation comedy, an inherently unserious genre.  Penn’s performance as stoner surfer Jeff Spicoli was simultaneously so iconic and so lowbrow that one could argue that Penn’s entire career past this point —where he has made it clear that he is a serious actor for serious people— has been a nearly 40 year attempt to distance himself from Jeff Spicoli.  Nonetheless, despite the inherently silly genre, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy Hamilton is a touching and sweet character whose discovery of her own sexuality and subsequent unwanted pregnancy and abortion are subjects treated with respect and dignity.**** The late 80s and 90s though are when Leigh truly had her most impressive run of films, in critically acclaimed and commercially successful work such as Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), Backdraft  (1991) and Single White Female (1992).  It was also during the 90s when she had a string of working with notably critically acclaimed directors such as Robert Altman, David Cronenberg, and of course Joel & Ethan Coen. 

Outside of a few films in the early 90s though, few of the films Leigh has worked on have been mega-blockbusters.  Some of this is doubtless simply due to bad luck (for example, starring in a film made by indie darlings in what was supposed to be their big budget blockbuster breakthrough called The Hudsucker Proxy). One gets the sense this is also because Leigh choses films not owing to what their potential commercial success might look like, but rather due to the fact that she wants to experience as much of the acting world as possible. It’s not even that she’s a snob, preferring only to work with celebrated directors on highbrow arthouse material, her work is simply very broad, being equally at home and compelling in the erotic thriller In The Cut (2003) as with Charlie Kaufman’s inscrutable directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2008) or in the big screen adaptation of the cartoon Hey, Arnold! (2002).  Nothing bears this out quite like the fact that there simply is no Jennifer Jason Leigh type.  She is not a dreamy girl-next-door like Meg Ryan.  She is not the unhinged maniac like Nicholas Cage.  She is not cool like Paul Newman, she’s just always compelling and interesting to look at in myriad different ways.  

One constant that is a through-line of Leigh’s career though is professionalism.  Everyone who has worked with Leigh has expressed what a joy she is to work with.  When interviewed about working on the Netflix series Atypical, Michael Rappaport has used nearly every opportunity to talk specifically about how much of a joy it was to work with Leigh.  Bruce Campbell who plays Smitty on Hudsucker still to this day says she is the best actor he has had the pleasure of working with, and states in his book If Chins Could Kill “I knew my way around a film set and had performed some difficult tasks, but nothing was as challenging as keeping up with her.  Jennifer was an acting machine — she knew every one of her voluminous lines from day one of rehearsal and never tripped up, not even once.” Kurt Russell was impressed by her commitment to the process while filming The Hateful Eight (2015), a film where she spends the entirety of the run time literally chained to Russell.  Rather than choreographing their movements, which she felt risked looking awkward and unnatural on camera, she opted to spend the extensive rehearsal process chained to Russell the entire time, acclimating both actors to the unusual circumstance and giving both of them the freedom to improvise their physicality. Jennifer Jason Leigh wants to get the job done and get it right.  

What’s truly spectacular about Leigh though is that she manages to do all of this without ego.  Acting is ultimately a profession that attracts people who want the world to behold them in all their glory.  Talented actors who really commit to the part therefore can get a reputation of being at best a little intense (such as Daniel Day Lewis, a man who comedian Paul F Tompkins compared to “like being in the same room as a panther”) and at worse raging assholes (such as Christian Bale and Orson Welles, men whose on-set meltdowns are very well documented). Talented actors also tend to like to be part of the creative process of the film being made.  Sometimes this meshes well with a filmmaker’s style, Robert Altman for example (with whom Leigh worked on the 1996 film Kansas City) is known for inviting his cast to view dailies after filming and soliciting their input on future scenes, or filmmakers like Mike Leigh or Christopher Guest whose scripts are effectively skeleton frameworks for the stories they wish to tell, inviting their actors to improvise effectively all of their dialog.  The Coens are not this type of filmmaker however.  When interviewed about working with them on Marc Maron’s WTF, John Goodman stated simply of working with the Coens “it’s all on the page, I just show up and say the lines”.  The Coens are such meticulous planners of their work that anything that is outside the scope of what exactly is on the script doesn’t matter to them.  In the same interview, while Goodman was discussing his character, the grouchy jazz musician Roland Turner from Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), he revealed that when he asked Joel & Ethan what instrument Turner played they told him they had no idea. During the filming of Miller’s Crossing (1990), Gabriel Byrne asked the brothers what the significance of his character’s dream about a hat was. After Byrne asked Joel Coen "What's the significance of the hat? I need to know", Joel called to his brother, saying "Ethan, come here, Gabe wants to know what the significance of the hat is."  Ethan's response was "Hmm.  Yeah, it was significant" before walking away and adding nothing further. This level of meticulous planning without any kind of direct creative contribution from the actors can be maddening for the type of actor who desires to contribute.  Nicholas Cage for example famously butted heads with the Coens all throughout the shoot of Raising Arizona (1987), insisting that he knew the character of H.I. McDunnough better than they did and constantly suggesting dialogue changes which were constantly shut down.  Leigh is clearly an actor who will happily creatively contribute to how her character will be seen on screen, but has never expressed this kind of ego about needing that kind of creative credit or contribution.  

Leigh however does know how to bring her own high bar of acting creativity to a film’s set, even one where changes to dialogue and story are impossible, as on the set of a Coens feature.  While Joel & Ethan are sticklers with what words are presented on screen, they are not nearly as concerned with how they are spoken.  As far as they’re concerned if an actor passes muster in the audition process and brings the correct kind of energy there, they’re not going to mess with it on set when time is ticking and the shots need to be made. On the set of Hudsucker, Paul Newman said he found it interesting that the Coens never gave him any direction with regard to his character’s motivation. “They don’t use Stanislavski language. They don’t speak in the word of the Active verb.  They are not interested in the psychology.  They are more interested in the pacing – ‘faster’ was the only direction I got”.  It’s unknown to what extent Leigh was familiar with this aspect of the Coens’ directorial style, but it’s definitely true that her preparation for the role gelled with it perfectly.  Rather than seeing the set as a place for collaboration, she created the character of Amy Archer based on the overall ethos of the film and what she saw on the page.  Prior to day one of filming, she had spent hours working on her posture and elocution. Noting that this was clearly a film meant to evoke classic Hollywood tropes of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, and that her character was clearly a pastiche of Babe Bennet in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936) and Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday (1940), a lesser actor might have done her best Jean Arthur and Rosalind Russell impressions and called it a day, but this was not how Jennifer Jason Leigh prepared.  She took the physicality and speech patterns of the classic actors of the 1930s and 40s and decided rather than imitating them, to put herself through the same kind of training and preparations that women did in the 30s and 40s in order to be considered actresses.  As a result, she basically gave herself a 30s makeover, forcing herself to exist physically in the world in the same way as a woman would be expected to 60 years ago stating “The actresses during that period always had beautiful posture. They took elocution lessons, took posture classes, it was a completely different time. So standing up straight was something I had to learn how to do, it wasn’t in my repertoire.” She also taught herself not a specific speech pattern of one person, but rather learning how her own voice would use the classic Hollywood mid-Atlantic accent, so that when asked what classic Hollywood actor she was imitating she could say honestly “all of them”. A classic example of the dedicated actor is them wrecking their body for a part, often in terms of excessive weight loss or gain.  Leigh was likewise willing to risk her own health for a part in this instance by taking up smoking exclusively for the run of the shoot so that she could look naturalistic as her character chain smokes through the film.  The most beautiful little touch though that Jennifer Jason Leigh brought to her performance was for one scene in the newsroom.  By 1994, typing was a common skill.  Most Americans could use a typewriter, and the proliferation of the personal computer was only making the skill more universal.  Jennifer Jason Leigh in 1994 knew how to touch type proficiently, but she noticed that when the stars of these classic studio screwball comedies typed, they did not type the same way that the people of 1994 did.  The actors acting touch typing knew that typists typed quickly, but they did not have this skill, and so they would mash their fingers into the keypads as fast as possible, likely producing gobbledygook on the page.  For a scene in which she drafts her story “Imbecile Heads Hudsucker: Not a Brain In His Head” (a one minute scene in which she drafts a column that looks to be around 500 words at least, putting her more than twice as fast as the world record for typing at 212 words per minute) her typewriter runs at a continuous clip while she mashes the keys and continues to make smalltalk with Campbell’s character Smitty.  As preparation for Hudsucker, Jennifer Jason Leigh learned how to comically type incorrectly. 

The net result of all this is a masterful performance.  Hudsucker is all about style, all about capturing a certain kind of aesthetic and filling it with as many gags as humanly possible much more than it is about creating well rounded human characters, and yet despite the filmmakers’ not writing a character with much of an inner life beyond “work at newspaper” and “smooch Norville Barnes”, and despite the style of filmmaking being pastiched itself not lending itself to 3 dimensional characters, Amy Archer leaps off the screen.  Her righteous anger, her sadness, and her extreme professionalism are all vehicles for gags, and yet none of it feels put-upon.  The kind of accent she speaks with is something that no human being has ever grown up speaking naturally, and yet she uses it as though she hadn’t grown up in Los Angeles but in fact grew up in a George Cukor movie.  Jennifer Jason Leigh breathes life into what could so easily have been lifeless.  

The great pity of this is that Leigh as an actor who wishes to experience all the kinds of acting there are in the world doesn’t establish much in the way of creative partnerships.  She comes in, does fabulously, and then finds someone else to work with.  “I don’t want to play the same person twice, that’s not why I wanted to act. I want to play great roles and work with directors I admire” and so while the Coens will happily bring back folks they have worked with in the past, creating a kind of crew of regular collaborators, Leigh will likely never be one of them.  A pity, I would have loved to have seen her Maude Lebowski. 

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* Tommy Lee  

** The Seattle Mariners

*** Prior to 2020, it would have been the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, but now it’s all we seem to talk about, so now it would have to be the 1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora 

**** Director Noah Baumbach’s barely-disguised 2019 autobiographical account of his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, Marriage Story, depicts Scarlett Johansen’s Jennifer Jason Leigh stand-in Nicole Barber as a serious actor who is hamstrung by an early film appearance in a teen movie in which she appears topless, clearly a reference to Fast Times. 

It’s a strange reference though, in that the moment depicted clearly has much more in common with Leigh’s Fast Times costar Phoebe Cates. Whether this is something that Leigh herself felt about her own career that she didn’t communicate publicly or whether this is something that Baumbach exaggerated for dramatic effect, both display a similar kind of casual misogyny in which a woman tenderly portraying nascent awkward sexuality as Leigh did in Fast Times is best remembered for getting her boobs out on screen.