Noah Baumbach and Laura Dern have a pact.
After working together on Marriage Story — Baumbach’s drama starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, for which Dern won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress — the director and actor made a deal that she would be in everything he made thereafter.
“When Noah made White Noise, there wasn’t an obvious role [for me], but there was a voice on the radio, so he was like, ‘That counts, then you’re in it!’ ” Dern tells Krista Smith during a new episode of the podcast Skip Intro. “He and Greta [Gerwig] are my family, and I want to spend this life telling stories with them. Whatever the role, I’m ready.”
When it came to Jay Kelly — Baumbach’s most recent film (now streaming on Netflix), about a movie star (George Clooney) reflecting on his life, showbiz career, and the decisions he made along the way — Dern was more than prepared. Her parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, were actors, as was her godmother, Shelley Winters, so the Hollywood lifestyle was familiar terrain even before Dern began acting herself. “This is the life I know,” she says. “Growing up here and watching what it takes to be dedicated and committed and having a lifetime career, I think I was pretty prepared for an actor’s life.”
In Jay Kelly, Dern doesn’t play an actor but the titular movie star’s publicist, Liz, while Adam Sandler takes on the role of Jay’s long-suffering manager, Ron. Both Liz and Ron (among others in Jay’s entourage) must drop everything in their lives and jet off to Europe when their boss decides, on a whim, to follow his daughter to Italy. “We’re there to represent … the loyalty that surrounds, protects, and builds up the artist, the celebrity, the movie star,” says Dern. “[Liz and Ron have been in] the same pattern for almost 20 years — which is always sacrificing at the service of this larger-than-life being, Jay Kelly, that’s not even [the real] Jay Kelly. We’re there to protect this image. Liz has this wake-up call where she doesn’t want to lose another thing that matters. She has the opportunity to service the story by saying, ‘We can no longer lose ourselves by supporting an image that’s false.’ That’s a really huge theme for all of us in the movie.”
In one sense, Jay Kelly is the journey of a movie star questioning whether he has missed out on his own life, but Dern says that Baumbach uses the iconography of the movie star so brilliantly that Jay’s questions become our own. “The whole point is that it’s about the movie star as us,” she says. “It’s everything we’ve projected onto the movie star, or the movie itself, over our lifetime. Our longing, our love stories, our mishaps, our resentments, what we should have gotten, what we didn’t get. All of it. Yes, [the film] is this homage to cinema in this way, but it’s our homage to what cinema has given our life journey while saying to us, no matter our vocation, our job, our commitments, we’re all wondering if we missed it. And we all don’t want to wake up too late to what is really of value: our loved ones.”
It’s fortunate, then, that making this movie was also an opportunity to spend time with a cast and creator Dern considers family. She and Clooney have known each other for 40 years, since they worked on what Dern describes as a “horrible never finished horror film” when she was just a teen. Their bond proved more resilient than the project. “We became real, true, deep friends,” she says. “He was such a protector and so generous to me.” She adds that it was incredible to spend quality time with Sandler, too. “Adam is such a loyalist, and he’s such an unbelievable family man and father. Being with George and Adam was the time of my life.”
That included having dinner together and telling stories every night for months during production. “It was such a dream come true,” says Dern. “You feel that connection in the movie. We’ll all be working together forever.”
