“It’s a tough time for Southern California,” Amy Madigan said on Zoom.
She and her husband Ed Harris had successfully quenched eight or nine “really bad” Malibu fires over the decades at their sprawling hilltop Malibu ranch, complete with horses and extensive gardens. But this year’s inferno “was unlike anything we’ve ever been through. We have a big, giant pool and legit fire hoses, legit generator, and it was just not to be. Southern California is trying to recover. It’s scarred. It’s just too much.” The couple is now rebuilding.
But Madigan has other things to be thankful for. Zach Cregger told himself not to hire the character actress before their first meeting on “Weapons,” and at the end, offered her the gig to play the film‘s villain, Aunt Gladys. Madigan had admired Cregger’s breakout indie “Barbarian,” his first horror film as a director coming out of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know.
“He always has great characters,” she said. “We sat down, and he volunteered personal information about him as a boy and the situation with alcohol in the family, which turned into certain things in the ‘Weapons‘ script. Someone was saying, ‘This is who I am. This is what happened to me. I’ve used my art to do it.’”
Her wild and wily performance as Gladys could land Madigan her first Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress since 1985, when she earned the only Oscar nomination for “Twice in a Lifetime,” as Gene Hackman’s daughter. She also earned early kudos as Kevin Costner’s stalwart wife in “Field of Dreams.” “It still stands up, doesn’t it?” she said. “I have people come up to me in the airport, and they’re always men, and they say, ‘Hey, I’d really like to have a wife like you.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, so would I, you know where one is?’”
Aunt Gladys was crystal clear to Madigan right off the page. And she loved her [spoiler alert], even if she kidnaps a town full of children and drains their lifeblood to survive. Madigan had no idea she would capture the zeitgeist and inspire Halloween costumes. In Cregger’s script, “Gladys is rather eccentric. She wears loud colors, and her makeup is blatantly out there,” said Madigan. “He was overseeing everything and had ideas, of course, but we all tried a lot of different things. We had to make sure that when you saw Gladys, you were like, ‘Whoa.’ If you saw her walking down the street, you definitely turn around.”
‘Weapons’Warner Bros.
Creating Gladys was a team effort, building from the ground up. It took time, trial, and error. Wig designer Melizah Anguiano Wheat “tried on every color of red, and different designs,” said Madigan. “Each time we put them on, we had to match it up with makeup. Leo Satkovich did the makeup, which was a long, arduous process, because we had to do layers and layers. Jason Collins did the designs for all the special effects. We tried things, and then we didn’t like it. We had to wipe everything off, especially for the look where I’m quite ill, not doing well, and I’m bald and have these little strands of hair. It took a long time to figure that out. How should the hair be? How much hair should it be? Get rid of my eyebrows, get rid of my teeth.”
Costume Designer Trish Somerville helped with Gladys’ clothes. “She is careful about her costumes,” said Madigan. “When she does have to go out, they’re not costumes to her. That’s her wardrobe. She’s particular about how she matches things. How she puts the broach on, her handbag. So she takes pride in it. She thinks she looks great. I think she looks great. So somebody else could argue against it. Once you have that all in place, it feels so good.”
‘Weapons’Warner Bros.
While Madigan saw Gladys clearly in her mind’s eye, she listened to input from Cregger and others. “Zach and I had many conversations working with the looks teams,” she said. “I would take things in, things I didn’t want to take in, I discarded. She’s a confident woman; she’s doing everything she needs to do to make sure that she reaches the next day. Her back is against the wall. She was in desperate circumstances, and it was a heightened way to deal with something which I thought was rather unique. Yes, she is scary. She can turn on you, and you don’t want that to happen. But the movie is funny. Zach is smart because he melded those two things. But when she’s bad, she’s really bad.”
Madigan loves physical comedy. She did the running. But she let the stunt person get tackled by the children. Then, they flipped her over, and the kids got to jump on her back. “That Keystone Cops escapade at the end where I run,” she said, “we did that over a series of days. ‘Let’s shoot you blasting through this door in this location,’ and it was fun. And, of course, I had a stunt person. And they said, ‘Well, she’s right here.’ I was 74, I got a bum knee, and whatever else. Too many lines on your face, your neck hangs down, all that shit. The producers were a little nervous about it: ‘Suppose I smacked into something and cut my head open? Suppose I broke something?’ Fair enough. I just looked at Zach, and I said, ‘No, I’m doing it.’”
There are elements of Gladys in Madigan. It’s tough to argue with her when she wants something. Madigan developed tenacity as a rising actress in the business. “A lot of that is a shield,” she said. “And it’s protection, because when I was coming up, a long time ago, none of these things were in place to protect young women in any way, shape or form, mentally, physically, emotionally. You didn’t bring up stuff, you didn’t talk about stuff. There’s no HR. You could go complain to somebody, and they would be, ‘Shut up.’ So you have to take on a fierceness in that way. And of course, we now have a million stories, and it goes on and on.”
‘Field of Dreams’©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection
The casting couch was a real threat for actresses. “‘Oh, we’re over at the Peninsula Hotel. Come on and meet in that room there,’” she said. “You’d be like, ‘What? I’m going to what?’ Those things still do go on, but it’s not as prevalent. I love when people say, ‘We had no idea.’ And you knew that was bullshit when you heard it 15 years ago, 40 years ago, the powers that be can’t hide behind that anymore. I guess if you’re the president, you can call a reporter, ‘Shut up, piggy.’ You can say that.”
You’d think that Madigan would be feeling renewed interest right now. “I would say no to that,” she said. “I haven’t got a plethora of scripts or the phone is ringing off the hook to Anonymous Content. Until something’s real, it’s not real. That is part and parcel of what this business is. If it can provide me an opportunity to work on something good, that would be so welcome, because those opportunities don’t happen that often for a lot of women, and certainly a lot of older women.”
As older actors like her husband Ed Harris grow into being presidents and commanders and powerful men, somehow that doesn’t happen with women the same way. To fight ageism, said Madigan, “it’s important to have female writers and women directors who realize that we can make something with women being in most of the parts in the film, and it revolves around them, and people will go see it. It’s not as bad as it used to be.”
“Weapons” is one of a string of sleeper hits ($269 million worldwide) from Warner Bros. this year. Now the legacy studio is for sale.
“I feel saddened by it, because you know the history of that place and how many great directors and writers and actors and craftsmen came through there,” said Madigan. “Everything is taken over by these giant corporations, and it’s usually a titular head. We know who those people are, and they’re looking at their bottom line, and they’re looking down the road at how they can get the largest reach. As long as movies are made, you hope that they pay attention to other kinds of films, as opposed to the larger superhero blockbusters. I have no problem with those movies, and people love to go to them, but there’s a lot of different movies out there, and I don’t know if [the new owners] will fulfill that or not.”
Next up: Harris and Madigan have been trying to get an indie movie off the ground for years. One script was ready to shoot on the East Coast, but the money fell out. “It was a true independent film,” she said. “It was a personal, emotional film. Ed has a project of his own that he’s been trying to do, it’s that same situation. You can put in a chunk of money yourself, but then you have to get all the other investors.”
Ed Harris and Amy Madigan 70th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2018Chelsea Lauren/REX/Shutterstock
Harris is accepting an award at January’s last Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, for his years of service at the Sundance workshops. Madigan would like to go.
“He’s devoted to Sundance,” she said. “And of course, it’s emotional, Mr. Redford passing, because he created a format for so many artists, so many creators. They’re moving to Colorado, but it’s still going. A lot of people know films that come through Sundance, but they don’t know what the workshops are. They don’t know how they have the writers and the dancers and actors and the filmmakers.”
Madigan laughed when I brought up the Gladys prequel movie. “There’s a lot of talk about it, which is fun,” she said. “Zach and I talked after we finished shooting, and he was editing, and he said, ‘Oh, yes, we’re going to make another film.’ He said that. I didn’t say it. I didn’t hear Warner Brothers say that. He lightly sketched out an idea that he thought might work. It’s nice to be in the conversation, and it’s fun living in Zach’s imagination. He’s a filmmaker. He’s a writer/director. He knows what he’s doing.”