In this episode of Screen Tests, Laura Dern shares her deeply thoughtful musings on life, recognition, other people’s perceptions, and the labels foisted upon her.
“If there’s an internal aspect to the idea of feeling recognized, then I would say I’m figuring that out right now,” she reveals. “The outside perception was always confusing to me. I was their daughter, or his girlfriend, or their mom, or a ‘sex siren,’ or ‘the girl next door,’ the ‘blind girl from the thing,’ or ‘the dinosaur lady’…You have all these labels and you don’t feel connection to them, if you’re lucky.”
The actress, who has already won a Golden Globe for her role in “Marriage Story” and is nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the same film, also shared her favorite memory about her longtime collaborator David Lynch. (It involves Dern’s son making a cappuccino with Lynch).
“I was sitting at [Lynch’s] kitchen table. At the time, [my son] was probably 13. He said, ‘So David, I haven’t gotten to see your movies with my mom.’ And [Lynch] was like, ‘Oh, yeah, does she want you to wait?'” Dern said in her best impression of his voice. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I think she thinks I shouldn’t see them. I wanted to see Wild at Heart, and she was like, no…Is that too sassy?’ And he said, ‘Well, I mean, it’s sassy, but you can’t see that until you’re 30…It’s not seeing your mother I’m worried about, it’s you seeing your grandmother that I’m worried about!’ It was that moment that I was like, oh right. That woman who paints her face red with lipstick is somebody’s grandma.”
