And the Oscar goes to … Annette Bening. It has a nice ring to it, and it’s certainly overdue, given that Bening has had four Oscar nominations but no wins in a screen career that stretches back to the early Nineties — and, frankly, makes some of those losses, over time, seem increasingly unjustifiable. There’s no way that Natalie Portman’s horror movie turn in Black Swan (the eventual Oscar winner) is “better” than Bening’s nuanced and nominated performance as a brittle doctor in The Kids Are All Right. And so here we go again into this year’s Oscar hoopla, with Bening, a best actress nominee, playing her ascribed role: the seasoned outsider to a bunch of upstarts.
She is speaking from a quiet corner of her home in Los Angeles. Her 95-year-old mother, Shirley, is next door, and outside is the swimming pool in which she exercises every morning. With a cup of matcha tea in hand, she settles back into a comfy armchair for a hefty chat about being an Oscar nominee for her role in the swimming movie Nyad.
However, the 65-year-old star of American Beauty, Bugsy and 20th Century Women is far too savvy and intellectually voracious to stay on script for long. So yes, “absolutely”, she says, grinning, she would love to win an Oscar for playing the endurance swimmer Diana Nyad who, in 2013 at the age of 64, swam the 110-mile journey from Havana, Cuba, to Key West in Florida.
She also wants to talk politics. She’s big on politics. One of her directors, Mike Mills (20th Century Women), said that if you accept a dinner invitation from Bening and her husband, Warren Beatty, you need to be an expert in politics and history. Of the US political situation she says, “It’s a serious concern. And I would shake my finger first at the Republican leadership that puts up with Donald Trump. It’s really disturbing.”
On whether Biden is capable of another presidential term, she says, “I don’t know. I think he’s been a phenomenal president and I’ve always admired him, and I think that everyone is concerned. Not because he’s not capable of it, but because of how being in the public eye can be, you get caught off guard, because his age is worrying. I think he will win, yeah. But it’s nervous-making.”
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And no, she doesn’t do social media. Doesn’t even read it any more. “I used to read Twitter because I felt I needed to. A foreign policy expert I respected told me that he went to Twitter for news, and so I did. Never tweeted, just read. But once I got too many creepy things on my feed I said, ‘I don’t even need this.’”
Then there’s kissing — or more — on screen. She has a fabulous tip, given by a former acting coach, for any actors performing a love scene opposite someone to whom they feel “decidedly unattracted”, as she puts it. “Well, you imagine taking the head of that person off [mimes physically decapitating invisible co-star], and you replace it with the head of whoever it is that you’d have those feelings for and then you simply pretend. And you know what? I’ve had to do that a few times.” She adds, just in case, “Now I didn’t have to do that with Warren Beatty. I ended up falling in love with him.”
We return to the Oscars. She remembers her first awards season rodeo, in 1991, as a best supporting actress nominee for The Grifters, and how on the night “all the women in my category [Whoopi Goldberg, Diane Ladd, Mary McDonnell and Lorraine Bracco] got together in a little huddle and we said, ‘All right, let’s all have dinner next week and whoever wins pays.’ And so Whoopi Goldberg won and she sent us each a flower arrangement and a card that said, ‘Meet at such and such a restaurant next week at a certain time.’ And we all showed up, and had dinner, and she gave us a chocolate Oscar and a gardenia. And it was so nice, and so quiet, and was never in the press and no one ever knew about it.” And today? She sighs. “The technology has exploded and there’s just so much space out there on the internet that needs to be filled up with stuff. Back then it was considered bad form to promote yourself, and now it’s considered bad form if you don’t.”
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That said, Bening does produce an extraordinary, Oscar-worthy performance in Nyad. It’s one of those transformational turns that’s normally reserved for, say, Christian Bale or Joaquin Phoenix, where the dedication to the role exceeds all expectations. Bening agreed to play Nyad in 2021, then spent a year training with the American Olympic swimmer Rada Owen to swim convincingly on camera. For most of the film’s eight-week shoot in 2022 Bening refused the services of the film’s two stunt doubles, preferring to spend three to eight hours a day in the water.
Why? “Part of it was that I knew that if someone else got in the water it wouldn’t look right. We all know how it is when you watch something and think, ‘It’s just not that person.’ You can tell, and I didn’t want that. But it’s also a case of ‘this is mine — I have to do this’. It’s, like, [she shouts] ego!”
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Her performance out of the water is equally exceptional. Bening’s Nyad is driven forward obsessively by a need to complete the swim. She defies those around her and an entire society that, it seems, looks at this loud and demanding sixtysomething woman and, as Nyad says in the film, “wants me to shut my mouth and sit down and wait to die”. It’s a beautiful characterisation, but one that has also been described, often by male critics, as “challenging”.
Bening is aware of this and notes that the real Nyad (who has become a friend) “was single-minded in her pursuit, and if that pissed people off and they thought she was bossy or obstreperous, then that was their problem. And so I do think that, culturally, if a man stands up and says, ‘I’m king of the world,’ we say, ‘Of course you are.’ But somehow, if a woman does it, it’s a different thing.”
Bening is inevitably an outsider in the Oscar race, with Emma Stone the clear favourite, having already won a Golden Globe and Bafta for Poor Things. Yet it’s worth wondering about an awards system that celebrates Cillian Murphy’s hugely “challenging” (and super-annoying) male protagonist in Oppenheimer yet has consistently overlooked Nyad in favour of something much more adorable from the women.
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Bening was born in Kansas and raised, the youngest of four, by two conservative Republican parents. In her youth she found the politics of her father, Arnett, difficult, but they both mellowed with age. He died last year at 97, and she remembers as “cute” his refusal to watch her as a lesbian doctor in The Kids Are All Right on the home cinema. “Dad wouldn’t watch it, which I found so funny,” she says. “But I was old enough by that time to say, ‘Don’t worry about it, Dad, everyone else is going into the living room to watch the movie. You come in here with me while I cook and we can chat.’”
She was inspired by Shakespeare as a child and studied theatre at San Francisco State University. She worked exclusively on stage at first, and embraced screen acting relatively “late”, getting her big break at 32 in The Grifters. She didn’t have an “ingenue” phase, and instead played fully formed, formidable female characters such as the gangster’s moll Virginia Hill (opposite Beatty) in Bugsy, the no-nonsense CIA interrogator in The Siege and the sharp romantic match for the commander-in-chief in The American President. In another Oscar-nominated role, as the estate agent Carolyn Burnham in American Beauty, she undercuts the character’s seemingly cartoonish nature with a terrifying scene where she slaps herself round the face, shouting, “Shut up, you baby! Stop it! Weak!” Today she says, “So-called strong women characters are not very interesting to me. What’s interesting is what makes a strong woman fall apart.”
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She married Beatty in 1992 and they have four grown-up children, the youngest of whom, Ella, 23, is also an actress. Any misgivings about being a parent of an actor? “It is a worry,” she says. “But if someone has a passion for something and feel strongly about it, then they have to pursue it and be encouraged to do it. As parents we never stop worrying. My mother is 95 and I know she’s still concerned about how we’re all doing.”
When I ask about her daily downtime routines she cringes, saying, “It’s so boring. There’s nothing to say. I drink matcha, I read, I chat with my friends, or watch something on television with my husband, and I have a giant old lady dog.”
She was an active participant in the recent actors’ strike, and as the vice-chairwoman on the board of trustees for the Entertainment Community Fund helped to raise more than $20 million to support performers and behind-the-scenes workers. And yes, she thinks AI is a threat to the industry, but is not personally worried about it, “But maybe I’m just naive.”
Her forthcoming projects include a mystery mini-series called Apples Never Fall, and an as yet untitled Frankenstein revamp for Maggie Gyllenhaal. She likes time off, but needs to work. “If I don’t act for a while I get a little grumpy,” she says. The swimming helps, though. She’s been doing it, it transpires, every day since she stopped filming Nyad. It’s one of the things she’s carried with her. That and the inspiration of Diana Nyad. “Because she has such an interest in living life so fully, and I do love that about her,” she says. Then she pauses, and adds, with all the certainty of a 65-year-old woman who’s not going to shut her mouth and sit down and wait to die, “And I do want to live like that myself.”
Nyad is on Netflix. The Oscars are on ITV on March 10
