Mary Elizabeth Winstead Interview

Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Being an actress is a most unusual job. Chris Neumer speaks to up-and-coming actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead about life in Hollywood. The two touch why being mobbed on the street is bad, being vulnerable is good and why Winstead occasionally finds it necessary to think about her family being killed.

by Chris Neumer

Extra Information

CHRIS NEUMER: You were supposed to talk to me today at 2:00 and stood me up.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I know. I’m so sorry. I kept getting all my meetings miscalculated. It was bad today.

CHRIS NEUMER: You got to admit though that life is going well when you have to cancel all the interviews you’re doing because you need to take meetings with big Hollywood studios so they can tell you how much they like you.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I guess I can’t complain. It’s not a bad thing, but it is stressful at times.

CHRIS NEUMER: Is it?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: It can be. The last few days have been so much involving Final Destination 3 press, plus meetings, plus premieres, plus more meetings.

CHRIS NEUMER: The junket was what, yesterday?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Yeah, yesterday. All day yesterday and then the premiere was last night.

CHRIS NEUMER: My gosh, so you had to talk to the guys in sweat pants and bad beards all day huh?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: (laughs) And then all the same people at the premiere on the press line too, it’s funny.

CHRIS NEUMER: Wow! What questions did you get asked a lot of? Hold on, let me see if I can guess. “Tell me about your character.”

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Yes, of course.

CHRIS NEUMER: “Did you draw upon anything from your real life to create this?”

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: A little bit of that. There’s probably a little more of, “What’s your favorite death sequence in the film?” I got that one a lot and, “When you die, how do you want to go out?”

CHRIS NEUMER: What’s the correct answer to that?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: It’s really boring. I want to be really old and …

CHRIS NEUMER: There we go. I was thinking, “She better say she wants to be 150 years old.”

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: And I just want to go peacefully whenever I am prepared for it. Of course Ryan Merriman who was with me in the press junket says he wants to go out in a blaze of glory and gunfire so that’s a little more exciting.

CHRIS NEUMER: You haven’t done a ton of junkets.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Yeah, it’s only my second one.

CHRIS NEUMER: You did the one for Sky High and I saw some of the questions there and I was like, “This really is work. ” If I’m talking to you, it’s going to be a conversation that hopefully you will be interested in it as opposed to, “So tell me about your character” where you look at me and say, “Why don’t you watch the movie, jackass?” Or, “You’ve seen it, you know what my character is.”

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Those types of questions can be a little annoying after a while, but it was fine. Ryan and me are [friends]… it was nice having him with me because we could bounce off each other if one of us didn’t feel like answering it right away. We’d kind of look at each other and the other one would start.

CHRIS NEUMER: That’s when you work out the hand signals ahead of time?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Yeah, got to get that down. This will be a little different then.

CHRIS NEUMER: It will be. I’m going to preface it with this: I was talking with Josh Lucas recently. I was talking to him about acting for the screen versus acting off the screen. We were at an event together and we were talking. People kept coming up and going, “Oh Josh, I need a picture of this.” He was like, “Great, great.” Then these people would come up and smell awful and he was like, “Wow, this is great,” and he would roll his eyes when he got back. Do you find that your acting ever slips out into your everyday life or your persona?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I think that basically happens to everyone, even if you are not an actor. You find yourself in situations where you have to put on a front, where you have to put on a happy face even if you are frustrated or annoyed. I think actors are in those situations all the time because we are constantly being put in situations where you have to be smiling. If you are not happy that day, you have to be nice to everyone around you if you want to get ahead. So yeah, absolutely you have to. I don’t feel that I do that too much because I am a pretty happy person in general, so it comes pretty easily to me.

CHRIS NEUMER: Someone, I can’t remember who it was, told me that if you want to know what acting is like, just imagine lying to your girlfriend or boyfriend.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Really?

CHRIS NEUMER: It was a great analogy, but it’s horrendous to hear.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I wouldn’t agree with that. I think it’s very different to me. Lying to your girlfriend or boyfriend is a much different thing than acting to me.

CHRIS NEUMER: This begs the question then: What is acting to you?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: To me, it’s a lot of different things. It’s a release of emotions, it’s a place to channel whatever energy you have inside and creative energy and all that stuff. It’s a chance to put on a different persona and become somebody else. It’s fun, it’s what I love to do.

CHRIS NEUMER: Now looking through your filmography–and normally I don’t admit this–but I figure it will probably come up anyway, I don’t think I have actually seen anything that you have been in.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: That’s okay. You don’t want to act like you’ve seen anything if you haven’t. I might quiz you on it and that would be bad.

CHRIS NEUMER: Which is why I mention it. Have you had the opportunity to display significant range in the roles that you have taken?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Absolutely. Surprisingly in the film that I have coming out right now, Final Destination 3, I wouldn’t have expected to get as much opportunity to be able to show that range as I did. There are so many scenes where I am dealing with the loss of my boyfriend–he dies in the beginning of the film–and dealing with the possibility of the people around me dying. There are a lot of emotional scenes where I’m just sort of talking and letting all that out. You don’t often see that in horror films.  I was sort of worried that it might not really fit. I was happy when I watched it that it sort of balances everything out. You have all this over-the-top deaths and crazy wild things happening and then it comes back to this more grounded character who has real things going on. It was pretty great. I really enjoyed playing that character.

CHRIS NEUMER: Are you interested down the line in trying to tackle the role of like a child molester?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: For sure. I mean anything that is challenging I am up for.

CHRIS NEUMER: I know this differs from actor to actor, but what is something that you find challenging that you would like to tackle? I’ll give you a very concise way to answer this: are there any roles that you have seen in the last year of so that you go, “I see this role and that’s the kind of part that I would like to try.”

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Oh yeah. I think one that stuck out in my mind from the last few years was Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. I thought that she just killed that movie. I thought she was amazing not only as an actress but physically amazing and got to show so many different parts of what she could do.

CHRIS NEUMER: When you say that, is there anything specific that she did that you were like, “Wow!” Just a moment where she captures something?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Throughout the whole movie I was amazed at the strength that she was able to portray in the character, but at the same time, her vulnerability. It’s a challenging thing to blend those two characteristics together and to really show that on screen.

CHRIS NEUMER: Any time that you get to portray dueling contradictions, it seems like you would be able to sink your teeth into that.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: That’s a perfect way to describe it.

CHRIS NEUMER: Are there any things that you look ahead and you won’t do? I’m not going to do voice-overs for commercials, I’m not going to play stripper, I’m not going to star opposite Seann William Scott. Anything like that?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Ever since I started, I’ve said I won’t do nudity, that’s one thing. It’s hard because there are a lot of really good roles out there that I really want to play, but the director thinks that the nudity is really necessary. I’m fine with love scenes, I’m fine with sexual characters and things like that, but I feel that nudity isn’t really necessary.

CHRIS NEUMER: Are there any examples that you can give of characters you’d like to play, but you just can’t get around the nudity?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I can think of a few recently.  It’s just in scripts that are out there that obviously haven’t been made yet or haven’t come out yet. I still take meetings on them, I’m interested in the character and I just hope that maybe it can be discussed and negotiated. Typically if it is something that the writer or director feels is important, then it’s going to be really tough for me to change their mind.

CHRIS NEUMER: Usually, when I’m talking to people, personal life and personal decisions and feelings about nudity don’t come up, but for the scope of this article there is going to be something touching on dating and obviously here we are on nudity. So if it’s something that you want to tell me to go to hell on, feel free. Is there something about nudity that you oppose? Is it a religious thing? Comfort thing? Personal thing?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: It’s sort of a personal thing. When I see nudity in film, I don’t at all look down on the person who is doing it. I think great for them.

CHRIS NEUMER: Unless it is Bruce Willis.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Right, and then we don’t want to see it. No, we don’t want to say that. I just feel that I would be betraying a pact that I made with myself and a promise that I made to myself and my family. I’m comfortable with that. I don’t want the people around me to have to feel differently about me or to have to feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to be in a film that I can’t show my family or my parents.

CHRIS NEUMER: You want to be able to look your dad in the eye.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Exactly. I want to have my dignity throughout my career.

CHRIS NEUMER: Continuing forward with this, you often–and I’m not grouping you with this category because it may seem a pejorative comparison which I don’t mean it to be–but there are certainly actresses out there or who say, “No, no nudity. I refuse,” early in their careers–

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: And then they do it.

CHRIS NEUMER: Then four years down the road, you have to practically duct-tape your clothes on them, otherwise they are going to fall off. To the ears of America when they explain this, it’s sort of, “Oh yeah, right.” But these actresses say, “Oh, it was because this character was so great. Her name was like Muffy Johnson.” But is there a possibility down the road that you will go, “You know, I saw this thing, I would have had an opportunity to work opposite Sir Anthony Hopkins and it required just a quick butt shot. I thought this character is not gratuitous. It’s sort of an accident. I could do something like that.”

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Yeah, I think at different phases of your life your opinions on things change dramatically. I mean, I can’t say that 10 years down the road I won’t feel a lot more comfortable with that. I mean, I don’t know, but at this point in my life, I feel it would be a little weird for me being a young woman in Hollywood and doing nudity, so I’m going to hold out for now. I think that I’ll stick to it, but I’m not going to make any guarantees or promises.

CHRIS NEUMER: It seems as though what’s motivating you in terms of acting and in terms of progressing forward in your career is not what’s going to make you a star, not what’s going to make you money, but sort of what’s going to be best for you.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Oh absolutely. It’s been that way from the start, since I was 12, when I first got involved. It was always about loving to work and loving to play characters and to be on the set and just the thrill of it all. I never really thought about fame or money. In the first job I ever did, I guest starred in Touched by an Angel and I was so shocked that they were even paying me. I was like, “Why are you paying me to do this? It’s so much fun.” I still feel that way sometimes. I feel like I would do a lot of the work for free. It’s just a perk that comes along with it.

CHRIS NEUMER: One of the things that I’ve found, and I can’t act, I can’t act worth anything. What’s more I can’t understand actors. This isn’t because you guys are all broken human beings or anything like that. It’s just that when people can cry on command … By the way, is that a talent that you possess?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I cry pretty easily. If you ever see Final Destination 3, I cry basically through half the movie. None of them are fake tears either, it’s all my own tears. I spent three months crying on almost a daily basis.

CHRIS NEUMER: On cue?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Well there are some stories about how technically I had to do it a couple of times. The camera would be on a close-up of my eye and I would have to make a tear fall on cue. That was difficult.

CHRIS NEUMER: And how do you do that?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: For me, I can’t just make my tear ducts well up. I have to sit alone and I have to think about horrible things. I have to think about my family dying or really get into it like what I would say at their funeral and listen to music and really get myself into that head space.

CHRIS NEUMER: Somehow it seems like Enya would play a large part in this.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I don’t know about Enya.

CHRIS NEUMER: She’s new age depressing, I think. What is the sad music you listen to?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Pretty much anything. I go through phases where a certain song will just trigger it.

CHRIS NEUMER: When I listen to Creed, I do start to cry a lot actually.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: (laughs) Creed?

CHRIS NEUMER: I go, “Oh dear God, not another one”

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Yeah, you are crying out of pain, physical pain.

CHRIS NEUMER: As I was saying, I don’t know how you guys do what it is that you do. It seems to me that it is next to impossible to communicate . When people get into acting and into understanding the psyches and all that, they want to focus on this and it seems like there is a large percentage of making it in Hollywood, in terms of becoming successful, in terms of becoming a known actor or actress, that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual acting.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Oh, absolutely. There’s so much business involved in it.

CHRIS NEUMER: Like what you are doing right now… except it’s usually not this fun.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: (laughs) Exactly. It’s a job. You have to do everything that is required of you to do your job the best way that you can. You have to meet as many people as possible and make connections and get your face out there and all that stuff in order to keep your job, keep being a working actor. That’s what I want to do, to keep working steadily and becoming a ‘name’ is part of what will help me do that. I don’t particularly want to be hugely famous; I just want to be notable enough to be able to continue working.

CHRIS NEUMER: And you want a little bit of money.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Oh, of course.

CHRIS NEUMER: Who doesn’t? And in certain cases it’s sort of like recognition for a job well done. So you want a little bit of money, but you also want to be able to go to the grocery store.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Yes, exactly. I do not want to be mobbed just walking down the street. That doesn’t sound like an ideal way to live to me.

CHRIS NEUMER: No, no, it certainly doesn’t. Do you find it trying at times when you have to do things other than act to reach this goal?  If you want to play baseball, you go out and you practice grounders and you practice hitting, but you don’t practice going out and meeting people. “What the hell are you doing over here. Get back in there and start hitting. ” But with actors, it’s like, “I want to act so what I’m going to do is go to some parties.”

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I know. I haven’t gotten into that yet. I haven’t done the party thing. That’s the most exhausting thing to me. You’re taking meetings all day as it is, auditions and meeting with people and offices, things like that. Going out to parties is just more work, it’s exhausting. Not only are you having to meet people, but you have to talk over the loud music, bodies everywhere.

CHRIS NEUMER: This is just because you haven’t gotten you into coke yet. That’s why.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: (laughs) That must be it.

CHRIS NEUMER: That’s my excuse for not going out at least.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: (laughs) Yeah, talk to me in a year and maybe it will be different.

CHRIS NEUMER: Is there anything that has surprised you about the nature of your career thus far?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I think I’m still surprised that I’ve been as successful as I am. I’m not saying that I’m great or that my career is amazing or anything, but just the fact that I’ve been able to work steadily ever since I started at a young age. I never really expected that to happen. As much as I wanted it, I always figured that it would dwindle, that I would have to find something else to do. So I’m just shocked that I’m still here and still going.

CHRIS NEUMER: I know the feeling. I started the magazine as well as write for it. So at least in certain principles, I understand exactly what you are saying. Now I know that you’ve been doing this for a while. I’ll tell you that it has been next to impossible to find young actresses–by young I mean 20 to 25–who haven’t been working forever. You think about it and you think about the old thing, “I’m from Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas,” and for the purposes of this story, “I’m hot and 5’ 9″ and I’m blond. I move out to LA and I start waitressing somewhere on the Strip and then the next thing you know, the casting agent for some new Cameron Crowe movie sees me and goes, ‘Oh God, you would be great.'” You have that popular myth, the audiences of America sort of have that in their heads, not exactly as the standard, but as a valid way to get in Hollywood. The more you look at it and start doing research on it, it shocks me that I can’t find any actresses who are 20 to 25 who only have 2 or 3 screen credits to their name and actually appear to have talent.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Yeah, most of the actresses that I’m familiar with who are my age, we’ve all been doing it since we were kids. It’s funny because none of us have that child actress stigma because we weren’t famous as kids, but we’ve been working for that long.

CHRIS NEUMER: Are there any names of these friends that you can give?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Well they were actually sort of famous as kids. The girls that I’m working with on my next movie, Michelle Trachtenberg and Lacey Chabert, have been working since they were toddlers. Michelle is really good friends with Scarlett Johansson who also has been working since she was five. Sort of that whole generation, they’ve all been doing it so long. That’s why they are able to be successful at 20 and 21 or 19. They’ve been doing it for 10 years already or more.

CHRIS NEUMER: Are there tricks of the trade so to speak that you have picked up during your years acting that sort of help you, that you feel you couldn’t have gotten if you were doing something else?

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: I don’t know if it is through acting or if it’s more just my own natural way that I am, I know what I want, exactly what I want and I know how to go for what I want. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know if I am explaining it right. I guess it’s given me a little more confidence and drive to go for what I want in life. It’s given me something to focus on and to really pour my heart into.

CHRIS NEUMER: Sort of like extra practice makes you good which gives you confidence which allows you to go out and nail things in the future.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: Exactly. If you feel confident that you are doing a good job at something, it’s a really good feeling.

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