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| Brooke Smith as Merilee in "Big Sky." |
I was contracted by an online magazine last
year to profile Smith when she mounted her own Emmy campaign for her supporting
performance in the ABC series "Big Sky." When the campaign failed to
net Smith a nomination, the story was dropped, but I think another reason might have been because I was more interested in what Smith represents--a
real actor, a true talent, in a wilderness of badness and public relations.
Brooke Smith has never
disappointed an audience, a writer, or a fellow player. While she maintains a
social-media presence, it is not full of humble bragging ("Can I tell you
how awed I am to hear such great things about myself?") nor does she feel
compelled to mark every job gained, meal eaten, and despite her passionate
views on the world and its politics, she does not engage in arguments or statements
implying that she has tapped into something alien or out of reach to others.
Smith has also not looked at the future and decided, as someone in her
mid-fifties, that a burnishing of the woke wheels through philanthropy or
braying indignance might benefit her.
"I just want to
keep working," Smith tells me. "And I need to. I have two daughters,
one headed to college. [Since our initial interviews, Smith's daughter has
entered college]. I have rent to pay. I need to make a living."
"Listen," Mary-Louise Parker told me, "I need
her to keep working. I need to see her. I believe her every time I see
her." When I ask if Smith makes her believe in the power of acting, as
others do, Parker says without hesitation, "Absolutely. She is always right
in the center of the truth when she acts."
Marian Seldes thought
Smith had the capacity to "look like a Madonna, and then terrify you by
showing the face of someone in absolute turmoil." When you saw a play or a
film with Marian, she might whisper "That's one," which generally
meant the person noted was one of her students from Juilliard, where she taught
for more than two decades. Seldes whispered, "That's one," when Smith
completed a particular scene in Louis Malle's VANYA ON 42ND STREET, but on the
street later, when I asked about Smith's time at Juilliard, Seldes confessed
that she hadn't attended, "but she has it. She's blessed. Watch her.
You'll see."
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| Brooke Smith in Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street (1994). |
There is a cult
following for Smith due to her performance in SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS, in
which Smith was a pregnant woman turned assassin, engaged in a brutal series of quests for a reality program that now seems terrifyingly prescient. (The film is
from 2001, and I highly recommend it.) When Smith is not lumbering about taking
down fellow contestants in the hopes of claiming the top prize, she's tending
to a sick lover (the preternaturally beautiful and wonderful Glenn Fitzgerald).
When I was researching the earlier story on Smith, I ventured into murky rooms
online to ask about this actress, and everyone--from teenagers to retirees with
a hunger for apocalyptic films--spoke of her as Nichols or Seldes or Parker had:
They loved that she felt like a woman in dire extremity, found on the street,
and told to do her job--or else. Smith cannot be caught acting, and when she is
on the screen with Marylouise Burke, an actress always wound too tight with
gewgaws and tics aimed at stealing focus, you find yourself in a diabolically
satisfying tango between a very obvious actress looking toward a demo reel and
a woman whose fluid has suddenly burst and who must--in the midst of murder and
betrayal--give birth to her baby. Even assassins, if played by Smith, have hope.
The director of SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS is Daniel Minahan, since triumphant with "Game of Thrones," "House of Cards," "The Assassination of Gianni Versace," and "Halston," and he told me he sought Brooke out for the film. "I saw her in an off-off Broadway play," he said, "and her co-star was John Cameron Mitchell. [This was Alan Bownes Little Monsters, in 1994.] I had seen her in Vanya and Silence [of the Lambs], and she was so vivid and alive and authentic. That’s how I fell in love with her. As I fell in love with her as an actor, I was [also] so impressed with how authentic she was in everything she approaches. She is experienced and technically able, but it all comes from a very heartfelt place. I describe her as an actor’s actor." Minahan adds, as did Parker, that working with Smith was to also invite her friendship, which she offers fully, honestly. I can say, from only a couple of telephone conversations with Smith that I trust her implicitly, but I also would not want to try and come between her and an honest thought. It is not that she is cruel, but she is smart, honest, and aware that time is terribly valuable.
Perhaps because her mother was the
powerful PR agent Lois Smith, whose clients included Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, and Liza Minnelli, Brooke knows the business and how it works, and
the most insidious enemy is time. Time is coming for all of us, and talent--and
I cannot stress again how much of it Brooke Smith has--can't do anything in a
crouch, waiting for a method of expression with a director or a writer of
talent. Talent waits and it withers. Talent grows desperate, and suddenly, the
talent is on the line doing substandard work to pay the rent or the tuition or
the dental bill. Another conversation that often arises, along with the praise
of actors we love, is, Why are certain actors always working? We live in a
culture that supports and sustains a bewildering number of actors who
occasionally rise to the competency of a sophomore at a decent college in a
lucky production, and I do not understand it. Smith is smarter than I am, and
she doesn't go near that topic, but she addresses acting in
general.
"You know,” she says, “in the
play Four Dogs and a Bone [by John Patrick Shanley] someone
tells a story about a mama bear giving birth to a bunch of babies. She was
licking them clean, and right before she got to the last bear, she died.
And that bear went into show business. I think of that line
every single time I’m on a set. I look for the unlicked cubs." Smith
laughed. [Later, talking with Mary-Louise Parker, who appeared in the 1993
premiere of that play, she was not surprised that the story arose. "She
loves that story," Parker said, "and it's true."]
Smith continues: "I’ve been thinking about the thick skin it
takes to be an actor, to accept this rejection and abuse, and yet when you do
the work, you’re expected to be vulnerable, and that’s a dangerous risk. A
weird combination, and I feel like people--even in the business--think it's
about learning the lines and moving along. It feels like it’s harder than ever
to be an actor. Unless it’s a hobby. God, I hate that sense of acting as a
side, a hobby. I'm committed to this, and not just as a means of supporting my
family, and it feels like people say there’s a million people who will do it
for free. We can throw a rock and get someone else." There is a
significant pause, and I can imagine that it might be Brooke Smith who may be
throwing some rocks soon.
When Smith speaks again, she says she's "not
baffled [by the business]. I get nervous. I don’t want to bite the hand that
feeds me, but I loved my work in "Big Sky." I don't think I'm deluded
in looking for recognition. I felt about it just as David E. Kelly did. I wasn’t
sure where she [the character Merilee] was going to go, and David had said to
me that he was very fascinated by people who marry monsters. I’ve noticed that
in other projects—"Undoing," "Big Little Lies." The show is
not entirely about that that, but I want to know if she knows, if she doesn’t,
does she choose not to know. So when they called and asked if I wanted
to go to Canada during a global pandemic, I said yes. It’s David Kelly!"
Find "Big Sky" on a streaming service and watch it. Smith's Merilee can be lumbering, tense, her face clouded with doubt and anger, and then she can become giddy with the prospect of romance, a dance, some attention. Watching Smith's face as facts become apparent is a marvel of acting as being, thinking, registering behind the eyes. As David E. Kelly told DEADLINE: "As a show, you want to put your best foot forward, and Brooke is certainly a part of that. She did incredible work for us. It was nuanced and complicated; she driving drama one moment and dark comedy the next. Good acting is good acting, and character actors are hard to find. You're looking for people to play adult roles, complicated roles where the human pathology is nuanced." He then added--It's the reason Brooke keeps getting hired: She's an extremely smart actress."
The Emmy campaign did not succeed in earning Smith a nomination, but it brought attention to a good actress, and Smith continues to work, and she continues to inspire. When you do see her on social media, she is bragging about her daughters, being rapturously greeted by her dog, praising her costars, boasting of nothing but her luck. Mary-Louise Parker mentioned Smith's loyalty, but Smith thinks it is really about placing an emphasis on the important things, and she remembers Ruth Nelson, the formidable actress from the Group Theater, whose husband, actor and director John Cromwell, was particularly destroyed by the HUAC hearings, the blacklist, and Elia Kazan's naming of names. Nelson was aged and
frail when she worked with Smith on Vanya on 42nd Street, but
she rested well, husbanded her energy, and appeared, fully, when she was
needed. Smith would learn that Nelson was offered the role of Linda Loman in
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, clearly a great part in a
play that was going to have an impact on the theater. It's director, however,
was to be Elia Kazan, and Nelson could not justify a good career move working
with a man she felt to be a traitor.
"She
knew what was important," Smith says, "what mattered, and I want to
be the same way. The work, the life, the family, the friends. What's
important?"
What we see in every performance offered to us by Brooke Smith has that single question--"What's important?"--deeply etched within it.
© 2022 James Grissom
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