Six actresses behind some of the year’s most striking performances— Hillbilly Elegy's Glenn Close, The United States vs. Billie Holiday's Andra Day, Pieces of a Woman's Vanessa Kirby, Promising Young Woman's Carey Mulligan, Ammonite's Kate Winslet and Malcolm & Marie's Zendaya—shared their insight into life in Hollywood as women, and their desire to support each other and other women, without judgement. They also shared peeks into their lives amid the pandemic.
SHUTDOWN
Kirby has been quiet: “I learned a lot about silence. I hadn't realized quite how much ‘doing’ I was doing. Somehow I hadn't quite realized that, when you're still, it's just as present, you know what I mean? And I think it's taught me to do less. I don't think anything else would have taught me that in the way this year has done.”
Winslet has gotten really into cleaning: “I became, and still am, actually, utterly obsessed with sweeping my kitchen floor. But down to the point where if there's just even dog hair, and our dog is a golden retriever, so it's blond hair, but I've got this microscopic vision where I can see the dog hair gathering in tiny little cracks, between the dishwasher and the sink, and I'll be like, ‘There's dog hair, somebody, quick, get me the broom.’ I've just become obsessed.”
SUPPORTING WOMEN
Winslet has seen real change: “This is the decade of women championing and supporting other women without judgment. This is happening right now, and that has come as a result of the mass united swell that has emerged from #MeToo. We've all come together, everyone is holding hands and walking in the same direction. And, for me, that is the single most exciting thing that is coming out of the awfulness of the past five years and those extraordinary women coming forward and sharing their painful, awful stories, and the horrendous Harvey Weinstein. The time now is about leading in a different way. Young women being able to lead with courage — in a way that I feel I certainly didn't have, that sense of courage and companionship with my peers, in a way that I think #MeToo has done for this generation of women.”
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Here, Day sees change: “I hope that it spawns lasting change that moves faster than it has moved in the past. I'm hoping that this is an uprooting of this idea of, ‘OK, pace yourself, we need to make sure we make people comfortable.’ That's really not how you achieve lasting change. We can't survive like this, we will not survive. It ends in what? Our destruction, it ends in war, it ends in just unrest.”
Close is feeling inspired: “I can't tell you, it's very moving to me to hear all this. I've been an actress for 46 years, and when I think of the change, the monumental changes that in my short time that I have witnessed, the expectation is going to be phenomenal when we finally can get back to doing what we are here to do. I think there's going to be an overwhelming amount of stories and new ways of telling stories.”