Maura Tierney on The Iron Claw, Joe Rogan and the aftermath of ER: ‘I need to stop playing women in despair’

Get our free weekly electronic mail for all the newest cinematic information from our movie critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our The Life Cinematic electronic mail at no cost

In the butch weepie The Iron Claw, Maura Tierney performs Dottie Von Erich, matriarch of a household of doomed wrestler sons. The ER star performs out unimaginable ranges of grief. She cherished it. Found it difficult and creatively satisfying. She’s additionally not going to do it any extra. “I’ve just decided,” she laughs, drily. “I need to start saying no to playing women in despair. It’s time.”

It is true that individuals preserve asking Tierney to cry. Or, if not cry, at the least to embody a form of haunted, battleworn depth. On ER, the medical drama phenomenon that made her one of tv’s most recognisable faces, her character at the least had somewhat steadiness: her sunny disposition tempered with simply the occasional relapse into alcoholism. Lately, although, she’s performed wives to philanderers and stepmothers to meth addicts. It had received a bit a lot. So final yr on the set of her small-town crime sequence American Rust, one other stop on the Maura Tierney Misery Express, she made a selection: even when the script didn’t name for it, she’d play all her scenes as if she was starring in a comedy.

“I don’t wear a clown nose or anything,” the 59-year-old tells me, “but I made a choice to find the funny in every scene. I tried to make it kind of arch because I needed to create a challenge for myself.” Did she inform anybody she was doing this? “Um… no. Maybe the hair and make-up department? I’m not sure if I was successful at all. But it made it more fun for me, that’s for sure.”

Less enjoyable is the irrigation situation in her again backyard that’s derailed her for the previous couple of weeks. An apologetic Tierney is looking from Los Angeles, and eager to clarify how a malfunctioning sprinkler system in her rental residence meant our interview stored being pushed again. Trying to converse to Tierney could have briefly change into my very own private Waiting for Godot however there was additionally one thing apt about it. TV has been superb to her – the seminal Nineties sitcom NewsRadio begat ER, which begat the aforementioned philander-fest The Affair – however in movie she is inconceivable to pin down, a mercurial supporting participant from whom you all the time need extra.

She makes the absolute most out of the “ticked-off ex-wife” half in Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar (1997). Excavates pure love and fear in the Timothée Chalamet dependancy drama Beautiful Boy (2018). In Christopher Nolan’s early thriller Insomnia (2002), she pops up as a girl on the run from components unknown, working at a tiny Alaskan resort. It’s kind of nothingy as a job however Tierney mines it for each shred of pathos and intrigue. She does this lots, for higher and for worse.

“I think I’m often requested because of what I’ll ‘bring to the role’,” she says, considerably cynically. “That’s very flattering! But sometimes they want you to bring something to a script instead of just making the character better written. And maybe if it was better on the page, you wouldn’t need an actress to do that work for you. I’m thinking out loud here… but just take one more pass at the script! Just enrich certain female characters.”

True to type, Tierney doesn’t function in a lot of The Iron Claw. But she proves to be one of its most fascinating parts. The movie dramatises the real-life story of the Von Erich siblings, swole showmen who turned the wrestling ring into their very own non-public live performance stage and grew to become pseudo-celebrities in Eighties America. Dottie takes a hands-off and arguably merciless strategy to parenting her boys – delicate meat slabs performed by Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson and Stanley Simons. She’s a bit of a void, too, her non-public goals and wishes swapped out for grief and Jesus. Dottie as soon as cherished to paint, it’s revealed at one level, however abruptly stopped, then stopped ever speaking about it. “I had my reasons,” she says. “Just don’t remember ’em any more.”

The Von Erichs have been blighted by tragedy – a lot, in reality, that The Iron Claw omits a whole Von Erich sibling who additionally met a horrid finish. “I just don’t think the audience would have been able to take it,” Tierney says. “How many children did Dottie lose?” She counts them up to 5. “That really is just beyond the scope of comprehension. How do you get through that? And even though it’s true, I think it would have been very difficult to watch.”

Tierney got here to fame in TV exhibits that embodied the whole reverse – ER, in which she starred from 1999 to 2009, was a heat hug of a present, comforting in its soapy, life-or-death melodrama. Before that, she spent 5 seasons on NewsRadio, about the interior workings of a radio station. It’s a jarring watch at present, although, primarily as a result of one of Tierney’s co-stars was none apart from Joe Rogan – then a comic and actor, at present the king of provocative, virtually chronically misinformative podcasts.

Access limitless streaming of films and TV exhibits with Amazon Prime Video

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial

Sign up

Access limitless streaming of films and TV exhibits with Amazon Prime Video

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial

Sign up

“It’s crazy!” she says. “Isn’t he the most listened-to person in the universe or something like that? I admit I’m not surprised by it – he was always a balls-out type of guy, and someone suspicious of absolute authority. His character on NewsRadio was kind of a conspiracy theorist, too, because they’d take our personalities as people and just put them in the show. So it’s not new – that side of him was there then.”

Ironically, contemplating how mired in drama she’s change into, ER took place from her early need to shift out of comedy. When her time on the present reached its finish – following 9 seasons of amorous affairs, surgical smocks and being plagued by Sally Field as her erratic mom – she wished to dive into one thing even wilder. So she pitched herself to the Wooster Group, an avant-garde theatre troupe co-founded by Willem Dafoe and Spalding Gray.

“I think it saved my life,” she says. “I am slightly exaggerating, but…” She takes a pause. “I’m only telling you these things because I feel bad about the irrigation,” she laughs. “But it was a very difficult time. I had finished treatment for cancer. My father passed away. And then in 2010, the Wooster Group called and said they wanted to work with me.”

“Now remember, I’m as bald as a cue ball at this point,” she continues. “Like bald bald. But I went into rehearsals with them, and it just didn’t matter. My hair grew in during the rehearsal process, and I just remember feeling so galvanised and focused. It was exhilarating to me.” Her line deliveries had to be hyper-stylised. Her physicality exaggerated. She had to, kind of, un-Maura Tierney herself. “I didn’t have to emote. I didn’t have to be sad. I didn’t have to despair! And to go from this very hard time personally to having my mind focused on this one thing, where it didn’t matter what I looked like, was revelatory.”

She has labored with the Wooster Group twice now, performing in international locations as far-ranging as Japan and Germany. She desires to work with them once more. And do extra comedy. Or at the least not have to sneak it into the most severe of severe issues, as she’s been doing these days. This summer time she’s in Twisters, the belated sequel to the 1996 catastrophe film that starred Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt and a flying cow. “But I’m just the mom on the farm in that one,” she sighs. “I didn’t get to do any of the stunty stuff. That would have been fun.”

You get the impression that, if Hollywood let her, she’d cherished to have performed the twister.

‘The Iron Claw’ is in cinemas