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Rosemarie DeWitt on Being an In-Demand Screen Sister

BuzzSugar — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:00:49 -0800

Depending on your attitude, Rosemarie DeWitt either has great luck or terrible luck with on-screen sisters. She recently starred as Rachel opposite Anne Hathaway's Kym in Rachel Getting Married, and now she's the foil to Toni Collette's Tara in United States of Tara, which just premiered to strong ratings. At TCA, I chatted with DeWitt about her film families, how she got the Tara gig, and how much Rachel was like a real wedding. Here are highlights:

How did you get the role of Charmaine?
It was just like a straightforward, old-school audition that I had. I read the script, I thought it was fantastic, and when I auditioned for it I think the part of the sister was a guest star. So it wasn't a super high-pressure situation . . . I auditioned where Spielberg and Dreamworks is all set up, and I remember thinking, "I just want to work here."

When did you find out that you were getting the upgrade to a regular character? Did that give you a chance to get more into playing Charmaine?
It was over the Summer where they invited me back, and we spoke and they said, "We're going to change Charmaine a little bit." TV I feel like you have to play - in most ways I'm nothing like Charmaine, but you have to play it a little closer to yourself, because they do change things at the 11th hour, and if you were doing some crazy character with a hunchback and now you're running a marathon - I don't know, you just have to be able to do it, basically. So they made her a little bit more quote-unquote normal. I was happy that there was a lot more love between Tara and Charmaine. She's an outsider but it would have really been hard to be like Anne Hathaway and I are in Rachel.

It was interesting to hear Diablo Cody say that Charmaine is looking for attention.
She's got a lot of issues. It's funny, because she's really awesome, and she just, I think, doesn't like herself that much. The vitamin sales, I think, are a little bit of a self-help program in and of themselves, and she's got some body issues, and issues with men, so there's just so many places to go with her and so many women in my own life to observe and draw from.

To hear more about Charmaine and Tara's relationship and how it differs from Rachel and Kym's, read more.

I'm assuming we'll be seeing more of those issues coming out throughout the season.
Yeah, and again, a lot of love. Annie and I would talk about Rachel and say, "They're sisters, they're not friends." But as Toni and I went through the season, we're discovering [Charmaine and Tara] are friends. I mean, they get on each other's nerves, and in ways they're nothing alike, but they can really be - they're kind of all that they had sometimes.

The show strikes a really delicate tone - it's not hilarious, for a comedy, but it's not heartbreaking all the time either. What about it appeals to you?
I am very impressed with the tone of it, because it could go a lot of different ways and I think they found a happy balance. The thing that kind of gets me about the show - besides Toni's performance as an actress, that gets me every day when I go to work - is seeing what we see through the children's eyes. Some people won't relate to this disorder, many people will, many people have someone with depression in their family. But it's just seeing that thing that kids have to go through where maybe they have to parent themselves or grow up before it's time. I think that's sort of the heartbeat of the show. With Juno as well, [Cody] can really find the truth of what kids are up against and then, in this case, also really write about marital problems and a woman in her 30s who can't find love, and write those with sophistication and grace.

Now, I have to ask about Rachel Getting Married, because I don't think I've ever seen a movie that just felt so much like a real wedding.
Oh, I felt like it might be legal in the state of Connecticut. You know, after he said our vows, I was like, "Does that mean . . . " I looked at Tunde [Adebimpe] and said, does that mean it's you and me? That's all [director] Jonathan Demme. He always says that we got to hang out and plan it, but we didn't - he just had all these crazy ideas. At one point he was like, "I think Rachel comes in on a white pony," but then he axes it, but then he comes in with some other fabulous element. We really just did it, that was the thing - we really just had a reception. Like, the rehearsal dinner scene, it was a 45-minute take, and we just did it three or four times.

That was something I was wondering - what the timing was like.
We went and lived in this house in Connecticut, and like, in the rehearsal dinner, Anne's speech was scripted, as were the best man and the maid of honor, but beyond that Jonathan just had anybody speak as they saw fit, and I'm sure there'll be some great toasts on the special features on the DVD, because everybody in that room spoke. And then he cut it down, and it was still really long and felt like you were really at a rehearsal dinner, in a good way.

Anne's character is such a strong personality. What was it like to play off of that?
It was sort of a wake-up call on the first day. We shot their first encounter in the movie and I felt like her character was taking all the oxygen out of the room. And I thought, "Wow, this is going to be a harder mountain to climb than I thought," just coming up against that sort of narcissistic personality. I think it's pretty classic addict behavior. In terms of the doing of it, Anne and I just had a really great experience on that. We didn't do a lot of sisterly bonding beforehand, I think because it was going to defuse the necessary tension. But then when we were working, there was never a nice-off. Nobody ever said, "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, did I just spit in your eye?" We just were horrible to each other when it called for it and loving to each other when it called for it and then gave each other a hug at the end and said, "See you tomorrow."

Photos Source and courtesy of Showtime and Sony Pictures Classics

Five Essential Things to Know About United States of Tara

BuzzSugar — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:30:00 -0800

United States of Tara is one of the most unusual shows to hit TV in a while - even for Showtime, home of drug-dealing moms and sympathetic serial killers. First imagined by Steven Spielberg, created by Diablo Cody, and brought to life by a cast led by Toni Collette and John Corbett, the show centers on a suburban housewife named Tara who is living with Dissociative Identity Disorder, which causes alternate personalities to emerge when she's under stress. The show premieres on Sunday, and today, the cast and producers stopped by TCA. Here are some of the essential things to know - and be sure to check out some great pics of the stars over on Pop:

It was important for Tara to be open about her condition. Cody said she's seen mental illness be destigmatized over the years, so it made sense for Tara's family not to keep her illness locked away. "Obviously there are some people who are frightened or curious," she said. "There are some people who are intrigued" - and that seemed like an appropriate, modern reaction.
Deep down, the show's about acceptance. Nobody ever says outright that Collette's character is mentally ill, or that Tara's son is gay, or that her daughter is a jerk, said Brie Larson, who plays teenage daughter Kate. "There's no labels on this show, and I think that's the most interesting part."
But not everyone's OK with Tara's personalities. One of the most tense relationships on the show is between Tara and her younger sister, Charmaine (Rosemarie DeWitt). "Charmaine always thought that Tara got more attention," Cody said. "She's always been resentful of that." Charmaine has an occasional flirtation with Max (Corbett), Tara's husband, but Cody said it's nothing with an actual romantic spark at this point - it's just a way for her to get someone to pay attention to her for once.

To see the final two essentials, just read more.

The show doesn't fit into any box. "It was just so delicious to read and so unusual, and it was a complete dream for an actor to play so many parts," said Collette of reading the script for the first time. "It is incredibly funny, but it also is incredibly moving and incredibly real."
We might not have met all of the "alters." The show's official photo shows four personalities - Tara, Buck, T, and Alice - but "you will see new ones emerge," said producer Darryl Frank. The origin of the personalities, which have been created within Tara at different points in her life, also will be explored as the season goes on.

Photo courtesy of Showtime

Rachel Getting Married: Riveting and Painful Realism

BuzzSugar — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:30:53 -0700

I normally cry at weddings (and wedding scenes), so spending a whole wedding weekend with Rachel and her family in Rachel Getting Married was quite the teary experience. It’s not all weeping and sighing (though there's a lot of that, in both the joyful and the heart-wrenching scenes) - there is also silliness and humor. It's a movie about forgiveness, heartache and the tenderness of human frailty. So, despite the lovely main plot point (a backyard wedding overflowing with the generosity of friends and family), it's incredibly heavy.

Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt) is indeed getting married at her father's home in Connecticut, and her recovering addict sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) is coming home from rehab to spend the weekend with her family. The duration of the movie takes place over this weekend as we watch the roots of the family's dysfunction unravel before us. There isn't a ton that happens in the story, but an awful lot is said and even more implied. The family spends the weekend in the warm company of friends and family, but while the guests are in full wedding celebration mode, the simmering emotions between the sisters, their father and their mother boil over, creating some majorly messy drama. For more of my thoughts on the film, read more.

Anne Hathaway's performance as Kym is touching and pitiful, though in truth, every performance in this film is top-notch. This is as much a testament to director Jonathan Demme as it is to the actors. The plot lurches in fits and spurts, with banal, everyday moments buffering the appalling and intensely sad ones. Each character is portrayed in a hyper-realistic light and their relationships are sticky and exhaustingly complex, with much of the disappointment in one another coming from their expectations of what a sister/father/mother should be doing or saying. It makes you cringe, even as (or because) you find some of these arguments or judgments familiar.

The handheld shaky-cam filming style makes the whole thing feel like documentary footage, or like we're just spying on these people. In the same way you're captivated by an interesting conversation taking place one table over in a restaurant, this movie is absorbing because it seems like we're really eavesdropping, almost to the point of feeling voyeuristic. This isn't a bad thing, really, though it's not for people who like their movie drama to be pretty or sugarcoated.

In reality, I think a lot of people like to see what's going on in other peoples' lives. It's why rubbernecking happens, why people "love to see a train wreck." Not (necessarily) to ridicule the victims but to feel like all of human experience is common and shared. There are plenty of tearful fights and screaming matches and tense showdowns in Rachel Getting Married. But there are just as many moments when you feel like you actually are at someone's wedding, what with all the heartfelt toasts and the warm embracing and the sweetly shy introductions between families. It's as fascinating and painful as any real-life human journey, which is both sad and comforting at the same time.

Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Movie Preview: Rachel Getting Married

BuzzSugar — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 14:00:03 -0700

Yes, that is Anne Hathaway with a choppy little haircut standing next to Rosemarie DeWitt, who played one of my favorite characters on Mad Men, Don's mistress Midge. The two women play sisters in Rachel Getting Married, a family drama focusing on Hathaway's character, Kym returning home for her sister Rachel's (DeWitt) wedding.

I like Hathaway a lot and I love watching DeWitt, but I kinda think this indie movie looks like a long string of hysterical conversations. The wacky dysfunctional family shtick can get pretty tiresome pretty quickly (see also the similarly themed Margot at the Wedding, which is a hard movie to like). I'll probably still see the movie anyway, though, to find out what these talented women do with their characters. Rachel Getting Married opens in limited release October 3. To see the trailer, read more.

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