Laura Dern: ‘I’m appalled by the nepo baby discourse – I think it’s awesome to have inspiring parents’
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Laura Dern’s mellifluous voice gently emanates over the phone from Italy where she’s currently filming with Noah Baumbach. Marriage Story, her last project with the Brooklyn director with a knack for turning a hyper-real yet artful lens on to everyday life, won her an Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta in 2020 for her 18-minute turn as Nora Fanshaw, the no-bullshit lawyer who power-charges Scarlett Johansson’s divorce from Adam Driver. Her punchy monologue — ‘People don’t accept mothers who drink too much wine and yell at their children and call him an a**hole’ — has become synonymous with a kind of unflinching honesty in film; see also America Ferrera’s feminist speech in Barbie for Baumbach’s wife, Greta Gerwig.
At 57, Dern has steered a career full of complicated roles with depth and nuance. In celebrity terms she flies fairly under the radar, but her back catalogue features decades’ of high-profile, agenda-setting performances. From starring in David Lynch’s Eighties classic Blue Velvet, fending off CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, to the cut-throat corporate mother Renata in and softness of Marmee in 2019’s Little Women, she’s run the character spectrum, sailing somewhat against the tide that these rich roles
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