Rebecca De Mornay on Film’s “Female Empowerment” Themes

Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: quiver distribution, Rebecca De Mornay, Saint Clare

Rebecca De Mornay (NCIS) spoke to Bleeding Cool about Quiver’s Saint Clare, director Mitzi Peirone, female empowerment & more.

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Rebecca De Mornay achieved an impressive longevity in Hollywood with over 44 years on the screen since her debut in the Francis Ford Coppola Columbia Pictures musical One from the Heart in 1981. She would follow up opposite Tom Cruise in the Warner Bros teen comedy Risky Business. De Mornay would also land memorable roles in Cannon’s Runaway Train (1985), Hollywood Pictures thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), and New Line’s raunchy comedy Wedding Crashers (2005). Her latest is Quiver’s Saint Clare, which follows Clare Bleecker (Bella Thorne), a 16-year-old Catholic school student, animal lover, and devout vegan living with her grandparents. Little beknown to her loved ones, she harbors a dark secret, living a life with dissociative identity disorder as a serial killer. Her victims are typical sexual predators who don’t know they are prey. De Mornay spoke to Bleeding Cool about writer-director Mitzi Peirone’s script and vision, how her character Gigi becomes a maternal influence to Thorne and Joy Rovaris’s characters, her career longevity, and why she wants to join a spy thriller.

Saint Clare Star Rebecca De Mornay on Film’s “Female Empowerment” Themes

What intrigued you about ‘Saint Clare’?

I love the script. I was amazed and fascinated. I was reading something that was truly an original story, because you keep getting scripts, and they’re all derivative. I thought, “What is going on in this movie? What is happening next?” That was thrilling, and it was such a story of female empowerment, which means a lot to me. [The references to] Joan of Arc, which I’ve always related to that [type of] character in a story, and seeing a female serial killer was fabulous, so that was the way I could be part of it, is by playing Gigi. There’s no other part for me in it.

What’s it like working with Mitzi as a creative?

Missy is very talented, and I knew she had a vision, because she did the rewrite on it and I could tell and feel her. I didn’t know her before. I knew this was only her second film, but I was surprised by how much, what a hallucinatory and artistic sense she brought to the film. Working with her was effortless, like we were on the same page. It was a great collaboration.

How does a film like ‘Saint Clare’ set itself apart from your other work?

I’ve rarely played someone so loose. [Gigi] is so loose and uninhibited. That’s what I mean, she’s very uninhibited. In terms of how she expresses herself and how she lives, she doesn’t let anybody tell her what to do. She is defiant, but a free spirit and fiercely maternal. I don’t think I’ve ever played that. The only time I’ve played something like that is in my own life. I have two daughters and I’m fiercely maternal with them, but I’m not the “free spirit maternal.” I’m way stricter than that.

How do you break down the dynamic you’ve had with Bella and Joy as far as being a guiding force character in the film, and the chemistry you develop with them?

That’s exactly right, “A guiding force” is what I wanted to be and what I am. I wanted to be the kind of pillar of the female empowerment to inspire her and her friends and also be protective of them if men or anything threatens them. Little do I know, Clare is three, five, and 10 steps ahead of me. She knows what to do.

You’ve been at this for a while. What’s been the secret to your career longevity? I imagine it’s been challenging to find parts and films like this throughout your career. How do you do it?

Thank you. I wonder how I do it, too. Well, I think they can’t get rid of me. They try, but they can’t get rid of me. I’ve stayed interested. The thing that keeps me interested, and maybe that helps me to be “interesting” to them, is that my own real life is as important to me as my film career. My real life is what I’m doing in my life otherwise, and so when I come to a project, I’ve got something to bring to it and I’m not coming to it to merely fill the space, because I’ve got nothing else going on.

I’m like, “Yes, now I’ve filled up in certain ways in my own life, and now I can bring something.” I also can’t bear to take parts that bore me or scripts that bore me, and a lot of stuff is boring. A lot of stuff that gets made is boring. It doesn’t…I don’t know…That’s a long answer. I don’t know the answer to your question, but that’s been my MO of how I’ve been living, and how I have been choosing projects. Things that don’t bore me are a key thing.

Is there a genre or a type of project you haven’t had a chance to do that you’ve wanted to do, or perhaps a genre you felt you haven’t done enough of in your career?

The role that I’m looking to play that I haven’t been able to play yet? I really want to play a spy. I want to be a spy in a real, intense thriller setting. I’m not sure how or what, but I want it to [have twists like] double cross. I haven’t been ableto  do that yet, and I would like to. I enjoy watching thrillers and spy thrillers. I’ve loved ‘Narcos,’ I’ve loved ‘Fawda’ from Israel. Have you seen that?

No.

It’s so great. ‘Ozark’ and ‘The Americans’ are one of my favorite series. There are a lot of series, it would be great to play a spy on a series. Let’s see if we can manifest that for me.

Do you wish you’d done more TV work in general?

No, I don’t think about where it’s at so much as the roles. The thing that is interesting about TV now is that film actors didn’t want to do TV, but what’s interesting now is they used to say you can’t have a long movie, because the audience doesn’t have that long of an attention span. These series prove that the audience has a huge attention span since they binge-watch these shows, but there needs to be a break in between each hour, and then they’ll watch like seven hours of something.

Saint Clare, which also stars Ryan Phillippe, Frank Whaley, Dylan Flashner, Bart Johnson, and Jan Luis Castellanos, is in select theaters and available digitally.

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