INTERVIEW: Maria Bello

Actress Maria Bello tells it how it is.

She seemingly refuses to censor herself, and in an interview setting she is perfectly comfortable allowing her thought process to be put on display. She’s headstrong, contemplative and overwhelmingly sensitive to the natural process of learning, be it through life, through career, through love or through family. She’s one of the few who seems to approach acting from within rather than from without, and as such, she was the perfect candidate for the demanding and crucial role of Edie Stall in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.

An actress with roots in television, including a modest stint on NBC’s “ER”, Bello has made rather defining marks in her cinematic output thus far. She typically finds herself portraying ladies mesmerized by their leading men.

In Permanent Midnight, she played the whimsical groupie (of sorts) to Ben Stiller’s former junkie screenwriter. In Auto Focus she found face-time opposite Greg Kinnear’s sex-addicted Bob Crane. In The Cooler she bounced off of the passive and reactive William H. Macy as a call girl searching for a pulse in lighted but lifeless Las Vegas. And this year, she offers her best work to date, opposite Viggo Mortensen, portraying equal parts of fear, loathing and intrigue as the wife of a man caught between a clouded past and a hopeful future.

Where collaborating with Mortensen and Cronenberg is concerned, Ms. Bello found the experience of working with the calm and collected duo to be a nurturing one to say the least. As the brown-eyed wild child to their blue-eyed human sedatives, she found solidarity and a strong sense of camaraderie on the set.

“I think that our energies really worked well together. We’re all very interior people. And I can’t control my wild nature – which maybe they harnessed to a certain extent – but it served us both in that way. They’re calm. They’re controlled. They’re so high on the food chain. I’m so human-human, and I’m kind of owning that humanness as I grow older in my own relationships and my humanity and my own feeling, and my own longings and desires. Perhaps they’ve already figured those things out; I don’t know. I haven’t. I’m still in the process.”

In fact, talking with the actress about her role in the film, it becomes ever apparent that she’s come to see the experience as an opportunity to confront herself and her ideals, perhaps even her perception of life not only as an actress, and not only a woman, but as a person as well. The words “who I am in the world” speckle an interview that ultimately leaves one with the notion that A History of Violence was a life-altering experience for the actress.

Discussing the often-confabulated graphic sex scenes utilized in the film, Ms. Bello speaks with a contemplative sense of discovery, refusing to define scenes of erotica as anything more or less important in a character’s existence than the next thing.

“I made a policy of not separating my characters’ sexuality from what they eat for breakfast. I don’t see a difference in one thing to another – if it’s emotionally raw or sexual or familial or whatever it is. I think it’s the same, and I certainly don’t want to promote the movement that sexuality is something to be held aloft like it’s some special fucking thing when it’s not.

“The thing is we are such talkers – the three of us – we’re such processors. All we did was yack about what the character’s doing, and the psychology of everybody. But this scene we never talked about. And I would say to David and Viggo for weeks ‘We’ve got to talk about that scene. What are we doing? How are we doing it?’ And finally, the day before, David said ‘You know what, Maria, you’re not in control of this one,’ because the scene was about me losing control. I’ve tended to be a very controlling person in my life – less so since I’ve had a child – but definitely controlling. I just want to know how things are going to go. And the truth was, for this character, it’s about her not being in control for the first time in her life, and completely surrendering to a desire that was bigger than herself.”

That said, the starlet is in full control of this performance from open to close. It’s one of the most dynamic and engaging performances of the year, one that seems to exists in the bone marrow of the thespian through to the final credits. The glance of an enraged eye, the gleeful clumsiness of a playful sex scene, the ruthlessness of a woman scorned – this is powerful work, quite clearly drawing upon some inner source of resiliency to command such presence.

“I think I’m pretty much a person who knows that I’m capable of anything,” she begins, “and there are many different facets of me. I’m sort of open to looking at all of those things. But I don’t think that anything would really shock me. When I was a younger woman, I was so much angrier than I am now. And I’ve had those moments of rage and violence where I’ve acted out, so I know that sort of space, and now I don’t really act from that place. I’ve seen in my own life how people can change.

“I think that what he [Tom] reflects in her [Edie] is an openness to her own shadow. We certainly all harbor our shadow-selves, and that can be so self-destructive when it’s repressed – in terms of our own psyches and in terms of the world. She has to deal with that now and figure out who she is. How can she not receive him, and all his secrets, when she can’t receive herself? Maybe she should receive herself, so then she can receive him.”

As a character, Edie Stall is a woman torn between her potential attraction to the mysteries slowly unlocking inside her husband and the safe nature of the world they have built together for nearly twenty years. She’s so much more than the typical “supporting wife” role that this character could have easily been relegated to, and it was what Bello brought to the table from her life experiences that really added the dimensions.

A mother in her own right, the actress was able to tap into the psyche of a woman who feels threatened by outside forces grasping at the strings that hold her life and sanity together.

“The scene where Ed Harris has my son and we’re at the front door – we were supposed to just stand at the door and have the scene, and when we were rehearsing it, my initial reaction was to kill him. That’s why I started running and that insanity, that irrational, mother-like lioness just came out of me. I know what that is, to want to protect someone so much and to want to kill someone to protect your child.”

She concedes that the older she gets, however, the clearer the point becomes that we’re forced to find our own paths in life.

“The toughest part is that I can’t protect my child from any lesson he is meant to learn. I want to. I want to save him from everything and protect his little soul. But it’s not possible. He has his own destiny, and to really be okay with that, I have to talk myself into it every day.”

Ultimately, Ms. Bello is a different, more intriguing sort of screen actress. She doesn’t watch television. She doesn’t even watch movies unless it involves a premiere or some other form of public relations. She reads – something she considers her passion – and at times tries her hand at authorship. In fact, she’s even considered taking up duties on the other side of the camera.

“I do write,” she offers. “I don’t know when I’ll have the courage to show it to the world, but I do write. I’ve been working on a novel for years. I’ve written a couple of screenplays. I’m always in process with it. I don’t know if it’s anything that I’ll ever show anyone.”

“I was attempting to get it together last year and maybe direct this movie I had written. David was the first person I went to who gave me advice and told me what I needed to do and he’d certainly be a good mentor for me in that regard.”

In the eyes of many an awards-watcher, Ms. Bello was ungraciously looked over for an Academy Award nomination for her performance in The Cooler in 2003. A History of Violence has generated considerable steam in that arena, but as the actress sees it, the world of film awards is foreign turf that does not faze her in the least.

“Honestly, I like the process so much, and all of this – I don’t know what that is. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it. What I’m trying to do right now is just concentrate on the next movie that I’m doing. I’m in pre-production now and it’s so exciting and exacting all of my time and my emotional life, and I love that. But the rest of all this, in terms of where this film goes and who’s going to see it, I don’t know. I have no control over it so I don’t think about it.”

She touches upon that current project, a cinematic excursion into the world of September 11, 2001 where she finds herself under the guidance of one of the cinema’s most prolific talents.

“I’m working on this project entitled September with Oliver Stone. He’s brilliant and interesting and enigmatic. I’m thrilled to be working with him. There were so many heroes that day, and this is the story of two of those heroes. I play one of their wives, and it’s a beautiful story of what we all went through.”

Getting back around to Cronenberg’s film, on the notion of forgiveness, A History of Violence seems to be approaching a point that it very well may reach after, rather than before the film’s close. It’s a notion that touches upon themes of human nature, human failure and human inadequacy that stand as typical Cronenberg philosophical debates. Ms. Bello found herself identifying with her character in this regard and perhaps on a whole other level all together.

“I’ve forgiven people, yes, but I think I’m pretty forgiving of our shared humanness, which we call special, but I think it’s just being human. And to try to hide yourself, I certainly work on that and worked through that in this movie. I tend to still work on it, which is, who do we present ourselves to be in the world? Who are we? What is our truth really? Who am I? Not who society wants me to be but who am I really? Really tough questions.”

As for her fellow collaborators, the actress has nothing but high marks to bestow.

On Cronenberg:

“He’s the greatest director I’ve ever worked with. I can say that – certainly the most experienced director I’ve ever worked with. And he directs like a good father. He has a very firm, guiding hand – a great vision – yet he lets his children go and play and explore and become, but always reins you in at the exact moment to make you feel safe. He’s a phenomenal director.”

On Mortensen:

“He’s such a beautiful person. I thought he was going to be an intense guy, but he’s incredibly light and playful and funny. He’s really funny. He made me laugh all the time. We still have our inside jokes that we share. He’s a different sort of person. He truly lives his life as an artist. You can’t separate Viggo from his art. He just is his work. Everything that he does is art.”

And on co-star Ed Harris:

“When he’s in character he’s in character. He will not tolerate otherwise. I’m such a child like that in so many ways when I’m on set. Sometimes I’m really present, sometimes I’m not. He called me on it a couple of times, and it was really good for me. He really set me straight.”

A History of Violence is the sort of film that shakes the viewer in some way, shape or form. It’s the kind of cinema that can raise interesting, insightful and potentially poignant questions about relations, family, honesty and love, among other things – the very nature of violence not least among them.

As for what Ms. Bello’s taken away from the experience?

“I’m still taking away from it, really. After I ended this film I shaved off all my hair and was basically on my back for six months. I felt so emotionally and spiritually drained and confused, in questioning so many things about myself and my life and who I am in the world as opposed to who I really am, and [I’m] continuing to ask myself those questions. So that can only be a good thing, I think.

“I don’t really separate myself from my work. I couldn’t live without doing what I do. I’d love to be the person who sits there and says ‘Oh, it’s just a job, and my family comes first,’ but it’s bullshit, really. I need to do what I do and I define myself by the truth of who I am in the world and helping to tell people’s stories.”