Claire Danes talks to Michael Dwyer about her role in Steve Martin's Shopgirl, which could lead to Oscar glory
Claire Danes walks into a London hotel suite, sits herself down and sighs, "I'm knackered." Hardly the turn of phrase one would expect from the mouth of a Yale-educated New Yorker, but she explains that she had an Australian boyfriend for seven years, rock singer Ben Lee. "So I picked up all that slang from him. I hope it doesn't sound pretentious when I say I'm knackered, because in America it does. Knackered is a good word, and I enjoy the way Australians abbreviate so many words - unless you have a short name and then they'll elongate it." Switching on an impeccable Australian accent she says, "Danesy was my name, y'see?"
Danesy is far from being unique among US actors who, on learning their interview is for an Irish newspaper, claim to be "part Irish". Oh, on which side? "I think both, but more on my mom's side. Her family were named Looney, but when they came to the America, they changed their name to Rooney because they didn't want to be regarded as insane. I was tickled to hear that."
She has never been to Ireland, although she was associated for some time with an Irish project, Pushers Needed, which, it should be pointed out, had nothing to do with drug dealing. The focus of that screenplay by Irish writer-director Jimmy Smallhorne is on four working-class Irishwomen who win a trip to Lourdes, leaving their husbands behind.
"It's not happening now," Danes says with an air of disappointment, not least as she was to have being joined in the cast by such luminaries as Joan Allen, Maggie Smith and Brenda Blethyn. "I would love to have done it," she says.
Instead she made Shopgirl, which could earn her an Oscar nomination at the end of the month. Adapted by Steve Martin from his novella of the same name, it features Danes in achingly sympathetic portrayal of a lonely young woman who sells gloves at a Los Angeles outlet of Saks Fifth Avenue.
She is as socially awkward as her name, Mirabelle Buttersfield. Martin, at his most self-deprecating, plays the predatory, wealthy middle-aged man who casually exploits her, although she finds a second suitor in a carefree young aspirant designer played by Jason Schwartzman. The vulnerable Mirabelle is played by Danes in a wonderfully quiet performance that affirms the maxim that less is more.
"That interested me, that she is so fragile," says Danes. "She's very shy and removed from other people and the rest of the world. She doesn't know how to engage or connect. It's like she's underwater and she has to surface in order to survive and grow and become a functional adult. I was concerned about that because I needed to render it all honestly, while at the same time I was conscious of my responsibility to entertain."
On set she found it particularly easy to connect with Schwartzman, a close friend for years. "He's endlessly inventive and surprising. He was always improvising, so I never quite knew what to anticipate. Every day, every take was new. Time and again I had to restrain myself from collapsing into a fit of giggles because he can be incredibly funny when you least expect it."
WITH SO MUCH improvisation going on, can one assume that the screenwriter, Steve Martin - also the leading actor and one of the film's producers - was not being precious about his words? "No, not at all," she says. "Steve was actively supportive of Jason doing all that stuff. I'm much more methodical and schoolgirlish in that I'm quite reverential of the material that's been given to me. I know my lines and what I'm supposed to do, so that's what I do. I guess that comes from starting out as a child actor, when I never dared challenge anything."
Nevertheless, it must have been an unusual and potentially awkward situation to play so many scenes with the actor who was also the writer. "Yes, it is something that very rarely happens," she says. "But Steve was very generous and he very much regarded the rest of us actors as his collaborators on the film. He surrendered a lot of control, which I found admirable. He made it very clear that he wanted us to share the material and that we could make alterations whenever we needed them. Of course, he's also an actor and sympathetic to the needs of other actors."
Danes had read Martin's novella soon after it was published, but never occurred to her that she would star in the film version. "That was dreamy," she sighs. "I felt very privileged. Because it was such an internal story in the novella, I never imagined it transferring into the medium of film. I don't get to do a role very often that's so textured and layered and where the character undergoes so much change. Those changes seem modest, but they're real and she really does transform along the way.
"I think a lot of young women will identify with the character. There are quite a few of them out there and they don't get to see themselves in movies very often. They're not represented in movies much at all. It's a curious age that's often overlooked. There are all these movies about teenage girls, because they're going through a period of such dramatic and conspicuous changes.
"But in your mid-twenties you're expected to be so much more mature than you are. We are so coddled in our college years that we can easily feel removed from the practicalities and realities of the world outside. Then suddenly we're hurled out of that eden - not that college is exactly a breeze, of course - and faced with very concrete responsibilities. We think we're so equipped to cope when actually we're not because our education has been in dealing with very different matters. It's a bit jarring to go from abstract thinking to having to do your own laundry and get on with surviving in the world."
DANES, WHO WILL be 27 in April, started out in childhood on the off-Broadway stage and was starring in the popular TV series, My So-Called Life, by the time she was 14. Movie roles followed, notably as Beth in Little Women and opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet.
Following the example of another former child actor, Jodie Foster, Danes took a career break and went to Yale. She studied psychology, but missing the movies, dropped out after two years. "I worked incessantly in my teens and I felt very overwhelmed," she says. "I had a lot of success and so many opportunities I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to focus it. So I took time out to develop a value system and a sensibility, and I figured out what an oeuvre was, so now I can actively develop one. I like being back acting."
In her early teens Danes left her native New York and moved with her parents to Los Angeles. "My parents liked it there and stayed, but I was back to New York as soon as I was legally able."
And after Yale, she was back in movies, working across the genres in Igby Goes Down, The Hours, Stage Beauty and more unexpectedly, Terminator 3.
"T3 felt anomalous, but it was fun," she says. "I had a good time working on it. There was a lot of hanging around between takes waiting for something to happen. It was such a long shoot compared to anything else I'd done. I finally watched Gone With the Wind!"
Now she's back in action movie mode, co-starring with Richard Gere in The Flock for Andrew Lau, the director of the Hong Kong cop thriller series, Infernal Affairs. "It's something new for me again - a psychological cop thriller," Danes says. "We play detectives who investigate sex crimes."
Given that guns are never too far away in an Andrew Lau movie, will she be wielding weapons again? "Oh yeah, but I've already had plenty of practice on T3, baby. I had this big fat one, a machine gun that made my whole body vibrate."
Before shooting that, she danced in - and received rave reviews for - a solo project, Christina Olson: American Model, on the Lower East Side in New York. "It was my first time on stage since I was about eight, so it was kind of terrifying because it was just me up there alone for about an hour. It was inspired by an Andrew Wyeth painting. It was really liberating to do, but it was hard. My feet were destroyed. I'm only recovering from it now. It was very exciting to finally get a pedicure."
When I raise the prospect of an Oscar nomination coming her way for Shopgirl, Danes smiles. "I don't know, but it's nice of you to mention it. I've been before, you know. I was a presenter when I was a kid, when I was about 17. I went with my dad and we were sitting in the same row as Muhammad Ali. That was the greatest thrill for my dad. I can still remember the pink clip-on earrings I was wearing because they were pinching all the time and killing me."
What she describes as her "latest fantasy" has nothing to do with acting or awards. "I want to go to the south of France and learn French and take a painting class out there. Maybe one day. It sounds like heaven - because I am, in fact, an 85-year-old woman." I tell her she looks well on it.
Shopgirl is on general release