Few actors have built a career as fascinatingly varied as Rebecca De Mornay. For many, she’ll forever be synonymous with Risky Business or the unforgettable menace of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, but her filmography reveals an artist who’s consistently gravitated toward women of intelligence, mystery and quiet strength, whether in prestige dramas, thrillers or cult horror gems like Mother’s Day.
Her latest film, The Gentleman Thief, finds her joining John Travolta in a globe-trotting heist thriller where priceless art, shifting loyalties and long-buried relationships prove just as valuable as the score itself. As the enigmatic Odessa, De Mornay brings a lived-in history to a character whose past feels as compelling as the story unfolding in front of us.
Ahead of the film’s release, our Peter Gray spoke with De Mornay about finding mystery within a performance, why independent women continue to inspire her, and why some of the roles she treasures most remain the ones audiences mention least.
Before getting to The Gentleman Thief, I just want to shout out your incredible performance in Mother’s Day. That film is incredible, and you are so beautifully terrifying in that film. It’s such a performance!
Thank you so much. It’s the only “horror” film I’ve done, and I was very unhappy because they told me there wasn’t going to be any gore. I don’t like gore, but I did love the character, and I think the performance is cool. And the other actors were very good. It was a great cast. Thank you.
With The Gentleman Thief, Odessa is someone who’s clearly lived enough life that the audience immediately starts inventing stories about her before she tells us anything. As an actor, do you enjoy playing characters where the mystery is actually part of the performance? Where your job is almost to convince us there’s an entire unseen movie sitting behind this one?
Did you get that sense? That’s amazing. That’s great. I think that is what you need to do always with a character. That you’re just getting a snapshot. This character’s moving along, and the camera is just catching as (she’s) moving along. Max Reinhardt said, “You can’t be anything on screen that you’re not already off screen.” You’re right, (because) when I read a part I really like sensing a mystery about the character. That intrigues me.
With heist films, they’re often obsessed with people in terms of what people steal. This film seems much more interested in what people are trying to reclaim. Reclaim trust, redemption, relationships. Did that emotional angle make the genre feel different to you here?
That’s a really interesting way of putting it. I didn’t see it like that, but I did see that there was something. Everything that you just said, but there was something about the family relationships that was light-hearted. There’s an almost innocence about the, you know, slightly backwards brother (Lukas Haas’ character) – this idiot savant – who comes up with things that the older brother follows. It’s an unusual duo, and to put it at the center of an action film with all these heist partners relating as family.
And then you have John’s (Travolta) character, once upon a time having a relationship with my character. This is the third installment of a trilogy they’ve all made together, and he’s gone through various love interests just to wind up back where he started. Which is interesting.
Without giving anything away, this film enjoys making the audience reassess people’s motives. When you’re playing someone who knows more than the audience does, how careful are you about deciding when a thought should leak into your face and when it absolutely shouldn’t?
I just formulate that based on what I felt as a reader. The first time I read the script, I was the audience. Then to have that twist at the end? I thought, “Ah, I really wasn’t expecting it.” So I kept that in the performance.
Odessa seems incredibly comfortable with solitude, and I feel like Hollywood almost treats that as something to fix, but Odessa wears it as this luxury. Was that something you consciously wanted to protect in the character?
That’s a very good observation. I like to play women who are very independent. It’s an example to women, to girls. She’s living this very full life while being very unattached. It’s possible.
And art auctions are fascinating because everyone in the room is trying to project certainty while calculating risk. In that way it almost feels like acting. Did that world resonate with you because so much of it is performance?
Yeah, I think they have to be very good actors to pull off very believably, with the high stakes and to pull off things that aren’t happening. I love playing that. I would never be able to do that in real life. I am not a gambler. If something goes wrong, things go very wrong. But it’s fun to play it.
I like that you’ve worked with directors who want precision and others who thrive on spontaneity. When you arrive on set, how quickly can you tell what kind of environment you’re stepping into?
This one was incredible easy. Randall (Ives Emmett), our director and producer, is just a whirling dervish of a human. He’s just whirling, and he’s actually making that film with all of that going in three weeks. Three weeks. So he was just spinning like a top from the get go, and I realised, “Okay, it’s that kind of film.” But he got so much on camera in three weeks. I really don’t know how he did it. But he also just promotes an arena of fun that takes the pressure off. It’s a different kind of directing than I’m used to, but it was enjoyable.
And it was so much fun with John Travolta, he’s such a delight to do scenes with. It dawned on me that he’s a dancer. He’s such a spectacular dancer, and as a dancer he knows how to be in sync with every breath. He is just so present to anything that is happening in a really freeing way. I love working with him.
And as I mentioned Mother’s Day before, I feel like people have their “Rebecca De Mornay movie”, and there’s been decades of audiences discovering your work across different generations. Have younger audiences surprised you with what they respond to in performances compared to the reactions you originally received?
I have to say many more people like The Three Musketeers more than I was aware of. There’s just been a lot of fan mail about (that film), and it was another really fun movie to shoot. I think that the stalwart is The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Risky Business, and then there are people that can enjoy the horror genre, and I’m really pleased about Mother’s Day, because I actually think it is one of my best performances. It was hard to make her uniquely believable because it’s such an extreme character. But I don’t get a lot of people talking to me about it.
And just before letting you go, and I want to say thank you again so much for the opportunity, when people look back on your career there’s going to be the films that everyone remembers. I’m curious whether you measure your career the same way, or whether it’s actually the quieter performances that have stayed with you the longest?
Well, one of my favourite performances of mine is in a little television film called Getting Out, and it was written by this Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Marsha Norman, and it was a stage play that they made into a television movie. That character just kills me. It’s a beautiful arc of a girl’s story. I really loved it.
And the other one is this ABC miniseries that was called An Inconvenient Woman, who I played, and it was a three-part series, and I was in a love affair with Jason Robards. He was a much older man. That was the story. It was based on a true story. I won’t get into it, but working with him and (my character) was this little waitress in Los Angeles who became this sophisticated young woman on the arm of a billionaire. It was a wonderful arc to play, as well act in tandem with Jason Robards. It was a great performance.
The Gentleman Thief is now available on Digital and On Demand in the United States.
