Mary Steenburgen would prefer to be elsewhere.
"I'd rather be making a film than talking about it," the Newport native says. "I think I'm better at acting rather than I am at promoting."
As an Oscar winner for Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard with 103 Internet Movie Database credits, Steenburgen may not be doing what she prefers, but she's hardly reluctant to talk about her most recent film Book Club, which comes to DVD and Blu-ray next week.
In two telephone interviews from her home in California, she discusses the film in answers that can run for several minutes. Despite having promoted the movie since it opened in the United States in May, Steenburgen shows no sign of tiring, even though the movie is already on the small screen in some markets.
In Book Club, she plays a member of a quartet of women (the others are Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Diane Keaton) who spend their spare time discussing some fairly weighty literature.
When Vivian (Fonda) has the rest of the group read E.L. James' salacious bondage/sadomasochistic romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey, the four find their seemingly dormant sex lives becoming curiously vibrant, even if none of them find novel uses for whips or chains.
Steenburgen's character, Carol, is trying to rekindle a romance with her newly retired husband Bruce (Craig T. Nelson), who can't stand the dance classes she drags him to and seems more at home with motorcycles than lovemaking.
When asked if she was familiar with James' fiction, Steenburgen candidly replies with a laugh, "No, I knew less than nothing about it."
While Book Club might not be as eye-popping or eye-rolling as James' books (or the three films made from them), Steenburgen says the movie is groundbreaking and even envelope-pushing in its own way.
"Within this commercial Hollywood movie there were kind of some quietly subversive things happening," she says. "One was that there were four women over the age of 55. It's almost impossible to name another film that that occurred in. That was just so rare and unique that I think we were curious if this was going to happen at all."
The only other movie within memory featuring characters over 60 falling in love and talking about it in vivid detail is the 2010 German adultery drama Cloud 9. But that's an art film.
"Our movie cost under $10 million, and it's made, I think, over $70 million," Steenburgen says. "That's quite respectable, and we heard quite quickly from Paramount that they'd be interested in a second one, and that was before it did even better than they had expected. So maybe the fact of that will help change things for us.
"I think the public desires to have the stories of all people and all ages. One of the things we talk about when we talk about diversity in Hollywood, while it's true we're all white in the movie, [is that] nobody talks about diversity of age very much. That is what is really unique about this."
She also gushes about getting to know her seasoned co-stars. Steenburgen talks about each of her cast mates in remarkable detail, citing Keaton's new book The House that Pinterest Built, Bergen's return to playing Murphy Brown, and Fonda's continued political activism at age 80. It's obvious these women have stayed in touch.
At 65, Steenburgen is a relative youngster. She looks up to Keaton who, like her, is a veteran of New York's Neighborhood Playhouse.
"For me, a kid who grew up in North Little Rock, I grew up idolizing these people," she says. "I remember who I was with when I saw Annie Hall. I put her picture on the wall and thought I'd like to have a career like hers one day."
While filming Book Club, "We shot primarily in one house, and the garage of the home was our green room, and after every setup we would run to the garage, and when we would get there, the stories that we told were not ordinary stories. In the case of Jane Fonda and Candice Bergen, there were stories that went all the way back to being children of famous fathers [actor Henry Fonda and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen] and how that [affected] their lives; Liberace playing piano in the living room and Frank Sinatra coming over for dinner," she recalls.
"Somehow, they liked my Arkansas stories too. There was so much delight in each other. No one was a diva. No one was late for work."
Book Club also demonstrates that Steenburgen can still tap dance the way she did to the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" in Melvin and Howard. When asked about her experience as a hoofer, she takes a breath and admits with a laugh, "Oh, God, no! It was something I did as a child. Literally, the way I describe it in Book Club is pretty much my truth.
"I never did dance again other than the little bit that was required for the Neighborhood Playhouse, which was very minimal. But for some reason since I was a little girl, I was able to learn tap quickly. So I tapped for Melvin and Howard, and I tapped for Book Club," she adds. "I've had one tap lesson since Book Club; I had so much fun that I decided I wanted to do it instead of the dreaded go-to-a-gym thing, which I'm super not into. So, who knows, maybe it'll be something I'll actually get good at in my life."
When she recalls her training, Steenburgen rattles off several businesses in North Little Rock that have replaced her dance school. She's a partner in the restaurant South on Main and frequently comes back to Little Rock and its northern neighbor to promote the arts in her home state. Back in the 1980s, she was the executive producer for Jay Russell's End of the Line, which featured Kevin Bacon, Holly Hunter, Wilford Brimley and Natural State native Levon Helm.
She'll be part of next week's Arkansas Cinema Society Filmland events, joining Oscar-nominated filmmaker Richard Linklater (Boyhood), her Last Man on Earth co-star Will Forte, and David and Christina Arquette. She'll present the locally shot Antiquities and host screenings and a discussion of Last Man on Earth.
She's glad her roots keep her grounded. Arkansas, she says, "is such a diverse and incredible place, visually and socially and architecture-wise; I've always thought it was such a beautiful place to make films."
"[Arkansas] has also been my harshest critic. When Melvin and Howard came out, back in those days I read reviews, and it was the only bad review in the country, which was interesting that it was from [Arkansas]. It's like I'm family, and you don't like your family to get too uppity, which is interesting," she laughs.
Antiquities not only allowed her to return home from California, but allowed her to follow in husband Ted Danson's footsteps. In her son Charlie McDowell's feature directorial debut The One I Love, Danson played an unorthodox shrink as she does in the forthcoming film.
"No, we didn't compare notes. Both of us have been to therapists, so I bring some of my own experience. Also my son-in-law is a therapist, and of course, while you can't talk about that, I've lived through his years of studying," she says.
"Ted and I, the way we help each other, is that we're really clear about our boundaries. I got up this morning and ran though his lines for The Good Place today, and that's what he's working on right now. When I was doing Last Man on Earth, he would run lines. That's all we do. There's no directing allowed, no suggesting.
"We both know that we're capable of getting carried away."
MovieStyle on 08/17/2018