Alicia Witt talks about kissing Madonna as if recalling a half-forgotten dream. “I was a huge fan,” the actor and songwriter says. “I mean, most everyone was. But I had listened to Bedtime Stories” – Madonna’s 1994 album – “on repeat. Then there I was, not only working with her but playing her girlfriend.”
In her 40-plus-year screen career, Witt has collaborated with David Lynch, Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise, in addition to releasing a series of searingly confessional albums. Being asked, when she was 20, to plant that smacker on the star during rehearsals for their turn as lovers in the 1995 art-house anthology film Four Rooms is the only time she has been star-struck, she says.
“There was a scene that got cut from the movie, because we didn’t end up having time to film it, where we kissed. So I did kiss Madonna in rehearsals. I learned also that she had chosen me.” Allison Anders, who directed their segment of Four Rooms, presented Madonna “with four options of girls to play that role, and she picked me. And when she first arrived at the table read, she threw a bunch of presents at me. Very grand. She was, like, ‘Oh, hi.’ Like, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s my introduction.’”
Witt is speaking in advance of her first Irish concert, which takes place in Dublin next week. Seated on the porch of her Nashville home, her vivid red hair catching the sunlight, Witt is animated and thoughtful. She speaks passionately about her career as a recording artist, which has unfolded in parallel with her acting, including her parts in Urban Legend, Vanilla Sky and Cage’s satanic horror Longlegs, in which she portrays a deranged mother. She calls that performance the most cathartic experience of her life.
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“I wasn’t very conscious of what was coming out of me. I still haven’t seen the movie – and I don’t plan to. Because of how beautifully intense playing Ruth [the Satanic mother] was, I didn’t feel that interesting in seeing what that looked like.”
Longlegs inspired one of the songs Witt will sing in Dublin. She needed to say goodbye to Ruth, she explains. Music was her way of drawing a line under a dark and difficult project and moving on. Still decompressing from the role, she went to her piano and wrote Always Tuesday, a farewell to her broken character.
“The song was written three days after I’d come back from Vancouver. Ruth was both very personal for me and also, obviously, a fictional character that I was fortunate to be able to play and let her come in through me. That song is the remnants of Ruth. It’s a letter to Ruth, in a way, dealing with ancestral trauma and forgiveness and love. It’s impossible for me to play that song and not remember exactly what I was experiencing as I played her.”
Witt has herself experienced the most horrific real-world tragedy. In 2021 her 87-year-old father and 75-year-old mother were discovered dead in their home in Massachusetts. The cause of death was exposure to the cold: they had become increasingly isolated from friends and neighbours, even as the house fell into disrepair; their heating was suspected of having eventually stopped working.
“I never imagined I would have to talk about this publicly,” Witt said on Facebook. “I hadn’t been allowed inside my parents’ home for well over a decade ... I begged, cried, tried to reason with them, tried to convince them to let me help them move – but, every time, they became furious with me, telling me I had no right to tell them how to live their lives.” They were, she says, “fiercely stubborn, beautifully original souls”.
The bad luck didn’t end there. Around that time, Witt was being treated for breast cancer.
One of the ways she processed it all was by writing the ballad Witness, a wrenching, Tori Amos-style evocation of a world turned head over heels.
“That song started appearing like a mantra right as I was within the greatest challenge of my life,” she says. “I knew, even though I wasn’t ready to write it yet, and it took me a while to be able to bring it all together – but the line ‘Will you be my witness?’ kept playing over and over in my brain and helped me get through those dark times.”
Witt experienced a different kind of bereavement when her dear friend David Lynch died, last January, at the age of 78. He had cast Witt in her first screen role, as Alia, the precocious seven-year-old psychic, in his 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. (Anya Taylor-Joy portrays a grown-up version of the character in the Denis Villeneuve movies.) She also starred in Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return, as the younger sister of Lara Flynn Boyle’s character, Donna. She regards her friendship with Lynch as one of the defining relationships of her life.
“We were close. I last saw him a year ago, well before he passed. He was so special to me. I was surprised. I didn’t expect him to pass at all. The last time I saw him … you know, he had been open about having emphysema, but he didn’t seem unwell, aside from that, at all. And I was utterly shocked. It was a great, great loss.”
Witt had never acted before flying to Mexico City, and the vast Dune set, in 1984. She recalls Lynch as kind and supportive, instilling in her a lifelong love of performance.
“It’s impossible to measure how much David changed my life,” she says. “He’s the one that put me in that first movie. And not only that, but he made it clear that this was a magical way to live a life, and made me want to do this forever.
“If I had worked with a director who was difficult or miserable on set – of which there are some – I could easily have had a different first experience and never wanted to do it again. He became as dear to me as a family member, and remained very special through my whole life. There was definitely a lot of grief. But he’s still here. I know that for sure.”
Witt also crossed paths with Harvey Weinstein. There was a lot of bullying and gaslighting, she says
Witt’s early life had the weird, almost eerie quality of one of Lynch’s films. Born in Massachusetts in 1975, she was homeschooled by her teacher parents. In 1989 her mother grew her hair so long that it made the Guinness Book of Records. Witt herself became known in her hometown as a child genius. She could read at two and by five was on the local TV network, reciting Shakespeare – which is what led to her being cast in Dune.
The 1990s were an altogether different trip. She moved to Los Angeles at the age of 16 and supported herself by playing piano at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. Her next big break came in 1995, playing Cybill Shepherd’s eye-rolling Gen X daughter in the sitcom Cybill. She went on to star in the superior slasher flick Urban Legend and was in contention for the Alicia Silverstone role in Clueless, the Neve Campbell lead in Scream, and the Mary-Jane love interest in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man that went to Kirsten Dunst.
“It was a crazy time – and amazing to think of all of the things … like, basically every big movie around that time that had a young woman in it I did audition for. I have a bin full of scripts in my basement that I’ve saved all these years – the iconic ones.”
Witt also crossed paths with Harvey Weinstein, a producer of Four Rooms. He never tried to take advantage, she says, but there was a lot of bullying and gaslighting: he would offer her parts, but only if she agreed to skip other auditions.
With the industry such a wild west, there were a lot of predators around. Witt considers herself lucky not to have been mistreated in that way.
“I was very fortunate, I now realise, because I didn’t have any so-called casting-couch worries. I was, I think, a weird mix of very mature for my age, especially as a teenager, and then maybe as a young woman as well, like, early 20s. But I also think I was very childlike too.”
Witt wonders if she was naive and oblivious about what was happening around her. “I remember a few moments where it crossed my mind that somebody I was with might have had some intentions that were not pure. I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I was very lucky.”
It’s early morning, but Witt has a busy day ahead, with scripts to read and meetings to take. There is also, of course, that Dublin concert to prepare for. She has never been to Ireland before and is looking forward to playing songs across her catalogue. Are there any Irish artists she admires?
“Sinéad O’Connor comes to mind. She changed the whole music industry – her sound and her energy and her bravery and not compromising. She went on Saturday Night Live and expressed herself in a way that was very controversial at the time,” says Witt, referring to the time O’Connor ripped a photograph of Pope John Paul II in half. “She was very brave.”
Alicia Witt plays the Grand Social, Dublin, on Wednesday, May 14th
