She's played everything from Jacqueline Du Pré's sister to the psychologically damaged Brenda in Six Feet Under. Now Rachel Griffiths is Dennis Quaid's wife in the baseball-themed movie, The Rookie. Why would she bother with it? asks Donald Clarke.
A long, angular string bean of a woman, Rachel Griffiths stretches out on the sofa and cackles over her shoulder: "You're not getting me at my best, but then maybe my defences are down. You know, I reckon that this is what I get paid for: talking to you. I'd do the acting for free."
Despite her exhaustion and the fact that she regards chatting to me (though I assume it's nothing personal) as the toughest side of her job, Griffiths is an absolute hoot. Throughout the interview she casts her replies casually into the air as if talking to herself or to a close friend in an adjacent room. I didn't expect the earthy Australian to start barking out demands like Jennifer Lopez, but it is still heartening to report how comfortable Griffiths appears to be with her membership of the human race.
There's an amusing paradox at work, for it is her very eccentricity, her difference, that makes her appear unexceptional on screen. Of course, she isn't strange-looking at all, she just seems that way when standing beside, say Johnny Depp, or any of the not- terribly-odd-looking oddballs in the hit TV series, Six Feet Under. The same abnormal normality characterises her friend, Toni Collette, co-star of P.J. Hogan's Muriel's Wedding, the film that launched both their careers.
"I don't think I'm any more ordinary or any more special than the ensemble of actors in Six Feet Under. Maybe you just fancy the two of us," she laughs. "But I suppose we both seek a certain kind of truth. Neither Toni nor I are the most glamorous pussycats in the kennel. Our strength is authenticity. Maybe it's because we're not as pretty as the other girls."
She doesn't really believe that, does she?
"No, no. I don't," she says, before contradicting herself. "If you're not beautiful as an actress, you've got to be doing something else. I've never been interested in handsome men, because they're never as funny, never as interesting. They've just cruised by, being handsome. It's rare to get an actor who has substance and beauty."
Griffiths's own brand of substance is already so familiar that it may come as a surprise that we only really became aware of her eight years ago.
Since Muriel's Wedding was released in 1994, the Melbourne actor has brought a consistent integrity to appearances in films of such varying quality as Jude, My Best Friend's Wedding and Divorcing Jack. But, before Six Feet Under, she was best known for her Oscar-nominated performance as Jacqueline Du Pré's sister in 1998's Hilary and Jackie, a film that attracted some controversy for its unflinching portrayal of the doomed cellist's unconventional love life.
"It concerned me that it took a long time for people to recognise that it was a good film," she says. "A real person's life means nothing in a film unless it resonates with your own life. What depressed me was that people were unable to assimilate a difficult truth about somebody and still revere them. I can take my heroes flawed; they don't have to be perfect to keep their place on my mantel. Jesus's mother doesn't have to be a real virgin for me to find inspiration in her life."
The film was based on Hilary Du Pré's biography of her sister. Did Griffiths meet her while preparing for the role? "No. The only time I would do that was if I was playing a character who was known to the public," she says. "If you sell your story, you sell your life as a blueprint. It becomes the storyboard for ideas and you have to just give it up, I think."
Griffiths has made the most peculiar choices in her career. Moments after her appearance in the decent, if rather worthy, Hilary and Jackie, we saw her shooting up Belfast as a gun-toting nun-o-gram in David Caffrey's adaptation of Colin Bateman's novel, Divorcing Jack.
"I met David when I was backpacking with Toni Collette," she says. "And we had this wild night in Galway, which I didn't much remember, but obviously he did. I just loved that writer's voice, a great combination of humour and despair. "I loved Belfast, I really met some gorgeous people there. It's a shame you can't ship the fanatics on to their own island."
Since then, she has appeared as a mad Welsh woman in 2001's undervalued Very Annie Mary; as a lesbian hairdresser in Paddy Breathnach's Blow Dry and - most bizarrely of all - as Johnny Depp's mom in the flashy thriller, Blow.
One admires her lack of vanity, but Depp is the 34-year-old Griffiths's senior by four years, for goodness sake.
"Ah yeh, but I do have to age in the film. At the start, he's a kid," she explains.
True, but there are far more scenes where he's an adult.
"Well, I think vanity gets in the way of good acting," she says. "Arnie \ was never a great actor, but every buttock shot took away a little of the expressive ability he did have. There was a guy who really couldn't afford buttock shots."
After winning a Golden Globe and being nominated for an Emmy, Griffiths must now feel that taking the role of Brenda Chenowith in Six Feet Under was a smart move. But most movie stars regard television with suspicion; the odd guest appearance is OK, but anything more that that can be seen as a step backwards. How did she persuade her agent that this was not another eccentric professional decision?
"Well James Gandolfini [from The Sopranos] getting $10 million, or whatever, a picture probably helped," she says. "I guess I come from a place which is smaller, and you're trained to just take the best role that's going - on TV, in the theatre - rather than just do the first mediocre movie that comes around."
Griffiths plays the psychologically fragile girlfriend of Nate, a member of the family of LA undertakers around whose lives the series revolves. A former hothouse child with a dangerously disturbed brother, Brenda offers some juicy material for an actor. I assume that Griffiths was excited by the notion of playing somebody so damaged.
"Oh God, no. That wasn't a part of it," she says. "What I liked in the pilot episode were all these great little seeds; if they all grew, it would turn into a complex forest. There were some very rare seeds for a female character here: the sexual, the psychological, the theological.
"She's doing all this body work as well, trying to put herself in the world more physically, to get outside her head. And then there's this over-responsibility to a psychologically unstable sibling. That basket of qualities is interesting. A girl who thinks about the existence of God who can also give a good blow-job is not something you come across very often as an actor."
The peculiar career choices continue.
Ostensibly, we are meeting to discuss her role in the baseball-themed movie, The Rookie, but it's difficult to know what to ask. The film is a hugely enjoyably slice of Americana, with Dennis Quaid playing a middle-aged Texan teacher who takes a belated stab at pitching in the big leagues. But Griffiths's role as Quaid's wife is just that: the lead's wife. Why would she bother with it?
"I quite liked the fact that it's not my story," Griffiths says. "Sometimes it's nice not carrying the weight. I'd been playing such a psychologically dense person in Six Feet Under, somebody full of so much ambivalence about love - What do you surrender? How do you surrender? - and it was nice to then play someone with such clarity. I really got into playing somebody like that: clear in their decisions, clear in their expectations of those around them."
Still living in Australia, Griffiths is shortly to be married to artist Andrew Taylor (I neglect to ask if he is handsome and uninteresting or plain and funny). Though she spends half the year in Los Angeles, she resists moving there - "The moment I move to LA will be the day I get my last job there" - and continues to live an Antipodean existence, surfing as much as she can. I'm surprised she connected so easily with the very American lives in The Rookie.
"Well, I like the fact that it's a very specific story," she says. "I'd rather do specific stories than generic stories. OK, it's baseball, but sport offers the last real feelings we have of community in many countries. There, it's round the baseball diamond; in Melbourne, it's round the oval of Australian Rules."
So she likes specific stories. Is there anything else she can offer to help us bind together her singular career?
"Yeh, actually," she says. "With the odd exception - Johnny Depp's mother, for one - I tend to choose roles in uplifting movies. Uplifting in the sense that they leave you coming out with some redemption. I'm not particularly keen on movies that leave you with nowhere to go about the human condition."
The Rookie
goes on release next Friday
