Allison Janney, most famous for her role in The West Wing, tells Michael Dwyerabout her part in the warm, Oscar-nominated Juno, working with two generations of Reitmans, and what it's like to tower over co-actors
Although Allison Janney is best known for her feisty portrayal of CJ Gregg, the US president's press secretary who was promoted to White House chief of staff in The West Wing, she has been working extensively in films and theatre for several decades.
Now 48, she received several awards for her performance in the New York revival of Noel Coward's Present Laughter, and a Tony nomination for the Broadway production of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge.
Her diverse cinema roles have ranged from providing the voice of Peach, the starfish in the animated Finding Nemo, to playing the lesbian lover of the Meryl Streep character in The Hours, to her recent role as a Bible-thumping mother in the musical, Hairspray. And Janney's engagingly natural screen presence shines through in her latest movie, Juno, a low-budget serious comedy that has been a major critical and commercial success in the US and collected four Oscar nominations - for best film, director, leading actress and original screenplay - on Tuesday.
Janney plays Bren, the stepmother of 16-year-old Juno (Ellen Page), who becomes pregnant after her first sexual experience with a fellow student (Michael Cera). When Juno decides to give up the baby for adoption, she sets out to find the ideal parents for the child who has yet to be born.
The screenplay for Junois the first from Diablo Cody, a former stripper. "It's a remarkable script," Janney says as we talk over coffee at a London hotel. "She is so original. She's very young and confident and irreverent. Yes, she was a stripper and she wrote a book about that. She had to sit her parents down before the book came out because they didn't know she had been working as a stripper.
"She's also a stepmother herself, which is why she wanted my character, Bren, to be really cool and not the usual wicked stepmother. It's difficult to come into a family as a stepmother when there's a teenage child there who doesn't want someone coming in and telling them what to do. I liked the way the relationship between Juno and Bren develops and how protective Bren is towards her." The movie is warm and very funny, and shot through with humanity. "There's something about the simplicity of the moments and the honesty of the movie that makes it very moving," Janney says.
Juno is the second feature film from Jason Reitman, the Canadian director who made his debut with Thank You for Smoking. Coincidentally, Janney worked on two films with his father, Ivan Reitman, Private Parts(1997), which he produced, and a year later on Six Days Seven Nights, which he directed. "They are very different," Janney says. "They're both very nice men, but they have completely different sensibilities. Ivan has made so many movies that he's very business-like. I was kind of intimidated by him. Jason was so sweet and approachable, and he creates such a relaxed atmosphere on the set. There's no drama. He's so talented. I don't know what makes people talented at what they do."
She's pretty good herself, I tell her. "Oh, thank you," she replies modestly. "I don't know what makes me a good actor. I've no idea. It's certainly not a skill that I learned. It's something that I'm able to do for whatever reason. I know that I'm good at it, but I don't know why and I can't really explain what I do. That's frustrating sometimes because I should be able to talk articulately about what I do."
GROWING UP IN Dayton, Ohio in the 1960s, Janney's ambition was to be a figure-skater. "I was very athletic when I was younger," she says. "I did ballet and modern dance. I started figure-skating, but I was impossibly tall for such an acrobatic sport. I wished I had kept it up because it's great way to get exercise, but these days I like to go out running with my dog."
Given that she is six feet tall, has Janney found her height an obstacle to getting screen roles? "It's always down to an artistic choice by a director," she says, "and I guess my height has hurt me as much as it's helped me. In comedy people don't mind casting tall women next to shorter men. It adds to the humour." Aren't there problems with the egos of some smaller actors? "That's true," she says. "It depends on the actor. I was the tallest woman on The West Wing, but the men were all pretty confident and that didn't bother any of them. I've heard stories about other actors. Did you hear the one about Sophia Loren having to stand in a ditch in one of her films because she was much taller than her co-star? Maybe that's apocryphal." I mention meeting Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman when they were shooting Far and Awayin Dublin. He was wearing three-inch heels and she was in flat shoes, but still taller than him. "That's funny, because all the men that I've dated have been shorter than me. I usually wear my heels anyway and they don't seem to mind." Is she married? "No, I've been engaged a couple of times, but never actually done it. I'm still looking for the right guy. I haven't found him yet."
Returning to the subject of Juno, I note that it's the fourth recent movie to deal with unplanned pregnancy - following Waitress, Knocked Upand 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days- although each film approaches the theme from different angles and with contrasting levels of seriousness.
"What is it about movies that these coincidences happen so often?" Janney asks. "It's been the same with musicals. There have been so many of them recently after years when there were hardly any at all. I loved the way Junodealt with it in such an unexpected way, and the way the family members dealt with the news. I felt that was refreshing, and something that people could learn from, in terms of listening to the girl who's pregnant and respecting what she wants to do, regardless of her age."
She describes the movie's 20-year-old star, Ellen Page, as remarkable. "She's not afraid to tackle anything. She's fearless and wise beyond her years." Given Janney's long experience as an actor, what advice would she give Page? "Ellen should just keep following her own path and doing what she wants. She just seems ridiculously self-possessed. I'd like just a little of that. She's so cool and laid-back."
Janney herself had the benefit of having acting spouses Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as her mentors when she started out as an actor at Kenyon College in Ohio, Newman's alma mater. "You can't get much better than that," she laughs. "I was fortunate enough to get cast in the first play staged in the college's new theatre, and Paul came back to direct it. From then on, they were in my life.
"Joanne encouraged me to come to New York and study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse. I did, and then she started a theatre company and I was in that. She kept us all working, which was very important for us as young actors - to have a venue where we could get roles all the time and where people could come and see you act. Joanne also got me into the Actors Studio. She did so much for me that I wish I could do something for her."
JANNEY WENT ON to collect four Emmy awards (the US TV equivalent of the Oscars) for her portrayal of CJ in The West Wing. "That was sweet," she says. "One reason why it was so popular, I think, was that it presented such a romantic vision of American politics. I don't think anyone likes what's going on now. When Bush came into office, our ratings dropped a bit, whereas I thought they would have gotten bigger.
"There are very few series of that calibre, and there probably won't be again given the direction TV seems to be going in the States. There are still some good series, but then there are all those reality shows. I just hate them. They're cheesy, tacky, and cheap. Art always suffers at the hands of big business."
Her character, CJ, was always so strong and determined, yet still vulnerable. "She was truly a woman," Janney says, "and I think that's why people responded to her. She maintained her femininity in that very male-driven arena and managed to hold her own. She was a remarkable role model. I'll always consider that role among my accomplishments as an actor."
Aaron Sorkin, who created the series, was such a perfectionist that he often delivered the scripts very close to when filming was scheduled. "We trusted him completely," she says. "Getting the scripts so close to shooting the scenes never bothered me. I've never been very good at memorising lines, so that kept me on my toes. Sometimes we would have to take a day off because there was no script. Of course, the producers, the people who were paying the money, were furious.
"I think that's ultimately why Aaron had to leave the show after the fourth year. They were losing money while waiting for his scripts to come and Aaron didn't want other writers to script the show. He wanted to write every single word of it. Even though other writers worked on different episodes, everything they wrote had to be filtered through Aaron's mind and his typewriter before he delivered the final product." How did she feel when it came to shooting the final episode after seven years working with such a close-knit cast and crew? "I had been preparing for that moment for a long time. It was really sad, because the people I had been working with had become my family. It was very hard. It felt quite surreal. It didn't feel real until five or six months later, when I fully realised it was over and we would not be returning there."
What's next for Janney? "To make money, I do some voice-over work and I have to go back home for that. It's a commercial for an insurance agency. It's a nice way to make ends meet when you're in between jobs, as I am now. I also do some voices for a cartoon called Phineas and Ferb, which is on the Disney Channel. And I've done voice-overs for some movies, Finding Nemoand Over the Hedge. Doing voice-over work is great because it doesn't matter how you look. You could go in your pyjamas."
Juno will be released on Feb 8