At this year’s San Francisco film festival, Maria Bello was honored for exemplifying brilliance, independence and integrity in her work. You couldn’t argue with that, or with the festival catalogue’s description of her as “the definition of fearless.” Look at Bello’s performance as Viggo Mortensen’s complex, uninhibited wife in A History of Violence, in which she gets more than a little frisky over the thought that her husband might be a brutal assassin. Or her sassy waitress in The Cooler, where her scenes with William H Macy, as the schlub who represents her chance of happiness, were so explicit they made even non-smokers crave a post-coital cigarette once the lights came up. (“When you shake hands with her,” warned a friend before I left to interview Bello, “just remember where those hands have been.”)
Anyone who has applauded the 41-year-old’s uncompromising choices and tough-cookie persona will be puzzled by her latest role. But when you’re known for being radical, perhaps the only way to wrongfoot people is to jump into bed with a Hollywood studio rather than with William H Macy. Bello has done that by starring as the adventurer Evie O’Connell in the new Mummy sequel, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, in which she gets to wear some fetching hats, speak poppycock in a Virginia McKenna accent, and land a few punches on assorted reanimated ghouls.
“I’ve been telling my agent for years that I wanted an action movie, but no one saw me like that,” she says when we meet in Los Angeles, her hair returned to blonde from the dyed black that she sports in the film. “Two weeks before my 40th birthday, I guess I’d given up. I mean, how many action roles are there for women over 40? Soon after that, I got a call to say they were considering me for the part.”
The director, Rob Cohen, didn’t even have Bello on his wish-list at first. “I said to her, ‘You’re so well respected. Why would you wanna do this giant popcorn movie?’ She told me that after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, all her friends wanted to be Karen Allen, but she wanted to be Harrison Ford. I knew that was the way I wanted to go.”
Mummy devotees will recall that Rachel Weisz played the character in the first two films. “I knew from the start I couldn’t fill Rachel’s shoes,” Bello says. “She’s so pretty and such an ingenue. But I played Evie more like Katharine Hepburn at 40 — she has a grown-up kid, a 20-year marriage, she’s a bit more cynical. She dreams of being someone like Rachel Weisz.”
The official line is that Weisz was reluctant to bring her young child with her to China for the arduous shoot, but it is rumored that the 37-year-old balked at “ageing up” to play the mother of a 20-year-old man. If this is true, the filmmakers couldn’t have arrived at a more appropriate replacement than Bello, who has made it something of a mission to ensure that women who don’t fit the cultural ideal are represented in cinema. She still receives letters from women grateful that she revealed her body in all its far-from-aerobicized glory in The Cooler. “I’d given birth to my son the year before and I was about 20kg overweight. I had cellulite on my ass, which I still do, but I thought that was a good thing to show. All these Hollywood movies with perfectly toned female bodies make you think, ‘Am I not sexy? Am I not good enough?’”
Despite her dalliance with the Mummy series (for which she has signed up for a further two installments), Bello seems to be keeping off the straight and narrow in all other respects. Her forthcoming films include Downloading Nancy, about a self-harming housewife who enlists a thug whom she meets online to put her out of her misery. That sounds like a feel-good romcom next to Towelhead, a drama so bleak that the darkest character is not even the pedophile who falls for a 13-year-old girl, but the child’s monstrous mother. Can you guess who plays her?
“She’s just the nastiest,” says Bello, laughing. “So many actors say you have to find something you like in each character. I’ve never bought that. I think there are people in the world who are plain mean. Not many, but some. So that’s how I decided to play her — without sympathy.”
But how can she live for months on end with a character for whom she has no respect? “I don’t live with my characters,” she shoots back. “I can’t take them home. I’m a mother.” It transpires that, as a consumer, she has no truck with the serious or somber. “All the films I like are escapist. I don’t want to have reality thrown in my face when I go to the cinema. I’ve never been a cinephile. My friends give me DVDs of Bergman or Truffaut, and I never watch them.”
This is ironic, not only because Bello specializes in making exactly the kind of films she does not watch, but because if Bergman were alive today, and working in America — big ifs, admittedly — it would not be far-fetched to see Bello’s poise and emotional intensity as a good fit for his austere temperament. “I know!” she says, agreeing with me — and yet, I sense, not quite agreeing. Minutes later, she is confiding that the person she would most like to be is Oprah Winfrey.
Of course, there’s no reason why the nature of an actor’s work should be reflected in his or her personality. But, perhaps because of the emotional investment demanded of performers, we come to expect it. Certainly you can trace the fieriness that Bello brought to A History of Violence or Coyote Ugly back to her blue-collar, Polish-Italian family. The Bellos are, she says, a boisterous clan. “When I brought boyfriends home, they would ask me, ‘Why is everyone shouting?’ I’d tell them, ‘They’re not shouting. They’re communicating.’”
Bello came to acting relatively late, having initially studied law; she was 30 when she landed her first major roles, including a regular gig on ER. But even when she was told by casting directors that she had no talent, she drew on reserves of self-belief and a vague sense of benevolent fate. She tells about how she was plodding through New York after being sacked by her agent, when she saw a gold shoe in the snow. She tried it on and it fitted, so she took it home. Now she updates me on recent developments.
“Guess what? This is pretty fascinating. I was going back to New York for a few weeks and a friend suggested I perform some ritual to thank the universe for my good luck. So I brought my gold shoe along. I got a piece of cardboard, and wrote on it, ‘Miracle shoe, size 8. If this shoe fits you, please take it. It brought me good luck, and now I want to pass it on to you, whoever you are.’ I don’t know who got it — I put it right next to a methadone clinic, so maybe it’s gone to someone who’s really struggling. When I left, I was crying with joy at being able to pass it on.”
The tears are falling again now. Bello, who has already written an unpublished novel about celebrity called Under the Blonde, dabs her eyes and tells me that this Cinderella saga inspired her to write a book of short stories about miracles. I can’t vouch for its literary merit, but Oprah is going to love it.
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