The Polley principle - actress Sarah Polley - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1999 by Elizabeth Weitzman

Occasionally a young actor or actress comes along who is really an event. The buzz starts from inside the entertainment business, then works its way out to the audience, until suddenly it seems like he or she is the only one people want to know about. It's an exciting moment and it's exactly what's happening with actress Sarah Polley right now

Everything about Sarah Polley startles: her preternatural maturity, which scornfully redefines the loaded phrase "ex-child star"; her look, which begins with a comforting plainness and then shimmers into sodden luminosity; and most of all, her still, cryptic gaze, which draws you to the point of heartbreak and then defies you to assume any intimacy. In Polley's hands, a performance becomes a promise: With a dedication unsullied by display, she will do her best to untangle a single, abstruse mystery of humanity or, in her words, to find some kind of truth.

The twenty-year-old daughter of actors Michael Polley and the late Diane Polley has been acting in her native Canada since age four, most famously on a long-running family show called Road to Avonlea. It wasn't until director Atom Egoyan cast her as the teenage conscience of a shattered town in The Sweet Hereafter (1997), however, that she began attracting serious attention in the U.S. In that picture, as in Egoyan's Exotica (1995), and Doug Liman's recent Go, she astounded audiences with powerfully restrained portrayals far removed from the glib screen teenagers we're accustomed to. But despite the heat surrounding her, Polley was not born to be a superstar. Unlike many of her peers, who are celebrities onscreen and off, Polley is meticulous about remaining unknowable in both labor and life. Her interests do extend well beyond her own career - she's long been an activist and supporter of left-wing issues - but she avoids vocal promotion of her causes for fear of diminishing them. In 1995, she temporarily gave up acting to devote herself mare fully to politics; happily, she's currently finding room for both her passions.

In her new movie, Guinevere, Polley plays Harper Sloane, a lost soul who helplessly accepts a pre-determined destiny until she's seduced by Connie Fitzpatrick (Stephen Rea), a fiftyish photographer with a Pygmalion complex. Though the film itself grapples a bit awkwardly with their relationship, Polley never loses sight of her character's progression; it's a genuine thrill to watch as she gently peels away the layers of an increasingly intricate young woman. To the degree that she'll allow it, the same can be said about the actress herself.

ELIZABETH WEITZMAN: You recently said that every character you've played in the last couple of years has been in the same place as you at that moment. Is that also true for Harper?

SARAH POLLEY: I think Harper was different because when I played her I wasn't as generous a person as she is. She's inherently kind, while I thought of kindness as a sort of weakness. I've always been a bit of a tomboy and frightened by anything girly - or anything I associated with being female, even subconsciously.

EW: Harper starts out with no Idea about what she can or wants to do. You've been an actress for most of your life. Was her struggle for identity something you could relate to at all?

SP: I think it was her sense of failure, or lack of self-confidence, that I related to.

EW: How do you feel you've failed?

SP: It's less to do with external things. It's more that there are qualities in me I'm just not satisfied with. Of course, if I was satisfied with everything, I'd be a bitch. [laughs] Occasionally I think you feel like you've failed as a human being just by not being more advanced, or more brave, or more honest.

EW: There's this Intermingling of damage and strength behind many of your characters. Where does that come from?

SP: Acting is pretty personal, so I would say it definitely comes from me. I'm not one of those people who can just create a character and divorce myself from her.

EW: Do you feel particularly drawn to characters who are damaged in some way?

SP: Yeah, I do, actually. [laughs] No question.

EW: Why?

SP: Because I think the ways in which people are damaged are the ways in which they're strong. It's what makes people interesting - what they've overcome and how, and what they haven't and how that's become a good thing. Almost everyone's life is both a gorgeous story and a tragedy. I think being alive is really, really hard, and I'm constantly stunned and amazed by people who make it something interesting and beautiful.

EW: Which character that you've played do you most closely identify with?

SP: I'd say Nicole, from The Sweet Hereafter. There's a moment in her life when the world is no longer a two-dimensional place, and suddenly everyone comes alive to her and she sees very clearly all that's both good and bad about them. As opposed to the world that she inhabited in her childhood, which was very one-note - happy and content. Things suddenly get intense and terrifying, and she feels like she's walking through a minefield. I think there was probably a moment in my life when things came alive to me in that way. In a really awful and really great way.