The Bold Testament of Jennifer Connelly

by Natasha Wolff | March 5, 2014 8:10 am

Inside the volcano Jennifer Connelly was about to learn the truth. The actress was in Iceland, taking a break from filming the biblical-disaster epic Noah, when she and her family decided to visit one of the island nation’s famous lava pits. It seemed, as so many things do, like a good idea at the time.

“Looking back, it’s one of the dodgiest things I’ve ever participated in,” recalls the actress, now safely ensconced in the lounge of a Tribeca hotel. She says that she and her brood, outfitted in hard hats and issued flashlights, were lowered into the volcano on a rickety scaffold and told to roam free. But there was something slightly off about the people operating the tour, the people Connelly assumed knew something—anything—about volcanoes.

“I thought they were geologists, these people escorting us into a cavern full of holes and encouraging us to run around,” she says, “but it turned out they were out-of-work actors. I was like, really?”

Jennifer Connelly isn’t known for bailing on challenging situations. She’s been in the public eye for most of her life, while managing to hold on to her privacy; when she left Yale, it was to attend Stanford; and she’s been married to a fellow actor for 11 years, a Hollywood eternity[1]. It should come as no surprise that the 43-year-old actress jumped into a volcano to have a bit of fun, or that a sweeping project like Noah caught her eye.

Jennifer Connelly and Russell Crowe in Noah

The movie, Connelly’s second with her Requiem for a Dream director, Darren Aronofsky, is a big-budget retelling of the rain-soaked Bible tale in which she plays Naameh, wife of Russell Crowe’s titular reluctant mariner. It’s a role that took the Oscar-winning mother of three around the world and subjected her to enough simulated disaster that a trip into Vesuvius’ Icelandic cousin with a troupe of thespians was definitely gratuitous.

Noah[2] was not an easy movie to make. In the beginning, Hurricane Sandy decimated parts of the East Coast and halted Aronofsky’s $100-million plus production by rendering inaccessible a three-story, 450-foot-long ark built along the Long Island Sound. “I take it that the irony of a massive storm holding up the production of Noah is not lost,” Connelly’s co-star Emma Watson tweeted[3] when the storm hit. Weather wasn’t the only obstacle the film faced, however.

“To be honest, Jennifer’s role was a bit underwritten when she took it on,” Aronofsky, a co-writer of the film, admits. Connelly’s take is a bit more diplomatic. “You could see there was an interesting opportunity in the part,” she says, “but the story is Noah. I don’t think the focus for Darren was on developing Naameh.”

So she embarked on finding depth to the character. “I didn’t want to just have her be a sidekick we didn’t get to learn about,” says Connelly, who re-read the Book of Genesis to prepare for her role. “I wanted people to understand who she was. I thought a lot about what a woman at that time might be doing, what her contributions might have been. We built on that in the script.”

A scene from Noah

That collaboration impressed Aronofsky, who welcomed her input. “I worked with Jennifer on Requiem 14 years ago,” he says, “and to not work with someone for that long and see what a master she had become was a tremendous experience. This was like working with a completely different actor.”

Considering Connelly first appeared on screen at 14, she’s seemed in some ways like an entirely new person in each of her roles, developing from the young heroine of Labyrinth into an ingénue in The Rocketeer and a commanding force in A Beautiful Mind. And while she brushes off the notion that there’s a calculated arc to her career, Connelly does admit to being choosy when it comes to projects she’ll take on.

“There’s a wish list of elements: a great director, a great part I can do something with and interesting people to work with,” she says. “It’s not a perfect world, so sometimes you get a great director but not a great part, or a great part with someone you don’t know. You compromise.”

She smiles slyly and adds, “Not every film I do ticks every box.”

Lately, though, Connelly’s been giving more projects the opportunity to do so. After an almost two-year break around the birth of her daughter Agnes, she’s got a full slate of forthcoming films, including Noah, Winter’s Tale (also starring Russell Crowe), director Claudia Llosa’s Aloft and Shelter[4], the first directorial effort from one Paul Bettany, the actor who just happens to be married to—you guessed it—Jennifer Connelly.

NEXT: “I think he felt his wife was the least of his worries.”[5]

Connelly and husband Paul Bettany on the set of Shelter

“It was kind of strange, going to work in the morning with the director,” she says of her involvement with the film, which finds her playing a homeless woman. “But it really seemed to come quite naturally to him—phew—and it was an amazing experience to have had together.”

Not that Connelly received any special treatment.

“We’ve been married for 11 years, we have kids together, so I feel confident in our ability to navigate situations,” she says. “I had this fantasy that we’d talk about scenes all day. In reality, if the man sat down, there was a line of people wanting to talk to him. Since we moved so quickly, I think he felt his wife was the least of his worries.”

While talking about Shelter, Connelly’s noticeably excited. It’s something that happens any time we discuss Bettany or any of their three kids—Kai, 16; Stellan, 10; and Agnes, who’s 2.

Having movie-star parents[6] doesn’t register with them. “I think they’re interested in the same way all kids are interested in what their parents do, but it doesn’t come up,” she says. “It affords them some fun experiences. They’ve seen hardly any of my movies, but they’ve been on almost every set.”

Given the opportunity, though, Connelly—who’s been the face of Balenciaga, Revlon and Shiseido—would rather nudge her family further off the beaten path.

“This past summer, while Paul was working, I took the kids on a road trip around the States,” she says. “We did mountain biking in the Mojave and we went hiking in Zion National Park and in Aspen[7]. It all went well, considering I’m the only one who can drive.”

Apparently, there are few adventures Connelly wouldn’t embrace. During our talk she mentions plans to ski the Alps and, of course, that fateful trip to the volcano. The one thing the star of Noah doesn’t seem too keen to do is climb aboard a boat.

So how does she think she’d fare on an ark?

“I would not want to be on a cruise ship,” Connelly says carefully. “Some ferry crossings I’m not too thrilled about. But this is a very different circumstance. If it’s ‘get on the vessel or perish with the rest of humanity,’ I’d be happy to be invited aboard.”

The same logic applied to filming Noah. Connelly was thrilled to be involved, but could have done with a slightly drier experience: “I had a lot of scenes that were harrowing in their subject matter. Creatively I enjoyed them, but they were the most taxing. Then there were the scenes beneath huge water towers, which were never fun. But you can’t complain. That’s what you sign up for with a movie called Noah.”

Click through the gallery to see the Jennifer Connelly cover shoot[8].

MORE:

Lupita Nyong’O: A Defining Moment[9]
Julianne Moore: The Most Honest Actress in Hollywood[10]
The Rising Action of Evangeline Lilly[11]

Source URL: https://dujour.com/news/jennifer-connelly-noah-shelter-paul-bettany-marriage/