Imogen Poots has been thinking about a Sam Shepard quote: “People here have become the people they’re pretending to be.”
Those 10 words, from a poem in his “Motel Chronicles” collection, are kind of about her character in “Hedda,” the quietly courageous Thea. But they’re also kind of about everything. After 20 years of acting in movies, television and on the stage, Poots is having a clarifying moment. And Shepard’s words somehow get to the heart of it all: the disorienting paradox of attempting to work as an artist in a big industry like Hollywood and preserving your soul in the process.
“I was always clear about what I wanted to do professionally, if only I could get there, in independent cinema and theater,” Poots told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “But only in the last two years, something’s clicked.”
The 36-year-old English actor has always managed to elegantly navigate her way through the distracting noise of franchises and fame and find the types of interesting filmmakers, stories and projects she’d always dreamed of, working with the likes of Peter Bogdanovich, Terrence Malick, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Imelda Staunton along the way.
But this year has been particularly special with three films that she’s enormously proud to be part of: sharing the screen with the great Nina Hoss in Nia DaCosta’s fiery”Hedda” (streaming on Prime Video), delving into the throes of an affair, with Brett Goldstein, in the romantic drama “All of You” (streaming on Apple TV) and giving herself over to what may just be remembered as a defining performance in Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water” (in theaters in Los Angeles and New York, nationwide on Jan. 9).
“You can make these films that simply don’t find their home, or don’t find the right home. And that can be quite devastating,” Poots said. “I feel really lucky that each of these projects found the place that understood what they had in their hands.”
Being in Kristen Stewart’s gaze
While all three films had independent spirits, it’s “The Chronology of Water” that was the biggest unknown — a daring and provocative adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about escaping an abusive home, dashed dreams of competitive swimming and losing herself in sex, drugs and alcohol before finding her voice through writing.
“This person’s life is so rich with inconsistencies and successes and sabotage. She’s kind of like the weather,” Poots said. “It’s a very present film, despite the fact it’s about memory and reframing that. It really is about being completely present, sometimes too present, like egregiously present in proximity to someone’s life and someone’s body.”
The intensity of it required total trust in Stewart, an artist she’d only admired from a few degrees away until they decided to dive into the deep end together. Work didn’t stop at wrap, she said. It was always spilling out over texts and calls and videos. And it all just felt right, a creative collaboration like she’d never experienced before.
“The two of us only know how to do it this way, which is to completely hurl yourself into it,” Poots said. “The stakes were so high for one another. We didn’t want to let the other one down.”
Someone said something recently to Stewart that she found very illuminating: They never bring the baggage of knowing that Poots has been in other movies when watching her in something. It’s like they’re always meeting her anew.
“It’s because she’s not like an ‘actress,'” Stewart said. “She’s like giving you her life, and it’s full and it’s so generous … you never really know where it’s going to go because she’s, she’s not planning it. She’s genuinely trust falling.”
If there had been any hesitation, Stewart said, there’s no way it would have worked. On screen, Poots just feels alive. And that’s exactly what Stewart needed: a person who knows how to live life, unselfconsciously.
Poots finds it a little embarrassing, even pointless, to talk about the craft of acting. She winces when she hears words like “brave” tossed around about her performance. Is it, she wonders?
“It’s my body, it’s my voice. That does feel very exposing,” Poots said. “But at the same time, what are you going to do? Like, you have this one life. And one day, if I make it that far, I’ll be an old woman and I’ll be like, ‘It’s good that you did something that mattered to you.'”
At the film’s world premiere at Cannes earlier this year, both Stewart and Poots sat there shaking — vibrating for one another, wanting the other to soar.
“We really did something,” Poots said. “We did it together with every cell in our body.”
Staying authentic and finding her people
Acting in the film business is hard for all its myriad contradictions, and projects like “Chronology” and “Hedda” and “All of You” don’t come along every day. It demands a patience and self-awareness to understand what’s right for you and what’s not.
“It’s creative and it’s arbitrary in the one sense, and other ways it’s very, very specific and precise,” Poots said. “You’re fighting against this unknowable, very sort of shiftable force, which is trend. And you’re trying to stay authentic in the face of that.”
She thinks of someone like her friend Jesse Eisenberg appearing in a Superman film, and Stewart, who climbed out of “Twilight” and built a brilliant body of work despite that, and how good you have to be to go back to working with auteurs.
In the beginning of her career, she was happy to take the work where she could, to try new things, to throw paint at the wall, so to speak, and figure out what felt right and what didn’t. And she looks back on jobs that might not have been the best fit with empathy. It’s important to learn what you’re not happy doing, as well.
“It doesn’t matter if everyone around you is like, ‘But it should be fun,’ like, ‘Go to the party!'” she said. “You don’t have to do that, I don’t think. You don’t have to be that uncomfortable. You can find people where you’re on the same page.”
Now she has a resolve that only comes with experience.
“There are such amazing actors working today and such incredible directors. It’s very easy to just to sort of give in and be like, well, everyone else is doing that, so I guess I should. So you have to keep putting the gold into the other pot,” Poots said. “There’s too much potential not to be making original work. Underestimating audiences is a huge thing. They’re so much smarter and more imaginative than the system knows what to do with.”
Next up is a reunion with her “Green Room” director Jeremy Saulnier for a new film with Chase Sui Wonders and Cory Michael Smith. It felt like coming home, she said.
“I don’t know what the alternative is,” she said. “The alternative is to do something where it’s like, oh, they lit you and you look like a supermodel and you didn’t eat for 10 weeks and you made a picture that’s kind of innocuous but people will watch occasionally. That sounds like I’d rather do something else for a living.”
Associated Press reporter Sian Watson contributed from London.
