‘This happens and it’s OK’: Olivia Colman gets honest about motherhood with ‘Lost Daughter’
The Lost Daughter.”
In the feverish Netflix drama (now in theaters, streaming Friday), the Oscar winner plays a divorced, middle-aged literature professor named Leda on a solo vacation in Greece. Lounging on the beach one day, she encounters an arresting but anxious young mother (Dakota Johnson), and soon starts reflecting on her own supposed shortcomings as a mom: how she snapped at her children during playtime, or felt quiet relief when she traveled out of town for work.
“It’s interesting to find out that you’re not alone,” says Colman, 47, who has three kids with writer Ed Sinclair, her husband of 20 years. “My family, I would die for them. But when they were smaller and I was exhausted, I had those moments of, ‘Just leave me alone for a minute’ or ‘Put the telly on’ – which I disagreed with, but (to hell with) it sometimes. And you felt bad, because you were that mummy who was trying to sleep on the floor.”
Holiday streaming guide:One of these movies is what you should watch tonight
“You’re like the 10th person to say to me, ‘I used to fall asleep when I was playing with my little kids,'” says Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film’s writer and director, sitting with Colman at a Midtown hotel in October. “I was like, ‘Me, too! They’re OK, they’re right next to you.’ Sometimes you’re just like, ‘I need to close my eyes for a minute.'”
its debut at Venice Film Festival in September. Colman earned best actress nods from the Critics Choice and Golden Globe awards, while Gyllenhaal was nominated for best director at the Globes.
‘Can you get on a plane in 10 minutes?’:Maggie Gyllenhaal recalls surreal ‘Lost Daughter’ Venice win
“I hadn’t played a Leda before, or seen a woman like her depicted so honestly on the screen, so that was intriguing,” Colman says of the character, who craves more time to devote to her studies and whose eyes wander when she meets a celebrated scholar (Peter Sarsgaard, Gyllenhaal’s real-life husband). The actress is heavily expected to earn her third Oscar nomination after a nod for last year’s “The Father” opposite Anthony Hopkins. In 2019, she won her first statue playing the acid-tongued Queen Anne in “The Favourite.”
Gyllenhaal, 44, adapted the film from Elena Ferrante’s 2008 book. She read the novel years ago and felt it said things “I had never actually heard out loud about being a mother, a lover and a thinking woman in the world.” (She shares two daughters – Ramona, 15, and Gloria Ray, 9 – with Sarsgaard.)
“I’ve spent so much of my life reading books, hearing songs and seeing movies where women are represented in a way that is actually more a fantasy of what we’re like,” Gyllenhaal says. “There’s so few representations that feel real, that you start to think, ‘Maybe there’s something wrong with me?'”
Ranked:The 10 best movies of 2021, from ‘The Power of the Dog’ to Diana drama ‘Spencer’
Gyllenhaal shoots and edits “Lost Daughter” like a horror movie, with close-ups of a younger Leda (Jessie Buckley) suffocating from her children’s cries and screams. Years later, Leda confesses to a stranger that she doesn’t feel like a “natural mother” and that it felt “amazing” when she left her family behind. But ultimately, “I went back because I’m their mother and I missed them,” Leda says. “I’m a selfish person.”
From ‘Ted Lasso’ to ‘Mare of Easttown’ to ‘Squid Game’
It’s not just women who relate to the film, either: “Fathers have come up to me with an equal sense of relief,” Buckley, 32, says later by Zoom. And some people have been haunted by it and just go, ‘Oh, my God, I need to run home to my children’ or ‘Oh, thank God I’m not such a bad parent.'”