Laura Dern and Andra Day: ‘With Bradley Cooper, we knew we were safe to dive in and share our secrets’

One is the Oscar-winning star of ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Blue Velvet’. The other is a Grammy-winning singer who played Billie Holiday to an Oscar nod. And now they’re best friends in Bradley Cooper’s new comedy drama ‘Is This Thing On?’. They speak to Adam White about David Lynch, breaking rules, and the evils of ‘preventative Botox’

Laura Dern and Andra Day: ‘Bradley Cooper said: What are we missing? You inform us about these female characters. You help us build them, and this sisterhood’ (Charlie Clift)

Not to get TMI on body types,” Laura Dern explains, “but I have a radically tall torso.” It’s one of the reasons the 5ft 11in actor was cast opposite the 6ft 2in Will Arnett in their new film Is This Thing On?, a sensitive comedy drama about divorce by Bradley Cooper. “It means that when Will and I are sitting side by side, we’re the same height. And it’s crazy to be in a scene with a male actor, and we’re actually looking straight into each other’s eyes, you know?”

The couple they play needed to be evenly matched, she says. “When she tells him, ‘Something is wrong [between us], this isn’t working,’ I had to be formidable coming at him.” Has Dern ever been turned down for jobs because she’s so tall? She practically spit-takes. “Oh, 150 times! I was 5ft 11 at 12 years old and acting already, so I was losing parts constantly!”

We’re in a hotel suite in London, Dern sherbet and shiny in a yellow grecian gown. Next to her is the actor who plays her onscreen bestie, the singer and Oscar nominee Andra Day, of The United States vs Billie Holiday. Day, possibly compensating for her regular, human height, has wrapped herself in an enviably cosy-looking yet ludicrously capacious caramel coat. Arnett is roaming the halls outside, as is Peter Crouch – presumably to interview him for his podcast, or to attend some kind of long famous person convention I wasn’t invited to.

In Is This Thing On?, Arnett plays Alex, a restless dad of a certain age, who finds in stand-up comedy an unexpected means to process his separation from his wife, Tess. Much has been made (at least in the UK) of the film’s John Bishop connection, Arnett inspired to co-write the movie (with Mark Chappell and Cooper) after meeting him on a boat in Amsterdam a few years ago and hearing his origin story: his split, his decision to take to the stage at a comedy club rather than pay the entry fee, his jokes about his mid-life crisis and his wife. Just dudes being dudes, talking about the missus on a barge. But the movie, to its credit, isn’t at all the Arnett show. Dern is granted serious dimension, as Tess too barrels down a new path in life that opens up her confidence, her rage, and her sexuality. And Day, in lesser hands playing the thankless best friend role, gets to be funny and peeved and frustrated, and just as rich with contradictions as the movie’s central pair.

“I’m tired of seeing flat female characters because someone was too lazy to write them,” Day says. “But it was the generosity of Bradley to have this beautiful script, but also to rely on [us], too.”

I once said to my mom that David Lynch’s unconditional trust in me is something I’d only ever felt from her. It’s that kind of love where they just believe in you so much...

Laura Dern

Dern nods. “Bradley said, ‘What are we missing? You inform us about these female characters. You help us build them, and this sisterhood.’”

Dern and Day first met briefly a few years ago. “We felt a genuine connection, for sure,” Dern says. “Even though we were in completely different worlds at that moment, because I was at a show of hers where she was performing, I felt a kinship immediately. So when Bradley told us we were getting to do this, we knew we were safe to dive in and share our secrets.”

For Dern, Is This Thing On? feels like a departure from the rich white ladies she’s been playing for a while, in the likes of Big Little Lies or Marriage Story, for which she won an Oscar in 2020: those big, broad, meme-able glamazons spitting with fire and sass. Here she’s… real, I suppose. And closer to her natural temperature, that luminous intelligence of hers, reared in films like Jurassic Park or Smooth Talk. Dern herself is Hollywood royalty – the daughter of actors Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern – by way of a wise owl. She’s an out-and-proud cheerleader of other women, and impassioned when talk turns to feminism, or ageing, or plastic surgery. Day sort of basks in her, as does everyone else in the room with us. “Preach,” Day hoots at the end of one of Dern’s full-hearted aphorisms, at first apprehensively, then unapologetically, as if realising that the moment really called for it, actually.

Bradley Cooper directs Laura Dern and Will Arnett on the set of ‘Is This Thing On?’ (Searchlight Pictures)

Day admits that all of this – acting, film junketing – still feels new to her. She was a Grammy-nominated singer before she auditioned to play Billie Holiday, but movie-making brought with it a level of attention she wasn’t used to (as well as a Grammy for the film’s soundtrack). “If I was aware of the depth of what I was getting into, I think I would have run away,” she laughs. “You’re always worried about not being good enough; asking ‘am I gonna mess this up?’. But I’ve realised that those butterflies you get… the pressure cooker sometimes makes the best meal.”

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“And you were playing the most iconic singer of all time, and you were incredible,” Dern gushes. Day squeals, then turns to me. “See, this is what happens when you’re sitting next to Laura Dern…”

Much like Arnett’s character in Is This Thing On?, Day ventured into a creative unknown in her thirties. “Even once you’ve reached something, there is still more,” she says. “You don’t have to accept the idea that there’s something wrong with you if you feel restless. But as you get older, it seems like there are fewer permissions to do that.”

Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett and Andra Day in ‘Is This Thing On?’ (Searchlight Pictures)

Dern agrees. “I can recount formative moments in my life – saying at 11 that I’m going to be a professional actor, or falling in love for the first time – and I think I believed there was a stopping point to it all eventually,” she says. “Like, I’ve achieved those things, so now I need to stick to them. That’s what the world told me. But, actually, we need to let ourselves be ever-evolving.”

For all of their additional work, both Dern and Day are most associated with filmmakers no one else could ever really emulate. Dern was the prolific muse of freaky visionary David Lynch, who’d cast her not only as a beguiling girl-next-door in Blue Velvet, but a carnivorous temptress “hotter than Georgia asphalt” in Wild at Heart, an otherworldly FBI secretary in Twin Peaks, and a big ol’ !????!! in Inland Empire. Day, meanwhile, has found a home within the kamikaze worlds of Lee Daniels, of Precious and The Paperboy fame. He tapered down her ebullience to a jagged simmer as Billie Holiday, then asked her to play an addicted ex-con single mother to at least one son possessed by demons in The Deliverance.

“You know that you’re in the hands of somebody who really does care about you,” Day says, of Daniels, admitting she would even play “a live-action Kermit the Frog” for him if he wanted her to, no questions asked.

Laura Dern and David Lynch on the set of ‘Inland Empire’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

“We found our person, right?” Dern says. “And my person told me that I can do anything.” She thinks back to Inland Empire, Lynch’s final feature film, which coasts between real and unreal, logic and abstraction. It’s ostensibly about a woman in trouble, but the woman is also an actor and a sex worker; a ghoul and a traumatised wife in 1930s Poland. “He says, ‘Now you’re going to do something – I don’t even know what it is yet, but you’re gonna show it to me, and then I’m gonna figure out what it is that I’ve been dreaming of.’” She smiles. “That kind of faith is incredible. I once said to my mom that David’s unconditional trust in me is something I’d only ever felt from her. It’s that kind of love where they just believe in you so much. [He] saw things in me I didn’t see in myself.”

They’ve both been afforded real space, in other words, to grow and mature in the spotlight. But Dern worries it’s an anomaly overall. “Lately, I have never seen more shame around ageing and women as public figures, and it’s just so tragic.” She says she’s friends with Sheryl Crow, and found herself just gazing at her a few days ago. “She’s more badass than ever. She sounds better. She’s hotter than ever! And yet, [we’re still hearing] this old story of needing to hide, or fix all the stuff that shows our wisdom.”

Day agrees. “I’m doing away with the social rules of what you’re supposed to be doing at this age. I’m not going to do any of the shrinking that people or society has – even unconsciously – required of me. I’m going to break the rules, actually.”

Andra Day in ‘The United States vs Billie Holiday’ (Hulu/Moviestore/Shutterstock)

Dern says that, being raised in a Hollywood family, she would overhear conversations about ageing as a woman in the industry. “But it’s so much worse now than for my mother’s generation,” she sighs. “I remember, when I was a child, hearing her friends talk about the pressure at 70 to get a facelift if you wanted to keep working. But now I’m hearing my 21-year-old daughter’s friends say, ‘You should get Botox now so that you’re never wrinkled.’”

“Preventative Botox!” Day adds.

“It’s tragic!” Dern reiterates. “So the idea that we’re advancing in empowerment is bats***. And these are societal norms that have been created, most of the time, from people’s fears and insecurities. And it’s all consumerism, right? It’s like the tobacco industry saying smoking looks cool. Look at the Marlboro Man! They’re just making money. They’re saying we’ll have a whole generation of girls buying our products if we say it’s ‘preventative’. But we’re supposed to be the ones to not buy into it, right?”

The publicists around us enthusiastically nod in unison.

“So I look forward to watching all of us grow together into comfort in our own skin,” Dern concludes. “And, as artists, for us to grow into portraying those truths, whether that’s the insecurity about it, or the rage about it, or – hopefully – the acceptance, too.”

The room is plunged into a kind of awed silence.

“Listen,” Day laughs, finally. “She says something, and that’s the new truth.”

‘Is This Thing On?’ is in cinemas