Over her decades-long acting career, Julianne Nicholson has shared the screen with Meryl Streep in August: Osage County, Margot Robbie in I, Tonya and Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire. But it wasn’t until starring alongside Kate Winslet in the HBO drama Mare of Easttown (which was such a pop culture phenomenon it inspired a Saturday Night Live sketch) that Nicholson won an Emmy and really started getting her flowers.
Right now, though, the American is enjoying the buzz around her lead performance in Janet Planet, the directorial debut from revered playwright Annie Baker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her 2013 play The Flick. The A24 film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September and is currently screening at Melbourne International Film Festival.
“People are responding, loving it, and that’s such a nice feeling. Because there’s no fireworks. There’s no splashy costumes. It’s a quiet little movie,” she tells Broadsheet from her home in Hampshire, on the south coast of England. She’s wearing friendship bracelets in preparation for her next big project: taking her teenage daughter to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour next week.
The pensive, off-beat film has received critical acclaim from both the New York Times, (which called it “a tiny masterpiece”) and The Atlantic (“visually alive and inventive”). Set in rural Massachusetts in the summer of 1991, it follows single mother Janet (Nicholson) and three characters that enter her orbit – an old friend and two would-be suitors – but she’s seen mostly from the perspective of her pre-teen daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler).
In interviews, Baker has described it as a film about falling out of love with your mother, though Nicholson says that’s not necessarily how they discussed the dynamic during production. “It was more about keeping these two people – as close as they are – also keeping them separate,” she says. “Keeping them individuals within this very intimate relationship.”
Nicholson and Baker first connected in 2009, while working at Playwright Horizons, an off-Broadway theatre in New York. Nicholson was starring in This and Baker was staging her play Circle Mirror Transformation.
“She’s the coolest person in any room she’s ever in. I wouldn’t go as far as to say [I was] intimidated, but I just thought she was the coolest,” Nicholson says.
Years later, Baker remembered Nicholson and invited her to a bench in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park to talk about the Janet Planet script. There, the pair discovered a surprise joint connection to Amherst, where the film is set. Baker grew up there, and Nicholson lived in nearby Montague from ages seven to 11.
“I know that part of the world. I felt like I knew those people and having invitation to basically go back in time to my childhood was just amazing.”
The pair spent a year texting back and forth and building out the background of Janet Planet. They shared stories about their mothers and memories of landmarks they both remembered from childhood. The resulting world feels lived-in and familiar. Nicholson’s performance is the rare kind where you forget you’re watching an actor and start to think of Janet as a real person.
“I think it’s just there. I think that’s just sort of a gift. You don’t have to force something. Knowing a place so intimately, it’s in your body and I feel like that comes through,” she says.
Up next, Nicholson stars in the first season of a yet-to-be-named series from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman and in Dope Girls, a new show from Australian director Shannon Murphy – Nicholson sent her a gushing DM after watching Murphy’s film Babyteeth. Both shows are yet to confirm air dates.
“I’d love to do something a little more lighthearted someday,” she says. “It’s why I did the Weird Al movie, because after Blonde it was just like, ‘Please, I have to do something where I’m not ripping my heart out’.”
For now, though, she’s excited to be taking a break at home, with nothing on the horizon:
“If it goes maybe eight months, I’ll start getting antsy, but hopefully I won’t have to get antsy.”
