Lili Taylor is one of those rare actors who makes whatever project she is in feel classier, no matter how small her part. (The few other actors who manage that, since you ask, are Parker Posey, Alfre Woodard, Kathryn Hahn and Chris Cooper.) She would always rather take an interesting minor role over a bland major one, and she then plays it with such punch and personality that she nearly steals the show. In 1989’s Say Anything, she took what could have been a thankless side role – John Cusack’s platonic best friend – and made it the joyful moral centre of the film. In Six Feet Under she darkened the mood yet further when she turned up in the second series as the fretful and furtive Lisa. Only occasionally has a starring role good enough to deserve her come along, such as her extraordinary turn as Valerie Solanas in 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol, a biopic of the woman who wrote the infamous SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto and very nearly killed Warhol in 1968.
“Solanas was only [mentioned] in two books, no one could handle her. So [director] Mary Harron did all this research, and that was really cool, from a feminist perspective and from a historical perspective. We may not like this woman, but we need to look at this woman,” Taylor says. “That was one of my favourite [jobs], but it was also hard because it set the bar so high. I had to realise that it wasn’t personal when that kind of role didn’t come around again.”
Taylor, 53, has always been a notably private actor, giving few interviews and revealing very little in them. So I am surprised by the sparky, open woman – still as girlishly fresh-faced as in her film debut, Mystic Pizza, 32 years ago – who greets me when we connect by Zoom. She is talking to me from her home in upstate New York, where she has been in lockdown with her husband, the poet and memoirist Nick Flynn, who occasionally shambles past in the background, and their 12-year-old daughter, Maeve. Flynn is best known for his 2004 book about his father, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, but he has also written about Taylor in the 2010 book The Ticking Is the Bomb, in which he describes, among other things, choosing whether to commit to her or another woman in the early days of their relationship. How does someone as private as Taylor cope with being married to a memoirist?
“No one’s ever asked that question – thank you,” she says with heavy feeling. “Yeah man, these poets and memoirists, they don’t have a problem putting their shit out there! Some [of Flynn’s books] I don’t read. I might not be able to read the next book. You’ll see …”
It is a testament to Taylor’s popularity that lockdown temporarily kiboshed not one but three projects she was about to start: an Amazon series, a TV series and a one-woman show called Birdland, “about my love of acting and birding and how the main skill for both is listening, and how I’m not very good at it”, she says. Although, given that she asks my children’s ages at the beginning of the interview, and remembers them an hour later, I bet she is amazing at birdwatching.
One job she did finish before the virus hit was the new series of Perry Mason, in which she plays a religious mother torn between her daughter and the church. Even though she is onscreen for far too short a time, Taylor manages to convey a whole character just in the way she stares at her daughter, and how she grips her notebook. She agreed to be in Perry Mason because she knew it would be “a collaborative experience”, in which she could work with the director, the props team and the wardrobe department to shape her character. This was how it was when she was the darling of 1990s indie cinema, working with Robert Altman (Short Cuts and Pret-à-Porter), Allison Anders (Four Rooms) and John Waters (Pecker), “with everyone in it together to create something”.
Like so many of the best female actors – such as Glenn Close and Jessica Lange – Taylor has increasingly worked in TV rather than film, acting in Six Feet Under, the American Crime series and now Perry Mason. This much-vaunted golden age of TV – which Six Feet Under helped to kick off – feels, Taylor says, like the golden age of independent cinema in the 1990s, with that shared respect for great storytelling and the variety of roles for women, “but with more capital”.
Taylor looks at those “golden age” tags with some scepticism, however. For a start, 90s cinema was riddled with sexism and worse, with Harvey Weinstein representing its worst extremes. When the stories about Weinstein came out, Taylor was only surprised “by the extent of it, and the patriarchal system’s support of it. I always knew [Weinstein] was a pig. I didn’t know he was a rapist and serial abuser,” she says. She never worked with him, but only “because he HATED me. People would tell me: ‘It’s true, he won’t even see you [for a role].’ I could not get a job with Miramax. Granted, a character like Valerie Solanas is not really his cup of tea … ”
When she was only 23, the extremely un-ugly Taylor was cast as “the ugly girl” in the now almost unwatchable 1991 film Dogfight, in which River Phoenix and his friends compete to find the ugliest date. How did it feel to be labelled like that so young?
“Well, we tried to get around it by getting more into how narrow the standards were for beauty … ” she begins. But when she sees my sceptical face she concedes: “I know, it was a stretch. It was a studio movie.”
It was shortly after the release of I Shot Andy Warhol that it was reported that Taylor had been harassed by her ex-boyfriend, the actor Michael Rapaport. He was charged with two counts of harassment, to which he pleaded guilty. I ask her if this was all going on during the shooting of the film, but I feel trepidatious approaching the subject, certain she will shut it down. Instead, she seizes on it with appetite.
“It was after. But it would have been handy [if it had been during] because I could have used the Society for Cutting Up Men … Boy, if I’d had [Solanas] on my side then, think about that!” she laughs.
I ask if the experience affected her later relationships with men.
“That was hard. I’m not blaming myself, because it’s not my fault that I chose this person. But it made sense to me on a psychological level: I thought about myself in such an undervalued way that I didn’t know I had the right to privacy. That’s some low self-esteem. So since then has been about getting some self-esteem, which has been harder,” she says.
These days, when she sees photos of Rapaport in the press it feels “neutral”. “And that’s really cool, because there were times when it felt like, this will not pass. And it did. Things pass,” she says.
Taylor is bipolar, something she inherited from her father, although he was “bad”, she says, whereas hers is “much more mild, like half of my dad’s gene got sliced”. Solanas, who died in 1988, was a paranoid schizophrenic, which is obviously extremely different, but I ask Taylor if her experience with mental health issues fed into her performance.
“Well, I wasn’t on medication at that point, so I was probably exhausted. [Taking medication] is not a moral issue, but I think during I Shot Andy Warhol I thought it was, so I was like: ‘You can do this, you just work harder, you’re not working hard enough.’ All that stuff,” she says.
So at what point did she accept she needed help?
It was in 1997, she says, “when I had a nervous breakdown on stage in Three Sisters. The only line I could remember was: ‘I want to go to Moscow.’ Amy Irving took one look at me and bellowed: ‘Get her understudy on NOW!’ And that was that,” she gives a small self-mocking laugh. “I’ve suffered, but life hasn’t been hard in that same way [since starting medication].”
Taylor grew up in a suburb of Chicago, the second youngest of six children. She knew she wanted to be an actor from the age of four, and she was going out to auditions as a teenager and studying at the famous Piven Theatre Workshop. It was there that she met her friend John Cusack, with whom she would later co-star in Say Anything and High Fidelity. When she was 21, she was cast in her breakthrough role as one of the stars of the much-loved 1988 film, Mystic Pizza. Today, Taylor is held in enormous affection by women of my generation, which is to say, women in their 40s. I suspect this is at least partly because we first encountered her in Mystic Pizza and Say Anything, and her roles in both are about the importance of female friendship.
“Maybe that’s one reason Mystic Pizza has stayed around so long, because there’s not a lot of movies about female friendship, not that Sex and the City shit, not females [from] a masculine point of view,” she says.
I tell Taylor two of my favourite movies from that decade are Mystic Pizza and Steel Magnolias, two films about female friendship at opposite ends of the age spectrum.
“And Julia was in both of those movies,” she points out, referring to Julia Roberts, her co-star in Mystic Pizza. “That’s so interesting, because Pretty Woman was so different. She has those two sides, the subject and object.”
Roberts and Taylor stayed in touch after Mystic Pizza and met up shortly before Pretty Woman came out. How did Taylor react when her friend told her she had made a romcom about a sex worker?
Taylor mugs wide-eyed horror. “Are you kidding? And back then I was very much in my angry 20s. I was like – not to her – ‘Are you fucking kidding me? And they’re making it nice?!’ Oh, I was furious!” she laughs.
She and Roberts acted together again in Altman’s Pret-à-Porter. “I remember being in the back of the car with her and the paparazzi were chasing us and she was slumped down in her seat. I said to her: ‘You’re a prisoner! This is so hard.’ She side-eyed me and probably just nodded.” Everyone knew, she says, that Roberts would be famous when they made Mystic Pizza.
“She had this thing that famous people have, this capacity to carry other people’s projection. For some people it gets too much and they die, but some people can just carry it,” she says.
Does she think it got too much for her Dogfight co-star Phoenix?
“He wasn’t doing heroin when we did Dogfight, but he was drinking a lot. I knew he was an alcoholic, and I knew he was in a lot of pain, and he was medicating himself. I think he wasn’t able to tolerate a lot of things that were in his psyche. It was after that that he started doing heroin and I was not surprised that he died because I’m an alcoholic, too. I’ve been sober for a long time, but I know what the disease will do to you, and he was going down hard and it was a matter of time if he didn’t get sober.”
Despite her prolific career, Taylor always has to force herself to say yes to things. “My first instinct is to say no, and I have to fight that in me,” she says. When a friend wanted to fix her up with Flynn, she initially said no and walked out, but then decided to say yes and walked back in, “and I’m very glad I did”. During lockdown, she has been saying yes to new ways of doing work, such as the possibility of doing her one-woman show about birding online, or as an audio performance. Birding, too, has taught her how to say yes. Instead of just lurking on message boards, thanks to social media she can now follow in real time when a bird has been spotted somewhere. “And I’ll say to myself, something’s happening in Central Park! Why don’t you go?” she says, eyes wide with excitement at the thought of running out the door to pursue a beautiful bird, one delicate, strong and extraordinary figure chasing down another.
Perry Mason is on Sky Atlantic
