Frances McDormands

Difficult Women
The actor has built a career, and a passionate fan
base, playing supporting roles; now, at 60, she has
become an unconventional star.

By JORDAN KISNER

OCT. 3, 2017

At 7 p.m. in Paris late last year, Frances McDormand

was marching from the Right Bank to the Left at an
extraordinary pace. Im practicing my route, she said,
speeding off in the wrong direction before stopping short.
Which way is the river? she asked, scanning the
narrow boulevards snaking in every direction.
I pointed left, and she took off so swiftly that I had to
run to catch up. When I did, she was cursing under her
breath at her faulty inner compass. She has lived most of
her life in Manhattan. She likes grids.
The route she was practicing began at the Centre
Pompidou, where she was performing with the experimental
theater company the Wooster Group, of which she has been
a member for nearly two decades. It ended at a friends
apartment off the Boulevard St.-Germain. The rest of the
company was lodged in the Marais, and McDormand had
been concerned about the state of their accommodations.
She likes to be sure that her co-stars are comfortably
situated and has been known to inspect and then personally
redecorate cast quarters in advance of their arrival. On one
of the Wooster Groups previous Paris tours, the hotel was
less than clean, and though no one could call McDormand
high maintenance, she has no patience with squalor. Were
avant-garde. It doesnt mean we have to be unhygienic.
She would be walking home alone after shows, and she
doesnt use Google Maps. Her cellphone still has buttons and
a hinge.
Do you want me to look this up? I asked, reaching for
my smartphone, and she responded as if Id reached for the
grenade pin. NO! DONT! She shook her head firmly. Then
well never learn. She caught a glimpse of the Seine and
was gone again.

Thats another great thing about getting older.

Your life is written on your face.

Frances McDormand, or Fran, as she is called in regular

life, cuts a handsome figure on the street. She is 60 and
sexy in the manner of women who have achieved total self-
possession. She eschews makeup unless she is working,
doesnt dye her hair and despises the nips, tucks and lifts
that have become routine for women of her profession. Her
clothes are well made she loves clothes but utilitarian
and comfortable. On this day she was wearing loose-legged
cropped pants, black-and-peach sneakers, a navy sweater
and a thin headband shoved in and out of uncombed hair as
the mood struck.
 She doesnt do press junkets, and for most of the 20
years since she won a Best Actress Academy Award for
playing Marge Gunderson, the tremendously pregnant,
improbably cheerful police detective in Fargo, she has
refused interviews. Her publicist explained to me that his job
is to politely tell people to go away.
 Frances McDormand

I was never that involved in the machine of press and

publicity as an actor because Ive always kind of worked on
the margins of my profession, she explained as we made
our way toward the river, reoriented at last. And then when
my son was younger and it did get a little bit more intrusive,
I tried to come to terms with how I was personally going to
handle someone coming up to me on the street and wanting
some part of my time. We turned onto the Boulevard de
Sbastopol, and the river enlarged itself on the horizon.
Now what I do because this is how I live when
someone approaches me and says, Can I have your
autograph, I say: No, Ive retired from that part of the
business. I just act now.
She paused in the street. I say: Whats your name?
She peered into my eyes and grasped my arm. I touch
them. I look at them. I have a real exchange, she said. Im
not an actor because I want my picture taken. Im an actor
because I want to be part of the human exchange.
Just then, a young Frenchwoman walked up to us and
said, Fargo? Fargo! Oh, jadore Fargo! It all transpired
as McDormand had described: She refused the picture and
the autograph but asked the woman what her name was,
made extended eye contact and allowed herself to be
hugged. The woman was elated.
McDormand turned back to me triumphant. See? The
exchange.

Over the course of her 36-year career, McDormand has

played women who are attractive but rarely beautiful,
magnetic but thorny and, she notes, theyre usually the
supporting player in a mans story. To this day she is best
known for Marge, but Marge had much less screen time than
people remember. Her slightly daffy good-heartedness
serves as the foil for the murderous men who occupy most
of Fargo. A peculiar number of McDormands early roles
were female accessories to men with violent tendencies: the
Lois Lane to a disfigured and enraged anti-superhero in
Darkman; the brutally beaten wife in Mississippi
Burning; the wife of a Korean War veteran who attempts
suicide in Chattahoochee.
Her first film role was Abby in the Coen brothers noirish
debut, Blood Simple. (This was kismet; the Coen brothers,
then unknown, went on to create some of McDormands best
roles, and she and Joel Coen married.) Abby is a proper
ingnue, a young Texan woman with wide eyes and fluffy
curls and a habit of softly telling men she loves them when
she is afraid they might hurt her. In Blood Simple,
McDormand is in her mid-20s, dewy and golden blond, and
she seems to occupy brighter, warmer light than anyone
else in her scenes. She is addictive to watch, which obscures
the fact that, as she pointed out to me, Abby is fairly two-
dimensional. The one thing that Ive always been able to
offer them is a complexity that fills out an idea they have of
something, she said of the Coen brothers in an interview
for the Criterion Collections release of Blood Simple in
2016.
This ability to suggest a fascinating inner life just out of
the viewers reach made McDormands career as a character
actress. She takes marginal characters and makes them the
most robust people in the movie. So it was with the fierce,
Goethe-quoting widow in Almost Famous, who gets a
scant few scenes but earned McDormand an Oscar
nomination; the hapless gym employee who wants a butt lift
in Burn After Reading; the molelike film editor in Hail,
Caesar!
McDormand explained to me that had she stayed in the
theater, she would have played all the canonical leading
women, but in Hollywood her looks disqualified her. I was
too old, too young, too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, too
blond, too dark but at some point theyre going to need
the other, she told me. So Id get really good at being the
other. Years of hearing this type of thing from casting
directors have provoked in her a defiant renunciation of
vanity and a deep, though intermittent, self-consciousness.
Shell state her weight in a public interview but avoids
looking at the monitor when filming. Id much rather not be
aware of how fat my ass looks, she said. She wants the
work that is given to stars, but she hates to have her photo
taken. She doesnt own a full-length mirror.
In the last 10 years, something shifted for McDormand:
Right as she hit the age when most actresses begin
disappearing for lack of roles or moving to the edges of story
lines, she moved to first billing. For decades, she excelled at
the work of embroidering the lives of women who arent
deemed appealing enough to watch for two hours straight,
and rather than aging into a different acting type, she has
taken it upon herself to put peripheral women at the center.
Photo
 McDormand improvising in TriBeCa in August.

In 2009, she optioned Elizabeth Strouts novel Olive

Kitteridge shortly before it won the Pulitzer Prize. She and
a friend, the screenwriter Jane Anderson, embarked on a
long adaptation for HBO. She later admitted to me that it
made her nervous; she didnt know if she could carry a film,
Anderson told me. McDormand kept asking to take Olive out
of scenes, to make her a supporting part. I said, Fran, its
called Olive Kitteridge! She cant be a side character.
Olive Kitteridge is a four-hour peregrination inside one
womans life a postmenopausal woman whos not the
Queen of England or an aging rock star or a mother suffering
picturesquely from dementia, but a starchy middle-school
math teacher living in Down East Maine. Olive is furious and
uncompromising, agitated by her husband, who is
oppressively nice (McDormands words), puzzled and
disappointed by her son, ill at ease with emotion and
bewildered by social niceties. She burps uncontrollably and
spares no one the truth. Shes moral, she cares, but still
shes unable to be what the people closest to her need:
warm, compromising, wifely, motherly.
The project was the first work McDormand ever
produced for herself, after a long career in which her only
power, as she describes the actors lot, was the power to say
no. It was also her first concentrated effort to create a
female story that felt as complex as real womens lives. I
became interested in educating people in the variety of ways
in which women can express their emotion. Which is much
easier to do in a large role than in a supporting role to a
male protagonist. In general, the women in a supporting role
to a male protagonist cry a lot. McDormand insisted on
Olives right not to cry and battled the director, Lisa
Cholodenko, over whether Olive should break down at
several key moments in the series. The women were already
comfortable working together. Cholodenko, who directed
McDormand in Laurel Canyon (2002), prevailed, pleading
that the audience needed an opportunity to feel affection for
the character. (McDormand privately made a list for me of
which moments of crying were authentically Olive, and
which were her doing what she was told.) The balance they
struck worked: Olive Kitteridge won eight Emmys in 2015,
including the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series
or Movie award for McDormand.
This fall, she will be the star of a film featuring another
caustic antiheroine, who was written just for her: Mildred in
Martin McDonaghs Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
Missouri. McDormand plays a mother whose daughter has
been raped and murdered, and who has made it her mission
to terrorize the local Police Department until they give the
case the attention it deserves.
Mildred is a difficult character shes violent,
sometimes in baffling ways. Shes foulmouthed and
enraged, pitiless and a bit demented. She stomps around
town in a car mechanics jumpsuit with the back of her head
shaved, ready to scorch the earth. McDormand is imposing
in the role mostly because of her stillness. Her back is
ramrod straight inside her jumpsuit. She doesnt walk; she
strides. I really played it like a man, she said. I completely
based the character upon John Wayne and John Ford
movies, because thats a two-hour arc. Those characters can
come out of nowhere, they dont need a lot of background,
you dont have to explain why theyre like that, they just are
the way they are.
McDonagh thought of Mildred more as a Marlon Brando
character. We both liked her, he told me, we both loved
her, but didnt want to do anything to make her more likable
or lovable. For once, we dont have to show the female side
or the light side or the nurturing, mothering side. We both
said, [expletive] that, were doing something different this
time. Whether or not you buy the notion that rage and
violence are incompatible with a female side, whether you
like the notion that the actors way into Mildred was to play
it like a man, theres something surprising about seeing a
female protagonist like Mildred. Nothing is done to make her
grief soft or even to imply that she was a very good mother
in the first place. She isnt made for viewing pleasure or to
teach a lesson; shes just there, hurling Molotov cocktails at
the world.

One evening after rehearsal with the Wooster Group,

McDormand walked to a cafe across from the Centre
Pompidou for a drink with Kate Valk, who was directing the
production, and the Wooster Groups founder and director,
Elizabeth LeCompte. McDormand intends to die onstage with
these women, or so she said over drinks. In 1999, after
seeing one of the groups productions, she approached
LeCompte to ask if she could join them. She didnt want to
accept film jobs that would take her away from her young
son. People kept stopping her in the grocery store asking
her to do the Fargo accent, and the Wooster Group, a
pioneer of avant-garde theater, was appealingly removed
from the machine of Hollywood celebrity. I need to work,
and I need a home, McDormand said. LeCompte agreed.
Early Shaker Spirituals is McDormands favorite of the
productions she has done with the group. In it, five of the
groups female members (LeCompte, McDormand, Cynthia
Hedstrom, Bebe Miller and Suzzy Roche) recreate a field
recording of Shaker spirituals made in 1976 at one of the
last remaining Shaker colonies, in Maine. These women are
not trying to sing pretty, McDormand said. Kate always
has to remind me not to make it pleasant. You fail if you try
to make a pleasant sound.
In rehearsal, as in life, her body is kinetic and restless.
The company was brushing up the performance after a long
break, and whenever someone made an error, McDormands
mouth twisted or her eyes betrayed intense perception and
restrained irritation. Throughout rehearsal, she was rapt but
funny, keeping one ear tuned toward Valks mood at all
times while finding moments to touch or joke with the cast
and crew. She was the goody-two-shoes and the class clown
wrapped up in one.
Whats perfect about the union of the Wooster Group
and the Shakers is that both are matriarchal, both are about
discipline and rigor and work, McDormand explained to me
over drinks with Valk and LeCompte. LeCompte had a glass
of Sancerre, McDormand had a glass of viognier and Valk
had a smoothie. Its foundation is postmenopausal women.
The five of us, Liz being the oldest and in a position of power,
and Kate directing us so its six postmenopausal women.
And what you gain after menopause is the power of
invisibility. You become sexually invisible to both men and
women. You gain the power of not giving a [expletive].
And we love the music, Valk added.
McDormand nodded, looking pensive. And I love the
bonnet.
A preposterously muscled young man walked by, and
McDormand followed him with her eyes. That physiognomy
is part of whats happening with gender equality right now.
Men are trying to indicate that they are still marketable
procreators its like plumage.
Valk agreed. Its like that great documentary on the
American wood duck. And all the things that male wood
ducks do.
The conversation shifted to my presence. LeCompte and
Valk were curious about what McDormand had gotten
herself into. Are they going to take photographs of you?
Valk wanted to know. She turned to me. Is she going to be
a cover girl?
McDormand made a face. No. No. They never She
stopped. Im not a cover-type person. Before anyone could
protest, she changed the subject: She thought perhaps a
bird had pooped in her wine.
She signaled the waiter and caught my eye. Do you
think you can tell him that a bird pooped in my wine and Id
like a little extra? The waiter arrived.
Monsieur, un oiseau a ... I hesitated, forgetting the
French verb and realizing too late that the bird had also
targeted my phone, which was sitting near her wine.
MERDE, McDormand interjected loudly, pointing at
her glass. The waiters eyes widened and he bowed lightly,
excising it from between bowls of olives and salted nuts.
McDormand sat back, satisfied. She reached for my
sullied phone and wiped its face with her napkin. Now lets
see if we get charged for the merde.

Im not an actor because I want my picture

 taken. Im an actor because I want to be part
of the human exchange.

Shortly after returning from Paris, I received an email

from her with the subject line My head shot. It contained
a photograph of her floating naked in a lake. She doesnt
like having her picture taken, she wrote, but this might suit
the magazines purposes. Two months after that, she sent
me a picture of herself at the dinner table with a head of
cauliflower perched atop her like a crown.
In reply to the lake picture, I sent her the poet Mary
Ruefles essay Pause. Hot flashes are the least of
menopause, Ruefle tells the young woman she imagines
might be reading. You will want to drive a knife through your
heart; you will want to leave your lover, no matter how
much you have loved them. You will feel as though your life
is over, because it is. You will realize for the first time that
your whole life people have looked at you because you are
a woman and people look at women but now, suddenly,
you are invisible. But then something magical happens:
You are a woman, the ten years [of menopause] have
passed, you love your children, you love your lover, but
there are no longer any persons on earth who can stop you
from being yourself. ... You would never want to be a girl
again for any reason at all, you have discovered that being
invisible is the biggest secret on earth, the most wondrous
gift anyone could ever have given you.
She got it perfectly, McDormand wrote back a few
hours later. Around 46 years of age, I became concerned
that I may slaughter my family. I was perimenopausal when
Pedro her son was in the throes of adolescence and
at the mercy of testosterone poisoning. I continue to have
three hot flashes daily, one bout of cold sweats per night,
and have reveled in my invisibility for 10 years. So there.

McDormand with John Getz in Blood Simple, 1984.

Fargo, 1996.
 Almost Famous, 2000.

With George Clooney in Burn After Reading, 2008.

Hail, Caesar! 2016.
 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, 2017.

Recently, at a benefit for her local radio station,

McDormand introduced herself this way: Hello. My name is
Frances Louise McDormand, formerly known as Cynthia Ann
Smith. I was born in Gibson City, Ill., in 1957. I identify as
gender-normative, heterosexual and white-trash American.
She explained: My parents were not white trash. My birth
mother was white trash.
McDormand was the last and, she thinks, ninth child to
be taken in by Noreen and Vernon McDormand. Vernon was
a pastor with the Disciples of Christ who had a talent for
starting new outposts of the church. He and Noreen moved
between working-class communities in the South and the
Midwest every few years, and because Noreen was never
able to carry a pregnancy to term, the couple fostered
children wherever they went. They adopted two, a son and
a daughter, through the foster system. In the late 50s, they
adopted their third, a 1-year-old named Cynthia, who, as far
as anyone knows, was born to a young woman in Vernons
parish. They changed her name to Frances.
In her late teens, McDormand was offered the chance
to meet her birth mother, and she refused. The anger she
felt at being unwanted had become too important a part of
her psychology, she thought. Still, she sounds proud when
she calls herself white trash like her birth mother, and she
has spent much of her career playing women who, in one
way or another, resemble that description.
She describes her upbringing with the McDormands as
kind of Norman Rockwell-y: hymn singing, spaghetti
dinners, summer Bible camps run by her father. Though
Noreen often worked full time as a receptionist and had lots
of kids to take care of, she strived to make a homemade
dessert every night, often elaborate cakes, like a three-
tiered Lady Baltimore. McDormands favorite was more
dclass: angel food cake with orange-juice icing. The family
moved mostly between small agricultural communities like
Hillsboro, Ky., Statesboro, Ga., and Chattanooga, Tenn.,
where they lived in a neighborhood that was built over the
town dump. McDormand, then in second grade, found that
this provided excellent treasure hunting.
Their longest stay was in Monessen, Pa., a steel town
near Pittsburgh, where, she told the public-radio
benefactors, the mill glowed and thrummed, day and
night. The working-class women she plays are familiar to
her from childhood. Those are the people that held me and
raised me, and the work ethic I have, she says. Thats why
she shows up herself for lighting and camera set up, though
it is expected that hired stand-ins endure the technical
rehearsals. McDormand does her hair and makeup too, if its
efficient. Im a member of the company, Im not outside of
it, she says. I like being right in the middle of everything.
Its isolating and vulnerable.
It was at Monessen High School that she acted for the
first time, as Lady Macbeth. She was 14, and an English
teacher had the students put on scenes from Shakespeare
after school. I spent a lot of time alone reading books, and
this was the first time that literature took me into a public
place where I could share it with other people, she told me.
She started acting in school plays, never as the lead but as
the colorful characters, the ones who came out screaming
or fainting. She went to Bethany College in West Virginia,
because it was affiliated with the Disciples of Christ and she
could get a scholarship. There, she became the only theater
major in her class, drove vans across the border into
Pennsylvania so her classmates could buy birth control and
steadily worked her way through her post-hometown to-do
list: sex, drugs, profanity.
At 24, newly graduated from Yales M.F.A. program in
acting, she was offered a role in Blood Simple, which
marked the beginning of her professional career as well as
of her 33-year partnership with Joel Coen. From the start,
they met each others instincts with unquestioning courtesy.
It was a revelation that I could have a lover who I could
also work with and I wasnt intimidated by the person,
McDormand told me. In past relationships, she struggled
against feeling subservient, trapped in fraught sexual power
dynamics. But that didnt happen with Joel. It was: Wow!
Really! Oh, my God! I can actually love and live not
subvert anything, not apologize for anything, not hide
anything.
Though they moved in together almost right away, they
waited 10 years to marry, and until recently her wedding
band was a ring once owned by Coens first wife, which
McDormand adopted, thinking it shouldnt go to waste. In
1995, they adopted a baby from Paraguay, whom
McDormand still refers to by his full name: Pedro
McDormand Coen. Pedro is now 24, a personal trainer and,
lately, a grip on his fathers movie sets, but McDormand still
likes to tell stories about the outfit he wore on his first day
of first grade. Jane Anderson described their household as
haimish. Shes a great homey cook, she told me. You go
to her house and shell whip up a great pork chop and a
salad and shell throw it down and set a beautiful table and
make you a good pot of English tea and a cookie. Joel will
show up to your house and bring a pie in a wonderful
antique pie carrier that Fran found somewhere.
The McCoens, as McDormand sometimes refers to her
marriage unit, now maintain two residences: an apartment
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where theyve lived
for decades, and a 1,300-square-foot house in what
McDormand would prefer me to call An Unnamed Town in
the Pacific Northwest. This is where McDormand spends
most of her time, and she forbade me to specify even a
state, not so much because she worries people will track her
down but because she feels protective of her Unnamed
Town. She is involved in local efforts to protect affordable
housing, and with the local radio station. The cheesemonger
runs around the counter to give her a hug when she comes
in.
The day before I flew there to visit her, McDormand
decided, after some deliberation, that I was not invited to
her house. It is mine, she emailed me, and I also dont
like articles where actors reveal their private lives. This was
part of a longer missive about her complex relationship to
anger, and the pain of being adopted, so I pushed back. She
was unmoved. Her reply was a link to the online portfolio of
the architect who helped them with their last renovation and
a dare: Guess which is ours.
So we hiked. McDormand had instructed me to meet
her in the parking lot of a nearby cafe, and when I arrived
she was sitting straight as a soldier, dressed in her hiking
skirt (ankle length, denim). We hopped into her car and
drove to a nearby freshwater spring to fill our water bottles,
which she stuck in a backpack packed with cheese and
apples for our lunch. As we carved our path up the
mountain, she told me about her next project with Jane
Anderson, based on a trilogy of Conrad Richter novels
published between 1940 and 1950 called The Awakening
Land, which theyre adapting into another mini-series.
Shell play the oldest iteration of the main character, Saird,
a pioneer woman who gives birth to a stillborn baby and,
while still covered in blood, throws herself on top of a wild
turkey and wrings its neck so her other children wont
starve. McDormand clapped with glee. Isnt that great?
What actor wouldnt want to play that? We sat on some
rocks in the forest, and she began unloading plastic bags of
cheese and crackers from her knapsack.
Look at this, she said, handing me an apple. It was a
variety called a Pink Pearl, which a neighbor had brought
her. Its skin was a pale, nearly translucent yellow. She
fished out her pocketknife and cut into it, revealing brilliant
pink and white swirls. Have you ever seen anything like
that?
I told her I thought I knew the answer to the question
I was about to ask, but: Why these roles? Why these
women?
What kind of women?
Oh, profane women. Or rageful, or violent.
I mean, I know Im profane. And outspoken. But I dont
know, theyre fun! She chewed and thought. Its not just
that theyre angry. Its more She paused. My politics
are private, but many of my feminist politics cross over into
my professional life. Because I portray female characters, so
I have the opportunity to change the way people look at
them. Even if I wasnt consciously doing that, it would
happen anyway, just because of how I present as a woman,
or as a person. I present in a way thats not stereotypical,
even if Im playing a stereotypical role. She shrugged. I
cant subtract that from myself anymore. I could when I was
younger.
Why? I asked. Is that just what happens with age?
Yes, she said, nodding seriously, and took a bite of
Pink Pearl. Thats another great thing about getting older.
Your life is written on your face.

If you are a woman who has risen to new levels of fame

and recognition by, paradoxically, renouncing any interest
in what we could call the male gaze or the industry gaze,
or the fan gaze then theres something profoundly
discomfiting about the prospect of being profiled for a
magazine. Four months into our meetings, McDormand
wrote to say she didnt think I should be writing about her
at all, but that shed like to get together to brainstorm a
more worthy subject. At our next meeting, she informed me
that she wouldnt be sitting for any photographs to
accompany this article. I dont do those. You have to use
pictures of me from what I do. Like my characters. Then Im
not promoting me.
She eventually agreed to be photographed but asked
that the session be as unlike a typical shoot as possible: no
hair person, no makeup artist, no wardrobe. Initially, when
asked to talk about the concept, she had suggested a no-
concept concept. Later, she allowed that she might wear
some plants in her hair. It would be interesting to appear
like the spirit of a Shaker woman floating around Lower
Manhattan.
On the appointed morning in August, she blew like a
friendly hurricane into the photo studio in TriBeCa one
minute early. She surveyed the variety of flower crowns laid
out on the props table, picked up a wreath of cotton
branches and set it on her head. How cool is THIS, she
shouted, looking in the mirror. But its not at all me. The
faux peonies, daisies, sea grasses and laurel went the way
of the cotton. She took the young stylist who had made the
wreaths cozily by his arm and thanked him for his work.
Theyre beautiful. But theyre not right for me. It looks
great on you, though! You should wear it. She set the
daisies on his head and announced the return of the no-
concept concept. Just me. Just me as myself.
McDormand-as-herself was dressed in wide-leg
bluejeans, a tank top with no bra, a long-sleeve T-shirt,
Birkenstock sandals and a giant denim jacket. Out of her
backpack she produced two other options: a bandanna and
a long white nightgown. I wore it last night, but I ironed it,
she said.
Even with as few people on set as possible and without
all the accouterments of a cover shoot, McDormand seemed
to be gritting her teeth. She shifted under the lights in her
tank top and bare feet like a child. Someone turned on the
music shed requested (Smooth, by Santana), and she
swayed a little, uncertainly. She caught my eye across the
room and made a small motion, asking me to dance too,
where I was standing, so she wouldnt be all alone up there.
We bopped awkwardly to Santana while she tried to ignore
the camera.
There is a stunning un-self-consciousness that
overtakes her characters when they are alone. In these
moments on film, you can see the face fall open and reveal
a whole person, whoever she is when shes turned inward,
unwatched. Her ability to go to this place in front of a camera
is one of her singular talents. I had been curious whether
that might happen this morning, a sort of reverse-
engineered revelation as Fran performed Fran. But if that
moment came, it was distinguishable only to the camera,
and perhaps to the photographer. As the hours passed,
McDormand kept the room in a state of mild panic. She
stood there at one point in her nightgown with a sweater on
her head. She sent the wreath stylist to cut pieces of
boxwood she had noticed on the buildings roof terrace, and
then winked at me as he went. She turned around so the
back of her head faced the camera and announced that she
wanted to try a few like this. This is my angle, she said.
I never do this, she kept saying to the photo team. All
morning: I never, ever do this.
Then why are you doing it? someone finally asked.
I dont know! She said. She seemed to really consider
the question. I guess I want more work.
At the end of the day, the group went outside for some
exterior shots in the alley behind the studio, and
McDormand spotted three teenage boys hanging out on the
sidewalk.