New interview & photoshoot for the New York Times

The New York Times interviewed Naomi about The Impossible during September’s Toronto International Film Festival, and they have now published it online, along with some new portrait shots. Read the interview on our Press page, and find the first photoshoot picture in our Gallery. I will add out-takes from the photoshoot either tomorrow or Monday, after the interview has been published in newspapers tomorrow.

A Specialist in Women Who Weather Storms
Naomi Watts on Acting in ‘The Impossible’

A NAOMI WATTS character is taking it easy, and that seems weird. In the first scenes of “The Impossible” Ms. Watts is on vacation with her movie family, poolside at a tropical Thai resort. But within seconds the sky darkens, and the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 churns up the landscape like an electric mixer.

Now Ms. Watts is bloodied and bobbing in a rush of water, clinging to a tree, hand extended in the chaos to her battered adolescent son. Ahh — that’s more like it. You expect harrowing from Naomi Watts, not lounging by the pool.

Her characters are often bruised, writhing, breaking or broken, sometimes emotionally, sometimes literally. In “21 Grams” she’s a drug-addled widow. In “Funny Games” she battles preppy psychopaths attacking her family. In “The Ring” a waterlogged demon child slimes her. “King Kong” is hardly a rom-com. Even Nicole Kidman, Ms. Watts’s good friend and perhaps the only working actress of their generation who lands as many substantial lead roles, has a “Bewitched” or two on her résumé. A rare patch of professional lightness for Ms. Watts in the last decade is the Merchant-Ivory film “Le Divorce.”

“These are the stories worth telling, stories that live beyond the moment,” she said recently in a hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival. “I’m thankful that I’m in a position where I can work with directors with intense vision and passion.”

Read the full interview