Why Naomi Watts is a glutton for punishment

Naomi Watts has been persecuted on screen by some of the world’s top directors – often in her undies. Jeff Dawson talks to the latterday Hitchcock blonde about her role in Michael Haneke’s malevolent Funny Games

When it comes to being bruised, battered and brutalised, few “give victim” like Naomi Watts. There was her supernatural spooking in The Ring and her wailing, drug-addled widow in 21 Grams. And need one mention the degradation heaped on her shrieking, scantily clad self by that naked, hairy ape King Kong? Why, the woman could scream for England . . . and Australia. Even in a piece of fluff such as Le Divorce, a rare romantic diversion from her more emotionally overwrought norm, Watts ended up attempting suicide.

Last year, in Eastern Promises, in which she played an angelic London nurse, she couldn’t help getting sucked into the grisly machinations of the Russian mafia. And in her latest film, Funny Games, which isn’t funny at all, so much misery is inflicted on all and sundry – adults, children, pet pooch – that the poor woman can do nothing but blub and screech and simper (in her undies).

For a screen actress acknowledged as one of the finest around – Watts was Oscar-nominated, deservedly, for 21 Grams – this is, of course, being facetiously disrespectful. Now she has established herself as a latterday Hitchcock blonde, however, news that she is about to take the Tippi Hedren role in a big, showy remake of The Birds suggests that she has embraced her lot.

“People keep saying, ‘Why are you going for this dark stuff? Why can’t you do something lighter?’, ” Watts says, issuing a sporting, conspiratorial chuckle. “I do look at the lighter stuff, but a lot of it I don’t connect with. I also think it’s fun to get all those demons out. We’ve all got a dark side. I mean, who doesn’t? Better out than in.”

Clearly, the on-screen catharsis works, for, in person, Watts is of a delightfully cheery disposition. On a chilly Saturday, she breezes into a London hotel like any other thirtysomething out for a mooch around Covent Garden (she’s 39, but looks 25), her petite frame and engaging smile disconnected from the mascara-streaked suffering of repute. It’s a disassociation that allows her to move around with anonymity, she says: “Nobody ever bothers me.”

If you think the poor woman has suffered enough, you had better steel yourself for Funny Games, a film of near unwatchable sadism in which Watts spends most of the time with a stalactite of traumatic snot hanging out of her nostril. Questioning its viewability is no joke. In fact, to do so is perceived as a compliment by its director, Michael Haneke, who mused recently that anyone sitting through his film to the end wants their head examining.

“It’s bloody awful, it really is,” Watts concurs. “Too difficult to watch, in a way.” It’s hardly the sort of snappy soundbite to get the PR people jumping, but there is a point here. Haneke, an Austrian, who directed The Piano Teacher and Hidden, has made Funny Games as a purported cultural exhibit, a means of pointing up the pornography of violence in American cinema. It is a deliberately manipulative shocker, one that confounds the very rules of the genre: who lives, who dies, and when the bloody hell are the heroics going to start?

“It’s an intellectual exercise,” Watts says. “What he’s doing is saying to the audience that we are culpable, we have blood on our hands; we are the ones who crave that violence. I feel I need to defend it now, because some people will not get it – they will feel it is too brutal.”

The film is set in an idyllic yachting inlet on Long Island. Watts and Tim Roth play a married couple retreating to their isolated holiday home, with young son and cuddly dog, only to find themselves held hostage by a pair of Leopold and Loeb-like young men conducting some kind of cerebral thesis on the art of terror (the kind that informed Hitchcock’s Rope). To complicate matters, the film is a faithful and meticulous shot-by-shot remake of Haneke’s original 1997 German-language version. What with The Ring, King Kong and the impending The Birds, it’s another retread for Watts, too (“I do look at my resumé, and go, ‘Oh God, they’re stacking up’ ”), although, with regard to Funny Games, that will be a side issue.

She is one of the most sought-after actresses around. Haneke wouldn’t make Funny Games without her. She is an admirer of his. And, she says, she remains guided largely by who’s directing a film. “Film-makers are my teachers – you want to learn from these people.” In which case, she has picked her tutors well: David Lynch, Gore Verbinski, Peter Jackson, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, David O Russell, David Cronenberg, not to mention Sean Penn, with whom she has acted in two films.

It’s a long way from Shoreham, Kent, where she was born, and the peripatetic childhood that saw her move through umpteen schools and homes (including on Anglesey, north Wales) before her mother, Myfanwy – “Miv”, now an interior designer – relocated her brood to Sydney when Watts was 14. As a consequence, her accent still vacillates between the hemispheres and, indeed, across the Atlantic, where she has lived since the mid1990s.

Her father, who died when Watts was seven (her mother had already divorced him), was a sound engineer with Pink Floyd: his mischievous cackle opens The Dark Side of the Moon. “I ran into Roger Waters in New York recently,” she says. “I had a good laugh with him. Dave Gilmour, I used to see him a lot. And I’m good friends with Rick Wright’s daughter.”

On leaving school, Watts modelled briefly, but it was acting classes that inspired her. After initial success on television and in the film Flirting, as well as the obligatory stint in Home and Away (in a wheelchair), she followed her pal Nicole Kidman to Hollywood. While Kidman married Tom Cruise and began cranking out blockbusters, Watts became an also-ran, cropping up in clunkers such as Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering. Did she think of quitting LA? “Oh, many times,” she sighs. “I did leave, but three weeks later they’d call and say, ‘Oh, you’ve got a job.’ Nothing that was ever great, but enough to keep me there.”

In 1999, she was cast by David Lynch in a television pilot called Mulholland Drive, a typically dreamlike, noirish venture. It was deemed too bizarre, and the intended series was never commissioned. “I was getting quite burnt out by the knock-backs,” Watts recalls. Then, 18 months later, the pilot was resurrected as a feature film and eventually released in 2001. Playing, ironically, a pretty blonde wannabe actress who traipses from audition to audition (albeit with some hot lesbian sex thrown in), Watts won a shedload of awards. At 33, she’d got her somewhat belated Hollywood entrée.

It was in 2005, on the set of The Painted Veil, that she met the American actor Liev Schreiber, now her live-in boyfriend in New York. I refer to him, erroneously, as her husband. “We’re, um, together,” she corrects later. Sadly, in recent weeks, Watts has been recast as the woman who once went out with Heath Ledger – the pair enjoying a high-profile romance after filming Ned Kelly together. Clearly, Ledger’s death has affected Watts deeply. She has maintained a dignified silence, to the extent of cancelling all her press at the recent Sundance festival, where Funny Games was previewing.

Last July, she and Schreiber had a son, Alexander Pete, “Sasha” for short, which has made her rethink the work they do in future. Schreiber, like Watts, moves largely in independently minded films, though neither of them is against forgoing their art-house roots for a blockbuster. “We’re not that noble that we’re above that kind of thing,” she laughs. “The pay cheques are nice. Yeah, it makes for a good lifestyle.”

A case in point will be The Birds, stalled by the writers’ strike, but now set to roll, with Watts as the pecked-upon heroine. “They’re not always damsels in distress,” she says. “They’re all strong women. And I happen to love Hitchcock films.” Meanwhile, she has completed The International, a thriller with Clive Owen, directed by another edgy German-speaker, Tom Twyker.

There is no way that Funny Games will be mistaken for a big-studio flick. For all Haneke’s antiAmerican posturing, however, it must be noted that he has not missed his own Hollywood trick, replacing the original’s plain-Jane heroine (Susanne Lothar), with Watts, and having her run around in her undies for most of the picture. “That was a conversation Michael and I had,” Watts explains. “The thing is, he spoke with Susanne Lothar about it, but she wasn’t up for it, so they chose to do it in a slip. He asked me. And I said, from a performance point of view, I’d feel more vulnerable if I were having to do this in my underwear.”

Oh, Naomi, you should know.