Robin Weigert may not be a household name yet, but she should be. The actress has had roles in many of your favorite shows including Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Fire, Sons of Anarchy, and many more. She even received an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Calamity Jane in Deadwood.
However, it is her role in the soon to be released film Concussion, that will propel her into the spotlight like never before. Weigert plays Abby, a suburban lesbian housewife who steps outside her marriage and into a whole new world of awakenings, sexually and otherwise. Weigert plays the role masterfully. She is a true actor’s actor, with an absolute dedication to the craft and to story. I had the pleasure of speaking with her recently about the film, and she blew me away with her thoughtful, powerfully insightful responses.
AfterEllen.com: I saw Concussion and I thought it was incredible. It just works in some many ways. Your wonderful portrayal of Abby/Eleanor, the powerful script, the ensemble. What initially drew you to the film?Robin Weigert: God, just her incredible arc. There’s an amazing journey there. From the very disassociated state at the beginning to this full return into her body, and then whatever the grappling with the consequences would be. I love how that is left as an open-ended thing. And I love how far outside the box she goes in a way but also how she’s seemingly she’s just putting one foot in front of the other.
There’s a kind of language: all she’s doing is trying to walk. And she walks into all that trouble. I mean she’s just trying to find her way and I think it’s wonderful when a script can kind of accomplish something where you almost don’t even know what’s happening and suddenly you’re deep, deep in. I was drawn to the idea that there’s this hunger, that’s super, super tamped down, but then inevitably rises up to claim her. She can’t really do anything but track it, follow it, let it lead her.
It’s almost like a mid-life, adolescent moment where as much as you might wish to be the good daughter or the good son, this thing that’s risen up within you is claiming you anyway. It’s kind of what’s happening to her in the middle of her life.
I think that’s what happens to a lot of people in the middle of their lives, especially when they are entrenched in a marriage that deeply doesn’t fulfill them in some way but they think they love. That’s pretty much any marriage [laughs] along the way. It’s very rare indeed that two people can meet each other’s deepest needs for the whole long haul, of a long, long marriage. Especially when there are children in the mix. I love that it’s a story about-well it’s a character study in a way-but it’s also a story about marriage that’s told through a same-sex vehicle.
You don’t, as an audience member, have the luxury of being able to apply gender stereotypes to different roles. You don’t say, well of course a man hits middle age and he always wants to run off with the secretary because how can a wife possibly be there for him sexually. Or a woman hits middle age and her husband isn’t paying enough attention to her, so she goes off and finds a man because she needs validation. You can’t apply those old tropes to this story because it’s a woman and a woman. You have to look at it as a human story and I think that’s why it speaks to a broader audience. It really doesn’t let you off the hook about the complexity of managing a marriage. Period. Full stop, you know?
AE: Without giving too much away to our readers, shortly after your character suffers a concussion, she begins to have a sexual reawakening. She’s married to a woman and is the mother of two, but begins to seek out experiences with other women. As a viewer, I was left asking myself, was it the concussion that shifted something inside of Abby, or was it just a wake up call, an excuse even perhaps-RW: I have a strong opinion about this.
AE: [laughs]
RW: I think that some of the tag lines that have been attached to the film have created this confusion, because they almost imply a linearity or connection that’s too literal between the head injury and her behavior. I think it’s a lot more about a rattling, jolting, disorienting event intruding upon a life that’s very much predetermined.
I mean you’re like a gerbil on your treadmill, going through your day, same as yesterday, same as the day before and something comes in a sideswipes you. Literally or figuratively. Boom, there it goes. You’re suddenly in a relationship to your life that is askew and you’ve got one foot in it, and one foot out because you’re not feeling quite yourself. You look at it and you say to yourself, what the hell is this? And how am I doing this? This isn’t me at all. What is going on? I think anybody looking at their own life can identify with a moment like that. It doesn’t have to be a baseball to the head, but it might just be witnessing a catastrophic event happen to somebody else and suddenly you’re awake in a different way. It can be any number of things that hit you, and then your reality is shaken up for a minute and you can’t but see it for what it is.
I think that is more of what it is. Yes, there are symptoms. Some of that early disassociation the character experiences is partly that she really is a little bit knocked out of it. It’s also that she’s newly in a relationship to how disassociated she’s been for a very long time. I think it functions both ways, in a way.
AE: So Abby has this beautiful home, she’s got two healthy children, a “happy marriage,” but it’s not enough. Something is missing, and I think that is a very universal feeling. Sometimes in the pursuit to have everything, we lose parts of ourselves along the way. What do you think is Abby’s real journey through this whole experience?
RW: I think that the suburban dream in particular-that particular life is even different than succeeding and being a Manhattan socialite. You’ve done everything right. You probably went to the best schools, and you’ve done well professionally and all of that stuff. But you have also put yourself in a box. I think it’s very easy to lose creative energy in a place where there isn’t a tremendous amount of direct creative stimulation.
Everybody is sort of agreeing to fall into a pattern with one another and all agreeing to follow a certain set of safe guidelines for how to live. A creative temperament, which I think is also what Abby is, is likely at a certain point to feel like they are dying the death out there in the ‘burbs. So then there also becomes this love affair with Manhattan and these projects she does there that are these fixer-uppers. Just trying to get to something that’s going to wake herself up again.
It’s on a few different levels that she’s dead; one of them is creatively and one of them is sexually. Those two are very intertwined, you know. There’s plenty written about that, that creative energy and sexual energy are sort of bound up in each other. I think that’s part of what’s going on. It is real, that kind of suffering, even though we go “Oh, high-class problems.” When this movie screened in Germany, there was a person in the Q&A, who said “What is your movie trying to say about the bourgeoisies?” It was sort a moment that set me back because yes, there is one way to look at this film that is entirely to do with class. It’s entirely to do with class. It’s an interesting way to look at it but I think that it’s important to value that form of suffering. The sort of suffering of the stifled soul, as well as the suffering that comes from genuine, physical, deprivation. Maybe it’s even more a common ground for the audience too. Pretty much everyone knows that experience, I think. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I feel like that is a pretty universal form of suffering.
AE: Films with lesbian protagonists are still pretty few and far between. To have a film where lesbian sex and the eroticism of lesbian sexuality are not presented for the male gaze is even more rare. Concussion is kind of like a precious little ruby in that respect. As an actress, what is it like to portray a role that celebrates a character’s sexuality in such a way? I believe I read somewhere that these were your first sex scenes ever?RW: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]
AE: Way to dive in!
RW: [laughs] Thank you. Yeah when I look it it’s funny, they are all so psychological in some ways too. There’s such a mixture. They feel incredibly raw, some of them but they don’t feel like, salacious and sort of build for their erotic-I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve never done a sex scene before, I don’t know how to play them differently from other scenes. Which is to say it’s about relationships, right? It’s about what’s going on between the two people always in a scene, sex scene or not.
My only way to approach these, and some of these were really quite: I would meet the woman for the very first time, and the sun would be setting, and I’d know that we’d need to accomplish the sex scene before the sun went down. I’d be like, “Jesus Christ, how is this going to happen?” Some of it was like that. The only thing I had at my disposal was to tune in energetically to her, whoever she might be, and try to bring out the best of what might be there in the time that we had.
Some of them were very clearly delineated by Stacie [Passon], exactly what she wanted to happen. But other ones she might have in the script, “woman #7,” and that’s it. So even the event of what happened between the two women wouldn’t yet be described. As an example, there was a woman who I knew was a performance artist. That’s all I knew about her. Stacie and I were driving to set together that day, “And what would this scene be?” and I thought out loud, “What if it’s the one where Abby is worried that she might bring home a visible wound from the experience? Like what if this woman gets violent with her?” I thought she’ll probably be a good actress to do that if she’s a performance artist, because she’s likely to be comfortable in her body, and so not be afraid to go to those places. So let’s propose that to her. That was invented on the day, and then it sort of ended up being built in an interesting way to accompany some of the dialogue. That was done in post.
Or the sort of really raw scene with the Asian woman toward the end-that developed the quality it had because the actress seemed to me (I didn’t know her at all) to be so shy, and we had so little time. I felt like the only way I could make that scene happen was to be extremely dominant with her, and kind of order her around. And as soon as I did that, she reacted in a very electric way, and suddenly we were in some territory that God knows, whatever was going one, that was really, really dynamic. That was captured, and then that became of course, this needs to be that sort of final beat that she’s really in the life now because that’s what it read as. Some of the things plugged into their places in the film, only after it was clarified, like what that event was. What was the event of that one? What was the event of this one? The clearest one in terms of what was on the page was the event that needed to happen with Maggie [Siff], with that character, because that journey was so important to the whole storytelling.
AE: That’s actually my next question for you. Abby/Eleanor has many encounters throughout the film, but for the most part, even though to me they have this almost…therapeutic feeling to them…she stays for the most part, unemotionally attached. Not to say that she’s is cold. She’s actually quite warm and giving, but I couldn’t help but feel Abby being pulled emotionally toward Sam (Maggie Siff) however. It felt like things began to shift after her encounters with Sam. So I wanted to know, was that the intention? Did Abby/Eleanor develop some real feeling for this woman?
RW: Yeah, yeah, and that was very clearly in the script. All the beats of that were very, very much predetermined. The character that Maggie plays is this straight woman who is a great danger I suppose to a gay woman, because she can just play with no consequence. So Abby ends up getting burned. This is what I came to feel about it: What she didn’t even realize that she needed was to be taken in hand, and here’s a woman who is able to take her, sort of masterfully, in hand. In that scene where she’s insisting on the eye contact and Abby suddenly realizes there’s this great danger in the eye contact. The great danger in meeting eyes with this woman, is that she knows she will sort of fall in. It’s like that experience of falling through the door in the floor, where suddenly it doesn’t feel casual at all anymore and you’re really in trouble. So that is this sort of a thing that happens between those two, and how Abby is suddenly then on the hook, and in some real, genuine pain. There had to be that for the story to have weight. There had to be one or another of these things that had real emotional consequence.
The other thing that has real emotional consequence for her is she did also have a really loving relationship with the older woman played by Laila Robins. For that woman to begin to call her out on her real life stuff-for her to begin to feel known, that’s too close. Too close. So there have to be these measures of what’s safe enough and what cuts too close to the bone. And then when she steps over the line, those degrees have to be in there. I think in the different scenarios that exist, those are in there. There’s no cost-free sex in it really. It does have more in common with sex surrogacy. She’s giving something; it feels to me each time. Her joy is partly in feeling that she’s someone with something to give because she’s not allowed to feel that way with her wife. Part of how she’s being fed is in the validation that comes from feeling like you can bestow something on someone that they very much need. Which is had won between two partners over time, because everybody knows each other very well at that point.
AE: Robin, you are about to get a whole bunch of new lesbian fans. I hope you are ready.
RW: Oh, it would be fantastic! Wonderful!
Concussion opens in theaters on October 4. You can also see the film on VOD or through iTunes. Read our review of the film here.
