This has been a long year for the Weekend Warrior blog and we’ve done a ton of interviews, but if we could just pick one actor or actress who really blew us away, we’d probably have to go with Rosemarie DeWitt, who began the year by running the gauntlet of film festivals of one third the cast of Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister along with Emily Blunt and Mark Duplass. It would be the movie that has had the most impact on DeWitt as the cast won an award for Best Ensemble at the Gotham Awards and DeWitt received an Indie Spirit nomination a few days later.
DeWitt could also be seen at Sundance in Ry Russo-Young’s Nobody Walks playing John Krasinski’s wife, but even Russo-Young was so impressed with what DeWitt did that she gave her character more screen time.
DeWitt also played Ben Stiller’s wife in the suburban sci-fi comedy The Watch, having some fun scenes in an otherwise bad movie–the less we talk about that the better–and also appeared in Disney’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green.
Still, that’s a fairly strong presence for any actor in one year and in Promised Land, written by Matt Damon and John Krasinski and directed by Gus Van Sant, DeWitt plays a small town schoolteacher named Alice who gets pulled into the battle between Damon’s corporate salesman and Krasinski’s environmentalist as they try to convince the townspeople to vote their way. It’s an amazing role since Alice feels so much younger than the wives and older sisters she played in other movies and in fact, you would have thought maybe they shot the movie before all the others rather than just this past spring and summer. That’s fairly typical of an actress who has appeared in many movies you may not even remember her from, but has always done such a great job blending right into whatever role she takes on. 2012 was the year when she started getting far bigger roles as she inches her way to playing more leading roles.
ComingSoon.net attended the New York junket for Promised Land a couple of weeks ago where we spoke to Damon and Krasinski–interviews you can watch here–but we also spent a little extra time speaking with DeWitt not only about the movie, but also about some of the other things she’s worked on in the past year and in the coming year, notably appearing on Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” on HBO and reuniting with Lynn Shelton for Touchy Feely which will premiere at Sundance. (We previously spoke with DeWitt this year for Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister as part of a group which you can read here.)
Earlier in the day, we did an on-camera interview with Ms. DeWitt which was more specifically about Promised Land and she is so much fun to talk to, we wanted to give you some idea of her personality before reading the print portion of the interview below.
* How she found out about the project
* What she did to audition for Matt and Gus
* She talks about her character
* Working on a movie where the co-stars are also writing and producing
* What surprised her about the movie when she finally saw it finished
