Film: Naomi Watts interview

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She’s played second fiddle to best bud Nicole Kidman for far too long — but now Naomi Watts is coming out of the shadows with a steamy lesbian role in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, says Garth Pearce

Until now, Naomi Watts has been best known in her supporting role as Nicole Kidman’s best friend. The two actresses first met as teenagers in Sydney at an audition for an advertisement, but they were both judged the wrong shape to sell bikinis. Watts remained Kidman’s confidante as the latter’s career soared. Last year, when Kidman’s marriage to Tom Cruise combusted spectacularly, it was Watts’s shoulder she cried on. Now, however, the 31-year-old Watts’s supporting role is about to change, thanks to a virtuoso performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. “I am cynical,” she reveals. “This time, though, the big offers are firm and I have to start believing that this is the breakthrough.”

In Watts’s case, the flash-and-burn of all her hopes has been exacerbated by watching Kidman’s irresistible march to international success. At one point, they were neck-and- neck, working together on the small-budget 1989 Australian film Flirting. There was not much to choose between the 5ft 11in pale girl with tumbling red ringlets and the blonde, blue-eyed 5ft 5in Watts. Then Kidman got her break in the thriller Dead Calm, and everything changed. Tom Cruise, already a big star, saw her performance, cast her in Days of Thunder, and they fell in love. Meanwhile, Watts was still struggling in Australia, playing a paraplegic in the daytime soap Home and Away. “It has not all been plain sailing and, like any friendship, there have been ebbs and flows,” she says. “But Nicole has remained my best mate — and we know virtually everything there is to know about each other.”

We meet in London. Watts has been driven up from Wales, where she has just completed filming Plots With a View with Brenda Blethyn, Alfred Molina and Christopher Walken. She is a straight-talker: pretty, with direct blue eyes, and an accent that is a curious hybrid of English, Australian and American.

She was born in Britain, but her parents were divorced when she was four. Her father, a sound engineer for Pink Floyd, died in 1981, when she was 11. When she was 14, her mother and stepfather emigrated to Australia, taking a reluctant Watts with them. “I had to face not only another new school, but a new country and way of life,” she says. “I met Nic in the first year and I think that is why we’ve been so close. I was a newcomer and she helped me.”

In the mid-1990s, Watts moved to Los Angeles to join her old friend there. “At first, everything was fantastic and doors were opened to me,” she says. “But some people who I met through Nicole, who had been all over me, had difficulty remembering my name when we next met. There were a lot of promises, but nothing actually came off. I ran out of money and became quite lonely, but Nic gave me company and encouragement to carry on.”

A glimmer of hope came when she was cast as Jet Girl in 1995’s Tank Girl, but the film flopped. “It is a tough town,” says Watts. “I think my spirit has taken a beating. The most painful thing has been the endless auditions. Knowing that you have something to offer, but not being able to show it, is so frustrating. As an unknown, you get treated badly. I auditioned and waited for things I did not have any belief in, but I needed the work and had to accept horrendous pieces of shit.”

Even a move to Britain to work on a BBC period drama, The Wyvern Mystery, had a cruel irony. Her co-star was Iain Glen, with whom Kidman had performed in passionate close-up in the West End play The Blue Room. It was as if, yet again, Watts was left holding the bouquet flung by a triumphant Kidman.

“It is difficult to rub shoulders with people who are doing well when you are not. You have to believe in yourself and keep that belief to yourself. Otherwise, you are lost. It is also best not to make comparisons. If I ever found myself thinking that way, then I would focus on the guy sitting on a street corner with a begging cup, and think: ‘Compared to him, I am the luckiest person.’”

Any comparison she used to make between the respective lots of her and her best friend ended last year, when Cruise announced that he wanted a divorce. Kidman, 34, say friends, became an emotional wreck and leant heavily on her friend. “Nic still does not know to this day the real reasons for the whole thing — and that is the truth,” says Watts. “We have shared intimacies about our lives and I can’t pass these on. But I know she has handled the whole thing in the most graceful way.

“The awful thing is that she’s had to live out her divorce in public. Other couples do that all over the world in private and it’s still a painful process. I was already sceptical about marriage after my own parents divorced, but this has made it worse. With Nic, there has been no escape. She has carried on promoting films like Moulin Rouge and The Others, knowing the first question will be: ‘What went wrong?’ When she really knows, she might answer.”

Watts, in contrast, has been able to conduct her own two-year relationship with the 41-year-old British director Stephen Hopkins in total privacy. Nobody yet looks when they go out together and nobody asks about it. “I first worked with him on a commercial when I was a kid,” she says. “He was just a young director and I never gave it a thought. We met up regularly and, at some point, we found ourselves single and getting on with each other. It has been like that ever since.”

But even Hopkins, who directed Lost in Space, was taken aback by what Lynch asked of Watts in Mulholland Drive. She plays Betty Elms, a struggling Hollywood actress — shades of art mirroring life here — who becomes embroiled in an odd friendship with the mysterious Rita (Laura Harring). In the film, Betty is drawn into a lesbian relationship with Rita. There are moments of sexual intimacy between the two actresses and one despairing masturbation scene performed by Watts. “The film is over two hours long, but those are the scenes I remember when I first read the script,” she says. “I met David Lynch at his house a few days prior to shooting and went through the graphic details. It was like a laundry list. But the day before we started shooting, I went back to his house and shed a few tears. I was freaked out. There were three scenes in the film when I am supposed to take my top off. I negotiated it down to two. I was not offended by it — I am just very wary of that stuff.

“The lesbian and masturbation scenes were non-negotiable. I had kissed lots of girls before, but not like this. It was quite odd, because Laura and I are both soft and gentle and there was no driving force. I was amazed how honest and real all this looks on screen. These girls look really in love and it was curiously erotic. Laura is very free in her sexuality. I am, too, but usually only with someone I am intimate with.”

She is less certain about her solo sex scene. “This was one I found difficult right up to the shooting experience,” she says. “I had to go to the bathroom about 100 times between takes. The camera was about four inches away from my face, moving up and down my body. The scene plays for a minute or two, but Lynch went on for about eight. That is why he is so brilliant. He is there for you, yet still determined to get the best he can. If he had bailed out, then I would have lost it, too.”

Watts has delivered so comprehensively that she has leapfrogged from unknown to Hollywood front-runner. While Mulholland Drive is the choice of New York film critics as their best movie of the year, she was runner-up as best actress to Judi Dench (in Iris, out on January 18).

Naomi Watts, who has been used to playing second fiddle to her best friend, now looks set to join her in the spotlight. “On the strength of this,” she says, “I have been offered a choice of big studio films. I am not going to blow it."

From The Sundaytimes

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