“I thought it was fascinating,” Glenn Close told the Actress Roundtable of her latest film, The Wife. “I had never been asked to play a character like that. But also, I had a lot of questions. I knew I’d have to answer those questions in order to play her, and the big one was, why didn’t she leave him?
“It was so much more complex than that, and I had to figure that out in order play her without any kind of judgment,” Close said of her character, who takes a back seat to her husband’s success, born from her own work.
Close told the roundtable it took 14 years to get the film made, saying, “It was actually hard to find actors who wanted to be in a movie called The Wife.” The role of Close’s husband eventually went to Jonathan Pryce. “It’s two women writers, the novelist and screenwriter, and, you know, starring a woman. No one wanted to it and, most of the money, if not all the money, came from Europe.”
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Playing a woman in the film who gives so much to her husband, Close spoke to the importance of living a life that fulfills her personally, saying, “We have our children and all that, and the nurturing, natural thing that we do as women. Then we have the need for personal fulfillment. We need to feed our souls and our hearts, and I think that’s what our work does. You can do both.”
Glenn Close is a six-time Oscar-nominated actress for her work in The World According to Garp, The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons and Albert Nobbs. The Wife is directed by Bjorn Runge, and written by Jane Anderson, based on the novel by Meg Wolitzer.
