‘I wouldn’t wish anyone down the drain. Except sometimes’: TikTok sensation and Oscar-nominated gun star Amy Madigan | Film

IIt’s a full-time gig being an Oscar nominee, what with the lunches, fittings, interviews and photo shoots. It’s amazing that anyone gets any actual work done. “I’m tired,” Amy Madigan says, grinning on a video call. It’s afternoon in Los Angeles but the curtains of the living room behind her are tightly closed. I’m afraid she may have just stayed up all night.

The last time Madigan was nominated was in 1985. She played Gene Hackman’s fragile daughter in a blue-collar drama called Twice in a Lifetime (the title now seems apt). She points out that awards season was shorter and sweeter at the time. “Now he’s a big, unruly beast. “We want to talk to Amy!” I’ve been doing this since November. Don’t you think people are tired of talking about us and seeing our faces? Haven’t you people seen enough?

Madigan is now 75, making her the plucky veteran in this year’s Best Supporting Actress race; Emotional outsider, even though there is nothing comfortable about it. She was shortlisted for her role in Zack Krieger’s Weapons, a small-town horror thriller that plays out in parts, like a collection of witness statements. Madigan appears — first teasingly, then startlingly — as nightmarish Aunt Gladys, the most terrifying child-hunter this side of Robert Helpman’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Feeding on young and turning adults into zombies, Gladys has rounded features, clown makeup and a monstrous orange wig – and Krieger’s film has her wandering around town talking 19s to dozens. Women are laughable and pathetic until the moment they’re not.

Those drawn curtains are unnerving. Madigan’s house seems very impersonal, like a peephole or a safe house. Maybe that’s because he is, she explains. She’s in a rented apartment she shares with actor Ed Harris, her husband and longtime creative collaborator. The couple’s real home burned down in bushfires last year. That’s her other full-time job, sorting out permits with the city. “We were hoping to start rebuilding in February or March, but that’s not going to happen. It will take years.”

Krieger credited Madigan with “saving” his film. At the very least, give him a big injection of blood. In the months since its release last August, Aunt Gladys has permeated the culture and become a TikTok star, beloved by trick-or-treaters and professional drag acts alike. The actor avoids social media but is well aware of the hype. “the people He loves Gladys. They want to hang out with Gladys. A faltering pause, a crooked smile. “Which I find kind of interesting.”

It’s a shame that Gladys’s appeal isn’t quite universal. I watched the movie Guns with my 11 year old son and it scared the hell out of him. He refused to go to bed after that, thinking Aunt Gladys might be lurking. This is my fault as a parent but it’s also her fault, a little bit. “Wow. Well, I’m sorry I did that to him,” she says. “But I take it as a compliment, too.”

It’s a funny thing, a horror. It somehow hits harder than more respectable types. “Horror works on an emotional level,” Madigan explains. “People want it and need it. They like to watch it from afar. I grew up with all the genius characters in black and white. Nosferatu, the Bride of Frankenstein, all the way back to Bette Davis in What Happened to Baby Jane? It scared the hell out of me, even though it was probably more gothic than horror. But it’s all based on old fairy tales. Someone stealing babies — that’s been around forever.”

Gladys feeds on the children, sapping their energy to survive. Perhaps Madigan, for her part, is now feeding off Gladys. For the past ten years, her career has been on subsistence rations, with smaller parts in smaller films. So weapons were a godsend, if not a magic bullet. She is careful to keep things in perspective. “Friends say, ‘Oh, texts must be flying into your inbox.’ And I’m like, ‘No.’ But I’m more on the radar, more in the conversation, which is nice. It’s like Gladys showed up and made an impact and reminded the world that I’m still here.”

How bad is it? Have you ever thought about quitting? “Sure. How could you not? These thoughts invade you, especially when you have time off, and I’ve certainly had them over the past few years. Then you have a bad day and think: ‘Will I ever get a job again?’ “Maybe I’ve retired and haven’t really told myself yet.” “The work is brutal. It is. But the truth is I still love doing it. “

Evidence suggests that she was always torn, a survivor, and viewed as too tough and too acerbic for mainstream Hollywood tastes. “Freckled, simple but winning,” critic Stanley Kaufman wrote of her first screen performance – playing a pregnant convict in 1982’s Love Child – an implication that every subsequent triumph would come against extreme odds. So she made hay on the sidelines, playing John Candy’s girlfriend in Uncle Buck and Kevin Costner’s wife in Field of Dreams before taking home a Golden Globe for her starring role in Roe vs Wade, the 1989 abortion rights legal drama.

For a while, she and Harris were an independent film powerhouse duo, working on the same page, with their careers running parallel. Then his work rate continued to drive – with roles in the likes of The Truman Show, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! and Top Gun: Maverick – while its business began to decline. In addition to change. She says there is inbuilt sexism in the entire casting process. “But Ed knows this business as well as I do. So he’s good at all of that. We met working together. We’ve done a lot of movies together. So we’re used to supporting each other.”

I’d been meaning to ask about their appearance at the 1999 Academy Awards, when director Elia Kazan received honorary awards from Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Madigan and Harris have collaborated on 11 films in total, but that night was certainly their most famous joint performance, as they watched the show silent, stone-faced and unapplauded. Kazan was the great leftist filmmaker of postwar American cinema, the man who directed Viva Zapata! And On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd. But in 1952, he broke ranks and named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was a dark time. Life has been ruined. Madigan believes Kazan played a role in all of this.

“My father was a journalist,” she says by way of explanation. “He was also the political liaison for the Illinois Supreme Court. So I grew up with a political mindset. My father covered the McCarthy hearings and that affected him greatly, to the point where he couldn’t really talk about it. So I couldn’t have participated in the applause. I probably wouldn’t have had those twists and turns in my head where I’m thinking, ‘Oh, let’s forgive and forget.’ No, I don’t forget that kind of thing. I wouldn’t wish this person to fall into the sewer — well, sometimes I do — but I don’t have to participate. And I think it’s a shame that the Academy should honor him.” This way.

Moreover, her rejection was not a comment on Kazan’s work, but rather a judgment on his actions. “It’s true,” she says. “Although I don’t really agree with the idea that you can separate the two. There are certain lines you can’t cross.”

The problem, of course, is that history repeats itself. Lines that have been crossed tend to be crossed again. Just look at today’s political landscape, she says. The almost daily attack on the First Amendment; Footage of people shot dead in the street. She’s angry with Trump and despairing about the state of the country. When their house burned down, she and Harris briefly discussed moving out altogether. “It’s a terrible feeling – politically – to live in the United States right now. So of course this topic comes up in the conversation. But I’m still proud to be an American. I believe in my colleagues. And you can feel something going on in Southern California. People are terrified but also angry. They’re fighting back and fighting back. So I’m cautiously optimistic.”

She knows this is a strange time to have another date at the Oscars. She has no idea if she’ll win, it’s all a mystery. Still, the nomination feels like a nice thing to have happened, especially after a 40-year gap. It views it as a belated reward for decades of graft, or even – dare one say it – its own honorary prize. “This is an unusual feeling,” she says. “This is going to take some getting used to. I mean it’s crazy how people respond to Gladys. But I have to accept that they respond to me too.”