Redefining a role

Susan Sarandon, who plays a drunk, wayward grandmother in the new comedy ‘Tammy’, is also preparing for the arrival of her first grandchild. Dave Itzkoff talks to the prolific actress about the image makeover.

Susan Sarandon was mildly disappointed that she wouldn’t make the trek to Burning Man this summer. She attended that free-spirited Nevada desert festival for the first time last year, and said she felt safely inconspicuous since “there’s a lot of girls walking around with amazing bodies and no clothes on, so you’re not that interesting.” 

Instead, after a July that will, somewhat improbably, see Sarandon play a wayward grandmother to Melissa McCarthy in the road-trip comedy Tammy, she is taking a few weeks off to prepare for the birth of her first real grandchild, by her daughter, Eva Amurri Martino.

The arrival of any new life is a “sci-fi” event, Sarandon said recently, and this particular one could have a fundamental impact on how the 67-year-old Academy Award-winner sees herself, coming at a time when she has been playing a series of characters who are dowdy, deranged and emphatically old.

In many shoes

But in a career in which she has famously played a prostitute, a nun and a feminist outlaw on screen, and become a polarising activist and a self-described “Ping-Pong propagandist” behind the scenes, Sarandon already has a perspective on herself that is sufficiently radical — and radically different from how the world sees her.

“I’ve never been skinny enough or charismatic enough to be a Julia Roberts kind of actress — somebody who sells a movie on the basis of her personality,” she said. “I have a broad base as a character actor, and it wasn’t difficult for people to see me grow older and change. But Tammy is probably pushing the envelope a bit,” she added.

In Tammy, Sarandon plays Pearl, a hard-drinking, man-chasing matriarch who is even more of a bad seed than McCarthy’s unruly title character. “We needed somebody that could be in the right age range, and still also be wildly sexual,” said McCarthy, who wrote the film with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed. “We kept saying, ‘Someone like Susan Sarandon, but older.’ ”

Instead, Falcone said, Sarandon played the role in a gray wig and other age-accelerating accouterments. “We were saying, basically, you’re too hotsy-totsy,” he explained. “You look vibrant and young. We need to age you up. In a bizarre way, that’s kind of a compliment.”

“It was like, we need to take all of this,” McCarthy added, “just pointing at every part of her body, and destroy it.”

Sarandon, who also put peppercorns in her shoes to achieve Pearl’s uncomfortable gait, said she found it “very liberating” to portray someone who is “dependent on highlighting every flaw and as much bad lighting as possible.”

“For the longest time,” she added, “I was in kind of a death mode, where everyone I was playing was either dying or helping someone die.” “It’s certainly more fun,” she said, to find herself in the phase of characters she calls “alcoholic, substance-abuse weird people.”

That loose category includes films like the Errol Flynn biopic The Last of Robin Hood, in which she plays a wicked stage mother with a prosthetic leg; and the coming-of-age comedy Ping Pong Summer, which cast her as an eccentric, fish-wielding mentor to a teenager.

Such a string of un-self-conscious roles could make one wonder whether this is all that’s available to Sarandon, or part of a continuing effort to reinvent herself after her separation from her former partner Tim Robbins, an occurrence now five years in the rearview mirror. But Sarandon said the reality was not nearly as deliberate.

“I’m always looking for things that frighten me, which in private life isn’t necessarily recommended, but in a career it’s very good,” she said. Her worldview, she said, is the opposite of paranoid, which she calls “pro-noid.”

“I think the universe is conspiring in my favour,” she said, “that everything that would be perceived as bad eventually has turned into something positive and useful.”“One of my strongest talents,” she added, “is being able to change directions when something crosses my path that I didn’t plan on.”

Directors’ choice

If Sarandon has no qualms about shedding her reputation as, say, a minor-league baseball groupie in Bull Durham or an underdressed virgin in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is not quite so easy for the directors who seek her for such starkly different roles. Michael Tully, the writer and director of Ping Pong Summer, said he was hopeful that Sarandon, who is a partner in the table-tennis nightclub franchise SPiN, would have a baseline interest in his low-budget independent film. Still, he seemed astounded that she agreed to do it.

“What does Susan Sarandon have to prove to the world?” Tully said. “She has done seemingly all you can to have a hugely successful Hollywood career, and she’s still trying. I don’t really know the answer. Let her explain, or a therapist explain. I will say I was appreciative and aware of her consistent drive to keep working.”

Sarandon has a gentle, low-key presence: “I am definitely somebody who, at a party, sits on the side and has a long conversation with two people,” she said. “I’m not a drinker, I’m more of a stoner.”

But she is also fiercely passionate about her liberal politics, and protective of allies like Somaly Mam, a Cambodian activist against sex trafficking, who has been accused of fabricating her personal back story. “You don’t see anyone accusing her of stealing money or molesting children or not keeping kids alive,” Sarandon said of Mam. If the same amount of scrutiny had been applied “going into Iraq — and by your paper, too — we wouldn’t have gone to war,” she added.

Her nonconformity resonates throughout her life in other ways: She was a longtime friend of Timothy Leary, the psychedelic spiritualist who left her some of his ashes, and she wears a necklace with the word “honey,” the self-chosen nickname she wants her future granddaughter to call her instead of “grandma.”

“My hairstylist said it’s a Southern thing, and I thought, that’s kind of fabulous,” Sarandon explained. “I like that. ‘Honey, come over here.’ ‘Where’s Honey?’ That’s the plan.” Martino, 29, who is Sarandon’s daughter by the director Franco Amurri and who has appeared on television comedies like The Mindy Project and Undateable, said her mother does not exhibit the qualities of a typical grandparent, other than perhaps a lack of familiarity with modern technology. “She has figured out how to do one thing on her phone,” Martino said, “which is tweet as Penny.” (That would be her dog Penny Lane, who chronicles her life with Sarandon on Twitter as @MsPennyPuppy.)

Sarandon, who is also the mother of two sons, Jack Henry Robbins, 25, and Miles Robbins, 22, from her relationship with Robbins, said she looked forward to her children seeing her in Tammy, a role they are unlikely to find as shocking as other provocative entries in her canon.

“They consider a sex scene anything where you kiss — it doesn’t even matter if you’re naked or not,” she said, “But now they’re pretty outrageous themselves and they have a great sense of humour.”

They were not so comfortable when they were exposed to portions of her work at a 2003 gala of the Film Society of Lincoln Center held in her honour.

As Sarandon recalled the occasion: “My older son said, ‘Did it never occur to you that you would have children?’ My daughter wasn’t fazed, and my younger son said, ‘Mom, I liked it, but it was scarring.’ ”