Adulterous housewives, CIA bosses – Joan Allen has played them all with consummate skill. Now, in Stephen King adaptation Lisey’s Story, she’s turned her hand to visceral horror
In some ways, Joan Allen is like an American Gary Oldman; wait, stay with it. She looks so different from one role to the next that she’s way beyond mercurial, further towards intangible – like a spirit slipping into a role more than a flesh-and-blood actor. Or maybe this is just acting at its most rarefied. One of the late 70s founders of Steppenwolf, the legendary Chicago theatre troupe that most famously launched John Malkovich, her early career was edgy, ensemble work, with an activist’s purity of purpose. “We’d have to write these applications to get arts grants, and people would say ‘What is your mission statement?’,” she remembers as she Zooms from Connecticut. “Well, what were we? A group of like-minded people who wanted to do strong visceral theatre and had a similar sensibility and sense of humour. We saw the pinnacle of our job as to tell whatever story we were telling to the best of our ability.” This was married, certainly in Allen’s mind, with a craftsmanlike lack of pretension. “It’s like tennis. You come in, and you bring your game. The better you play, the better your partner plays, the better your opponent plays.”
Although Steppenwolf were multi-award-winning and there was no shortage of mainstream theatre success – Allen won a Tony in 1988 for Burn This, in her Broadway debut – you can still get a whiff of how uncomfortable the ensemble was with the idea of Hollywood, especially as Malkovich’s star started to rise. “At that time, there really was a concern, if we do go out and do other work, will this still be the most important thing in our lives? Is it more important to stay in Chicago and do it for local audiences?”
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