Rebecca Corridor on ‘Godzilla x Kong’ and Discovering Her Method in Hollywood

Rebecca Corridor stood in entrance of an easel, her face contemplative. She moved a paintbrush gently on a palette, then utilized the paint to the canvas. This was in her studio, a transformed barn subsequent door to the place Ms. Corridor lives in upstate New York together with her husband, the actor Morgan Spector, and their 5-year-old daughter, Ida.

When she’s not performing, Ms. Corridor paints as a approach of channeling her creativity. Her father, Sir Peter Corridor — who based the Royal Shakespeare Firm — as soon as warned her about dividing her abilities. “He stated that it’s very onerous to do a couple of factor, which actually haunted me for a very very long time,” Ms. Corridor stated. “More and more, although, I refuse to remain in a single lane.”

This, in some ways, is Ms. Corridor in a nutshell: unwilling to be boxed in, an artist at coronary heart. At 41, Ms. Corridor is taken into account by some to be one among her era’s most proficient actresses. She possesses an unnerving maturity and an unparalleled capability for versatility. She will be able to so totally embody a personality that, because the New York Occasions movie critic Manohla Dargis as soon as wrote, “she turns into your approach into the film in addition to the explanation you retain watching.” However her profession selections reveal a circuitous route towards stardom, a push and pull between tasks with well-known administrators and actors and people on a a lot smaller scale, together with impartial movies and stage productions.

Most not too long ago, she seems on this month’s “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” a big-budget monster movie. In it, she performs Dr. Ilene Andrews, an anthropological linguist, who serves as a maternal Jane Goodall-type determine for Kong. It’s the kind of closely marketed blockbuster {that a} youthful Rebecca Corridor may need objected to altogether. So why did she select to do it?

“The cynical reply is you don’t get to be an artist these days with out doing a few of these,” she replied. “However I’m additionally a straight-up lover of cinema, and that entails every kind of cinema. I don’t have the mentality of, ‘Oh, I’ve bought to do one for them, after which I can do one for me.’ There’s additionally an enormous quantity of enjoyable in it, and I’m happy with the top outcome.”

Ms. Corridor shared a narrative about beginning out in Hollywood. She had simply signed with Inventive Artists Company and was visiting Los Angeles for the primary time. “I used to be being despatched round to auditions, and I sensed somewhat little bit of a sample,” she stated. “I wasn’t anyplace close to getting any of those jobs. However I wrote a letter to my agent on the time saying, ‘I consider myself as a distinct sort of actor. I need to do fascinating impartial movies. Please cease placing me up for these blockbusters. I’m not a standard film star, and the way dare you.’”

Ms. Corridor paused. “I imply, I used to be in all probability nicer than that. I’m extra well mannered. However the gist of it was: ‘I want so that you can conceive of me as one thing apart from what you’re conceiving me.’”

The story made Ms. Corridor cringe now. “As cool and righteous because it sounds, I feel it was an error,” she stated. “The extra of these large jobs that I’d’ve finished in my 20s, the extra entry I’d’ve needed to different work. It was additionally extremely smug to imagine that every one these movies had been unworthy. After all, I needed to be in these movies, too. I didn’t know what I used to be speaking about.”

“I don’t suppose both of us ever had ‘film star’ set in our sights,” stated Dan Stevens, her co-star in “Godzilla x Kong,” who met Ms. Corridor as college students in Cambridge after they had been each solid in a stage manufacturing of “Macbeth.” “Rebecca all the time had ‘artist’ written throughout her.”

Ms. Corridor’s Hollywood star flip got here in 2008, because the conservative brunette to Scarlett Johansson’s extra impulsive blonde in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” a job for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe. Earlier than that, she had apprenticed below her father and, notably, made her tv debut on the age of 10 in “The Camomile Garden.” Sir Peter would later solid her at 21 as Rosalind in an acclaimed manufacturing of “As You Like It.” She has gone on to play all kinds of characters, together with Ben Affleck’s virtuous love curiosity in “The City” and a ditsy Las Vegas dancer in Stephen Frears’s “Lay the Favourite.” In 2016, she obtained broad approval for “Christine,” a movie primarily based on a real story a few tv reporter who took her personal life on digicam in 1974, directed by Antonio Campos.

“Rebecca loves enjoying girls on the verge of a breakdown,” stated Mr. Campos. “She likes enjoying difficult, onerous roles.”

He added: “It’s humorous, she’s both doing a romantic comedy, or she’s doing essentially the most difficult, tough, troublesome, unhinged efficiency.”

Total, her physique of labor has revealed a curious eclecticism, one that’s greatest defined, Ms. Corridor stated, extra by her drive to attempt one thing new as an actor than by an curiosity in constructing a strategic profession, although she acknowledged the previous was a “luxurious not all the time assured.”

Hollywood could not be capable to categorize Ms. Corridor, however the style world has fortunately embraced her many variations. Ms. Corridor and Mr. Spector steadily attend style exhibits, most not too long ago because the company of Thom Browne, Gabriela Hearst and Batsheva Hay. “Somebody with that caliber of intelligence and curiosity, it’s regular that she is going to articulate herself in several mediums so she will sense and perceive the world,” stated Ms. Hearst.

“She’s all the time been enthusiastic about nice work,” stated the actor Khalid Abdalla, who additionally attended Cambridge with Ms. Corridor and directed her in a manufacturing of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the moment, which gained the hard-earned reward of her father. “Not enthusiastic about stardom, not enthusiastic about superstar for superstar’s sake, however the way you negotiate that path, significantly as a lady. And significantly as a lady in a pre-Me-Too period in your 20s,” Mr. Abdalla added.

However the Hollywood that Ms. Corridor grew up admiring had modified. It isn’t as simple to construct a profession doing indies. Ms. Corridor acknowledged that the Gen X angle towards promoting out now not utilized. If something, actors right now reverse-engineer their creative bona fides (suppose: Robert Pattinson), first attaining mega-fame with a franchise, then leveraging that superstar to make what they need.

Nonetheless, she has no regrets. “You must ask her: ‘What are the tasks you haven’t finished?’” Mr. Campos stated. “There are movies the place I went, ‘Oh my God, you didn’t try this! Why didn’t you try this?’ However I feel she’s very content material with how issues are going. She does what she desires to do.”

Just a few weeks later, I requested Ms. Corridor about this. Might she share among the extra iconic roles she has turned down? “Oh, I’ve bought some good ones,” she stated, chuckling. She appeared to run by means of an inventory in her head. She stopped herself. “Oh no, I can’t, I can’t. I don’t need to get into it. It opens too many cans of worms. I feel I’ll do it after I’m a lot older, then I’ll spill all the pieces.”

‘Performing comes simple to me’

In the previous couple of months, Ms. Corridor has been quietly sharing her work on social media. She not too long ago started to promote them to individuals in her direct messages. This April, quite a lot of her work — research of assorted audiences — will likely be on view at Alchemy Gallery in New York Metropolis, in dialogue with the work of her buddy, Rob Roth, an actor, artist and inventive director of the band Blondie. “I requested her, ‘Effectively, why audiences?’” defined Roth. “And Rebecca stated, ‘Effectively, they’ve been looking at me for thus lengthy, I figured I ought to take a look at them.’”

Three years in the past, Ms. Corridor made her directorial debut together with her adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing.” The challenge was 15 years within the making. Ms. Corridor had initially learn the e-book in response to the truth that her maternal grandfather — a Black lodge doorman from Detroit — handed as white after marrying a lady of Dutch descent. Ms. Corridor’s mom, the acclaimed opera singer Maria Ewing, handed as white as effectively. The movie supplied a way of closure for Ms. Ewing, who died in 2022. “She reached some actual peace about her racial identification in direction of the top, which I by no means thought would occur,” stated Ms. Corridor.

She is now at work on a brand new script for a movie she desires to direct, one that’s loosely impressed by her relationship together with her mom. For all of her mom’s life, Ms. Corridor needed to handle her expectations round her personal superstar: Ms. Ewing had all the time inspired her to be a star, however she needed to be cautious by no means to eclipse her mom, she stated.

“There’s no simple approach of claiming this: My mom had plenty of profound psychological well being problems. And I used to be a caretaker for her total life, in a technique or one other. So it was very onerous for me. I used to be all the time interested by her. It was unattainable to navigate, as a result of I used to be all the time doing one thing mistaken.”

Ms. Corridor is aware of it should take time to provide such a private movie. After “Passing,” Ms. Corridor discovered, to her shock, that she needed to return to her performing profession extra urgently than ever.

“I don’t say this flippantly or flippantly, however performing comes simple to me,” she stated. “And the convenience with which I usually discover performing can result in a sort of disrespect for it in a bizarre approach.”

In 2022, she selected to star within the thriller “Resurrection,” the place, as a single mom terrorized by a person from her previous, she delivered an eight-minute monologue that the Vulture movie critic Bilge Ebiri wrote “is so riveting, so mystifying and terrifying that you just shouldn’t be shocked if it exhibits up in each performing class someday within the close to future.”

Ms. Corridor had needed an actual problem. “Storytelling has been round endlessly, so I got here out of it being like, ‘Oh, performing is absolutely one of many noblest professions.’ It reinvigorated one thing in me.”

Ms. Corridor is showing subsequent in Janicza Bravo’s “The Listeners,” a BBC adaptation of the 2021 novel by Jordan Tannahill a few girl who can hear a sound that nobody else can. She additionally has a job in James L. Brooks’s upcoming comedy “Ella McCay,” with Ayo Edebiri and Jamie Lee Curtis, a few younger politician who steps into the position of her mentor. It started filming final month.

“I felt some sort of tether to her,” stated Ms. Bravo about their time filming “The Listeners.” “There are these individuals you fall in love with on the display, and you’ve got a false concept of what they will be like. She was higher than the factor I had imagined.”

Ms. Corridor has been married to Mr. Spector, 43, since 2015. The couple first met the yr earlier than, whereas each within the Broadway revival of Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal” and have labored collectively many occasions since. Their wedding ceremony was a spontaneous and improvised affair — one thing solely two actors would have had. They rented a barn for a weekend and requested mates to carry out a ritual or ceremony with them. “We had a theme, which was ‘convey your individual wedding ceremony,’” Ms. Corridor stated.

She stated she hadn’t anticipated to need marriage, or a household, however that modified with Mr. Spector. (She had her personal tabloid second in 2010 when it was rumored she was the trigger for the break up between the director Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet. Mr. Mendes and Ms. Corridor dated from 2011 to 2013.) “Marriage felt to me like a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of religion,’” stated Ms. Corridor. “I imagine that the entire concept of it’s logically unattainable, so deciding to do it anyway is a pure act of hope.”

Whereas the afternoon gentle was fading, Ms. Corridor completed her portray. Or it was completed sufficient. Ms. Corridor likes the work of Alex Katz, and he or she has an analogous fondness for flat strains and brilliant colours. Within the subsequent few weeks, Ms. Corridor would embark on the press tour for “Godzilla x Kong.”

She talked about how a lot she loves her life upstate, with its deliberate sense of isolation. Each are on the coronary heart of the conflicting impulses that drive her as an actor: “I needed to be a film star as a lot as I needed to be an artist,” she defined. “I used to be all the time dancing in direction of a want to be an iconically well-known superb film star, and in addition, ‘Oh, no, definitely not. I have to disguise instantly.’ I used to be all the time doing that dance, and I nonetheless am, and I in all probability will endlessly. That’s simply my fact.”