Brooke Smith: Always in the Center of Truth

Listen, there is a real actress out there. No, really.

When people who care about acting gather together to talk about how it's diminishing or being degraded, certain names are always brought up to engender hope in the group, and one of them is Brooke Smith. During a brief period when I had the ears and the attention of Mike Nichols, he said of Smith that "she was fully intelligent and present all the time, and that is very often not seen as 'acting.' People remain simple--if not dumb--about what they think acting is: Loud, outlined in neon, a parade of adjectives made flesh. To witness an actor inhabiting a character fully, listening, making a mark in the--God forgive this--mise en scène, is to see a rarity."

      I was contracted by an online magazine last year to profile Smith when she mounted her own Emmy campaign for her supporting performance in the ABC series "Big Sky." When the campaign failed to net Smith a nomination, the story was dropped, but I think another reason might have been because I was more interested in what Smith represents--a real actor, a true talent, in a wilderness of badness and public relations.

    Brooke Smith has never disappointed an audience, a writer, or a fellow player. While she maintains a social-media presence, it is not full of humble bragging ("Can I tell you how awed I am to hear such great things about myself?") nor does she feel compelled to mark every job gained, meal eaten, and despite her passionate views on the world and its politics, she does not engage in arguments or statements implying that she has tapped into something alien or out of reach to others. Smith has also not looked at the future and decided, as someone in her mid-fifties, that a burnishing of the woke wheels through philanthropy or braying indignance might benefit her.

    "I just want to keep working," Smith tells me. "And I need to. I have two daughters, one headed to college. [Since our initial interviews, Smith's daughter has entered college]. I have rent to pay. I need to make a living." "Listen," Mary-Louise Parker told me, "I need her to keep working. I need to see her. I believe her every time I see her." When I ask if Smith makes her believe in the power of acting, as others do, Parker says without hesitation, "Absolutely. She is always right in the center of the truth when she acts."

   Marian Seldes thought Smith had the capacity to "look like a Madonna, and then terrify you by showing the face of someone in absolute turmoil." When you saw a play or a film with Marian, she might whisper "That's one," which generally meant the person noted was one of her students from Juilliard, where she taught for more than two decades. Seldes whispered, "That's one," when Smith completed a particular scene in Louis Malle's VANYA ON 42ND STREET, but on the street later, when I asked about Smith's time at Juilliard, Seldes confessed that she hadn't attended, "but she has it. She's blessed. Watch her. You'll see."

There is a cult following for Smith due to her performance in SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS, in which Smith was a pregnant woman turned assassin, engaged in a brutal series of quests for a reality program that now seems terrifyingly prescient. (The film is from 2001, and I highly recommend it.) When Smith is not lumbering about taking down fellow contestants in the hopes of claiming the top prize, she's tending to a sick lover (the preternaturally beautiful and wonderful Glenn Fitzgerald). When I was researching the earlier story on Smith, I ventured into murky rooms online to ask about this actress, and everyone--from teenagers to retirees with a hunger for apocalyptic films--spoke of her as Nichols or Seldes or Parker had: They loved that she felt like a woman in dire extremity, found on the street, and told to do her job--or else. Smith cannot be caught acting, and when she is on the screen with Marylouise Burke, an actress always wound too tight with gewgaws and tics aimed at stealing focus, you find yourself in a diabolically satisfying tango between a very obvious actress looking toward a demo reel and a woman whose fluid has suddenly burst and who must--in the midst of murder and betrayal--give birth to her baby. Even assassins, if played by Smith, have hope.

The director of SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS is Daniel Minahan, since triumphant with "Game of Thrones," "House of Cards," "The Assassination of Gianni Versace," and "Halston," and he told me he sought Brooke out for the film. "I saw her in an off-off Broadway play," he said, "and her co-star was John Cameron Mitchell. [This was Alan Bownes Little Monsters, in 1994.] I had seen her in Vanya and Silence [of the Lambs], and she was so vivid and alive and authentic. That’s how I fell in love with her. As I fell in love with her as an actor, I was [also] so impressed with how authentic she was in everything she approaches. She is experienced and technically able, but it all comes from a very heartfelt place. I describe her as an actor’s actor." Minahan adds, as did Parker, that working with Smith was to also invite her friendship, which she offers fully, honestly. I can say, from only a couple of telephone conversations with Smith  that I trust her implicitly, but I also would not want to try and come between her and an honest thought. It is not that she is cruel, but she is smart, honest, and aware that time is terribly valuable.

Perhaps because her mother was the powerful PR agent Lois Smith, whose clients included Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, and Liza Minnelli,  Brooke knows the business and how it works, and the most insidious enemy is time. Time is coming for all of us, and talent--and I cannot stress again how much of it Brooke Smith has--can't do anything in a crouch, waiting for a method of expression with a director or a writer of talent. Talent waits and it withers. Talent grows desperate, and suddenly, the talent is on the line doing substandard work to pay the rent or the tuition or the dental bill. Another conversation that often arises, along with the praise of actors we love, is, Why are certain actors always working? We live in a culture that supports and sustains a bewildering number of actors who occasionally rise to the competency of a sophomore at a decent college in a lucky production, and I do not understand it. Smith is smarter than I am, and she doesn't go near that topic, but she addresses acting in general.

"You know,” she says, “in the play Four Dogs and a Bone [by John Patrick Shanley] someone tells a story about a mama bear giving birth to a bunch of babies. She was licking them clean, and right before she got to the last bear, she died. And that bear went into show business. I think of that line every single time I’m on a set. I look for the unlicked cubs." Smith laughed. [Later, talking with Mary-Louise Parker, who appeared in the 1993 premiere of that play, she was not surprised that the story arose. "She loves that story," Parker said, "and it's true."] 

Smith continues: "I’ve been thinking about the thick skin it takes to be an actor, to accept this rejection and abuse, and yet when you do the work, you’re expected to be vulnerable, and that’s a dangerous risk. A weird combination, and I feel like people--even in the business--think it's about learning the lines and moving along. It feels like it’s harder than ever to be an actor. Unless it’s a hobby. God, I hate that sense of acting as a side, a hobby. I'm committed to this, and not just as a means of supporting my family, and it feels like people say there’s a million people who will do it for free. We can throw a rock and get someone else." There is a significant pause, and I can imagine that it might be Brooke Smith who may be throwing some rocks soon.

When Smith speaks again, she says she's "not baffled [by the business]. I get nervous. I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, but I loved my work in "Big Sky." I don't think I'm deluded in looking for recognition. I felt about it just as David E. Kelly did. I wasn’t sure where she [the character Merilee] was going to go, and David had said to me that he was very fascinated by people who marry monsters. I’ve noticed that in other projects—"Undoing," "Big Little Lies." The show is not entirely about that that, but I want to know if she knows, if she doesn’t, does she choose not to know. So when they called and asked if I wanted to go to Canada during a global pandemic, I said yes. It’s David Kelly!"

Find "Big Sky" on a streaming service and watch it. Smith's Merilee can be lumbering, tense, her face clouded with doubt and anger, and then she can become giddy with the prospect of romance, a dance, some attention. Watching Smith's face as facts become apparent is a marvel of acting as being, thinking, registering behind the eyes. As David E. Kelly told DEADLINE: "As a show, you want to put your best foot forward, and Brooke is certainly a part of that. She did incredible work for us. It was nuanced and complicated; she driving drama one moment and dark comedy the next. Good acting is good acting, and character actors are hard to find. You're looking for people to play adult roles, complicated roles where the human pathology is nuanced." He then added--It's the reason Brooke keeps getting hired: She's an extremely smart actress." 

The Emmy campaign did not succeed in earning Smith a nomination, but it brought attention to a good actress, and Smith continues to work, and she continues to inspire. When you do see her on social media, she is bragging about her daughters, being rapturously greeted by her dog, praising her costars, boasting of nothing but her luck. Mary-Louise Parker mentioned Smith's loyalty, but Smith thinks it is really about placing an emphasis on the important things, and she remembers Ruth Nelson, the formidable actress from the Group Theater, whose husband, actor and director John Cromwell, was particularly destroyed by the HUAC hearings,  the blacklist, and Elia Kazan's naming of names. Nelson was aged and frail when she worked with Smith on Vanya on 42nd Street, but she rested well, husbanded her energy, and appeared, fully, when she was needed. Smith would learn that Nelson was offered the role of Linda Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, clearly a great part in a play that was going to have an impact on the theater. It's director, however, was to be Elia Kazan, and Nelson could not justify a good career move working with a man she felt to be a traitor.

"She knew what was important," Smith says, "what mattered, and I want to be the same way. The work, the life, the family, the friends. What's important?"

What we see in every performance offered to us by Brooke Smith has that single question--"What's important?"--deeply etched within it.