INTERVIEW DANIELLE WOODWARD
Friendships are so important to me but they are also fragile and the film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, captures that brilliantly. The script was so smartly written and compassionate, I had to do it. It is based on the true story of Lee Israel, played by Melissa McCarthy, and the friendship between her and my character, Jack Hock – two people who are essentially failing at life. They go through the cycle of friendship: the fallinginlove stage, the loyalty, then the inevitable betrayal and reconciliation, which is all the more poignant as Jack is dying of AIDS – both Melissa and I lost friends to AIDS in the 1990s and we also got on really well, so that a.ected our performances and made our onscreen friendship doubly charged.
I’m so grateful for my career and I’m enjoying it for as long as it lasts. Other actors my age, such as Daniel DayLewis, have retired and I could never imagine retiring now. I’ve heard that, as a method actor, he finds the process incredibly draining, but I don’t take my characters home with me; I don’t have to live the life of that person, so it doesn’t drain me in the same way.