The movie Naomi Watts auditioned for five times and still didn’t get: “It was pretty brutal”
Breaking into Hollywood is hard enough for those who were born in the United States, so what about those who were born hundreds of miles away, across seas, disconnected from such a cutthroat industry?
Naomi Watts longed to be an actor from a young age, but success wouldn’t come to her straight away. Born in England, she moved around a fair bit as a child, first to Wales, then much further afield to Australia. It was here, the other side of the world, that she would gain her first taste of being in the spotlight, auditioning for TV commercials before eventually landing her first film role in 1986’s For Love Alone.
From there, roles started to come more frequently, and her close friendship with another burgeoning star, Nicole Kidman, was a significant help, allowing her further access to the industry. Soon enough, she was in Hollywood trying to make it, just like her character Betty in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which she’d come to play in 2001.
Before this, though, she took on anything she could get, with credits ranging from an adaptation of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea to the campy sci-fi film Tank Girl, and then, strangely enough, Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering. What Watts really wanted, though, was proper Hollywood success, something her friend Kidman had already achieved, but she wasn’t going to give up, and in one instance, she auditioned for a movie five times, desperate to be a part of it. But that still wasn’t enough.
“It was pretty brutal,” she told The Daily Beast, in reference to the gruelling process of auditioning, getting rejected, or simply going through hours of preparation only to bag a forgettable part.
“You’d have to drive to an office just to pick up two bits of script paper, then you’d arrive and line up for hours, get to the casting director, and they wouldn’t even give you eye contact. It was so demeaning. Ten years of torment that’s probably made me able to play these parts where I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown all the time!” she explained.
These kinds of characters prove to be Watts speciality, and she proved her skill with her dual role performance in Mulholland Drive, but shortly before that, she’d hoped to star in a movie that was the total opposite: Meet the Parents. The comedy was a hit, but it was a totally different direction for Watts, and it seems like some mysterious higher power was working in her favour, trying to stop her from going down the Hollywood comedy route as her breakthrough.
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“I came to New York and auditioned at least five times for Meet the Parents,” she said. The role of Pam, the bride-to-be of Ben Stiller’s protagonist Greg, went to Teri Polo, but Watts can surely rest easy in the knowledge that the franchise, which included the terrible Little Fockers, quickly went straight down the toilet.
“I think the director liked me, but the studio didn’t. I heard every piece of feedback you could imagine, and in this case, it was ‘not sexy enough’,” Watts revealed. Luckily, she bagged Mulholland Drive soon after, a movie that would set her up for an impressive career that has never been short of star-studded opportunities.
