The movie Jennifer Connelly called the “real turning point” of her career
One of the more interesting things about seeing Top Gun: Maverick a few years ago, aside from how mad the flying scenes in the second half were and that the first half was essentially just a shot-for-shot remake of the first film and yet they got away with it, was definitely seeing Jennifer Connelly and thinking, “Oh, it’s Jennifer Connelly… where’s she been?”
The reason for that is not that Connelly, who has been acting in movies since as far back as 1984 and yet is still somehow only 54, had stopped working, but she definitely hadn’t been in what anyone would describe as a ‘big’ movie since around 2014 when she appeared in Noah, the Darren Aronofsky biblical epic with Russell Crowe, Emma Watson and loads of CGI animals.
And really, the same could be said for the decade before that film too, certainly she had barely been seen since what would probably be described as her career peak to that point, the early 2000s when she appeared again with Crowe in the multi-Oscar award winning A Beautiful Mind, and memorably in another Aronofsky film, the harrowing Requiem for a Dream in which she put in a performance for the ages as a young middle class woman who is dragged into a world of heroin addiction by her boyfriend.
It was A Beautiful Mind that landed her an Oscar win rather than Requiem, but that same year, she signed on to do a movie based on a 1986 novel called Waking the Dead. It’s the story of a young political activist who is blown up in a car, something witnessed by her partner, who questions his sanity when he begins to see her everywhere.
Speaking about the movie, Connelly said: “I can see a real turning point in terms of how I work, which I put right around the time of Waking the Dead, which I did right after my older son was born.”
Adding, “Because I hadn’t chosen it as a career for myself at age 11 but sort of kept working, that was where I decided I really wanted to take responsibility… for my work and make all my own choices, and I really approached it with a new passion.”
Connelly had indeed been working in Hollywood from an incredibly young age, appearing in Sergio Leone’s sprawling gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America in 1984 alongside Robert De Niro and James Woods. A couple of years later, she really found attention in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, the fantasy movie with David Bowie and some genuinely questionable hair that critics didn’t like but audiences did.
Most recently, she’s excelled not so much in movies but on TV shows, firstly with the small screen version of Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiecer between 2020 and 2024, and then with the twisty Apple TV+ show Dark Matter alongside Joel Edgerton, which got rave reviews and has just wrapped filming on the second season.
In it Connelly plays the wife of a Chicago-based physicist who finds himself entangled with a different version of himself in an alternate universe. It’s based on a 2016 novel by Blake Crouch, who also wrote Wayward Pines, another work that was adapted for TV with M Night Shyamalan serving as producer.
