The performance Frances McDormand wishes she could do over: “I was taking it too seriously”
If you were to call Frances McDormand the greatest female actor of her generation, very few people would argue with you. In fact, you put her in the conversation of one of the greatest actors, regardless of gender, and you’d still have a pretty good leg to stand on.
In terms of awards, she has almost everybody else beat hands down. She is a three-time ‘Best Actress’ winner at the Oscars for Fargo, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Nomadland. Incidentally, she also picked up a statuette for her role as a producer on Nomadland, which won ‘Best Picture’. Even ignoring her considerable trophy cabinet, the work McDormand has produced with directors like Cameron Crowe, Wes Anderson, and the Coen brothers (she and Joel Coen have been married since 1984) is enough to make most other actors sick to their stomachs with jealousy.
The one thing about being one of the greats, however, is that you have to hold yourself to an incredibly high standard. This is why so many extremely talented people find themselves hating their work. What to everyone else might seem like a masterpiece is perceived as a total flop internally; it’s very easy to lose perspective when you’re at the eye of your own storm.
For McDormand, the 1990 horror movie Darkman will always be an example of this horrible affliction. Directed by Sam Raimi, the film follows Liam Neeson’s Dr Peyton Westlake, a brilliant scientist who is left burned beyond recognition when thugs trash his laboratory. Following a revolutionary medical procedure, he becomes the eponymous antihero, a faceless vessel for vengeance who enacts his bloody revenge on those who have wronged him. McDormand plays Julie Hastings, Westlake’s girlfriend, who is invariably embroiled in his schemes.
“With Darkman, by the way, I really missed an opportunity,” the star admitted to American artist Tod Lippy during an interview. “I could’ve had more fun, the same way Sigourney Weaver had fun in Alien and Kathleen Turner had fun in Romancing the Stone. I was taking it too seriously, and also, Sam kind of cast me because he wanted to answer the criticism of not ever having three-dimensional female characters in his stories. It didn’t work, though, because I didn’t find the dimension of positive silliness that has to go along with the ‘damsel-in-distress’ role.”
The actor, who scored the role of Hastings after Julia Roberts turned it down, was always going to be in a tricky position. Darkman is technically a superhero movie, so the public would have been expecting a certain level of campiness from it. This was long before the genre had been legitimised by Christopher Nolan or Marvel, and even the so-called ‘dark’ comic book films like Tim Burton’s Batman have silly streaks running through them. Nevertheless, Darkman is played very seriously, hence the horror elements. Raimi ended up playing a huge part in the shift in perception of superhero flicks with his Spider-Man movies, and you can definitely see the beginnings of that here.
With the role of Julie Hastings, McDormand was always going to struggle in getting the tone right. Even so, Darkman is a beloved cult favourite to this day, so she can’t have done that badly. She really needs to stop being so hard on herself.
