The movie that made Toni Collette feel ripped off: “Everyone else is having fun”
Toni Collette has played every type of character imaginable, and then some.
She’s done comedies like Muriel’s Wedding and thrillers like Hereditary, arthouse picks like Velvet Goldmine or even historical biopics, starring as Peggy Robertson in Hitchcock, and so, maybe when you have that much variety in your work and so much breadth to your talent, it can get dizzying.
Especially as Collette was throwing herself between the vastly different worlds of shocks and scares to the sweetness of rom-coms, it’s a lot for a performer to wrap their head around when snapping out of one and stepping into the other, which was especially the case in the late 1990s and start of the 2000s for the actor.
She was basically switching up genres every year with a run of projects that included a psychological thriller, starting with The Sixth Sense, then the crime movie Shaft, the indie dark comedy Hotel Splendide and so on, such that, by the time she got cast in About A Boy, she surely just wanted to sink into something simpler and more lighthearted as she said yes to the cute coming-of-age comedy.
“Everyone else is having fun here, I’m the suicidal lady. What the fuck?” Collette joked on reflection of the film. Despite looking for something more easy-going to do, the actor found herself playing Fiona, a depressed single mother who attempts suicide pretty quickly into the movie. “I just felt ripped off. I was like, what?” she said when it wasn’t quite as fun a job as she thought.
However, the upsides came from the people around her, as Collette still recalls the project as one she deeply loves due to her castmates and the crew involved. “I knew it was a really great film. I really enjoyed working with [the directors] the Weitz brothers,” she said, in particular, highlighting the joy of working with the then-11-year-old Nicholas Hoult, for whom it was a breakout role, gushing, “I love him. He’s so talented. I love watching him grow and become who he is and get better and better at what he does. He’s such a sweetheart.”
While she might not have got the lighthearted role she needed, there was upliftment in watching others get their own. In particular, she remembered that there seemed to be something quite healing about the project for her co-star, Hugh Grant. “At the time, Hugh was so jaded. He just did not enjoy filmmaking at all. He found it torturous, and now I watch him, and I can tell he’s fallen in love with it again,” she said.
Even years on, she still smiles a smile for Grant’s renewed energy for making movies, relaying with real tenderness, “Watching him dance in Paddington 2, honestly, when I saw that, it made me so happy”.
And so Collette still found the boost of joy and lightheartedness she needed in the project, even if it was threatened by the tragic tale of her own character in it.
