Marisa Tomei uses body and soul in The Wrestler
Marisa Tomei entered the public eye back in 1992, when at 28 she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for My Cousin Vinny. She’s been giving them more than an eyeful lately, starting with nude scenes — her first — last year in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and likewise in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, opening December 26, in which she plays a stripper drawn to Mickey Rourke’s washed-up ring bum. But the performance is more than skin deep: pundits predict she’ll be picking up Oscar number two.
Q: Are you surprised at the Oscar buzz?
A: I’m so excited. I find it out from people like you, so it’s great to hear!
Q: Was the nudity daunting?
A: I had already just done it in the movie before, so it was daunting to think about doing it again. Why do it again? That’s a fluke of the highest order. It’s not that I was like, “Oh, great. I have all these scripts, and that’s the one I’m going to pick.” It just so happened that Sidney asked me to do that film and Darren asked me to do this film, and those were the requirements, and I thought about it and I decided to do it, and I’m glad I did. But it could’ve gone either way.
Q: Are you braced for criticism that you might have been exploited?
A: I don’t feel exploited. I thought about it ahead of time, about what this character was going to be. Was she going to be a complete basket case, a broken-down almost-whore? Or was she going to be someone who expressed herself, who has her demons but found her solace in this thing that she does, which is her art form, the way Mickey’s is his wrestling. And that’s the side that I went with. That’s what I tried to connect with.
