New York Tristate

Having a Good Time

Though “Mass” is Martha Plimpton’s most somber screen role to date, the Oscar hopeful insists: “If it’s not fun, what are we doing it for?”

By Casey Mink - Photographed by Zoe McConnell

MARTHA PLIMPTON IS, AS THE KIDS

might say, booked and busy. Calling from Pittsburgh on a recent Monday evening, the lifelong actor is buoyant and generous with her time, despite having worked all day on set. Then again, being spread too thin is just about the best problem an actor can have. “Isn’t that the nature of the beast?” she says, laughing.

Plimpton had planned to use the weeks of late summer to do press for her new film “Mass,” a four-hander from freshman filmmaker Fran Kranz. But as luck would have it, she instead booked a television job at what was almost literally the 11th hour. Given 36 hours, to be exact, between reading the script and starting production as the new project’s lead, she’s been at work nonstop.

For an actor who requires hours of scrupulous preparation before each new role, the feat sounds impossible. Fortunately for Plimpton, she’s no such actor. “I don’t have a set schedule for what I do for a job. I don’t have a checklist of, like: First I do this, then I do that, and I do this,” she says. “I don’t really work that way. I think the main impetus behind that, though, is just the desire to have fun. From my experience in my time doing this, I’ve found the best way to have fun is just to fucking do it.”

Plimpton isn’t sure exactly when or how she developed this “just jump in” mindset, as she calls it, and she acknowledges it isn’t something that everyone can merely decide to do. She reckons it’s a working style that’s naturally evolved over her time in the industry—which, by the way, began when she was just 8 years old. She was born in New York City to actors Shelley Plimpton and Keith Carradine, who met while starring in the original Broadway production of “Hair” in 1969. So it wasn’t that performing was in her blood; performing was her blood.

“It’s the only thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never had any other job,” she says, when asked whether being an actor was inevitable. “So, I guess the answer would be yes?”

Plimpton did not attend an acting conservatory, or any acting school for that matter. Now a fixture of the small screen on series like “Generation,” “Younger,” “The Real O’Neals,” and “The Good Wife” (which earned her an Emmy), she’s learned as she’s worked. From her earliest days on professional sets in 1980s cult classics like “The Goonies” and “The Mosquito Coast,” she made herself a sponge, absorbing knowledge and expertise from those around her.

“It all soaks in; you pick it all up, and you take what you like and leave the rest,” she says. “I absolutely learned on the job. I learned from working with lots of different kinds of people and lots of different styles of filmmaker and styles of actor. And I’m still learning.”

She worked consistently in film and regional theater throughout her teens and early adulthood, until arriving at a period in her late 20s and early 30s when things dried up. This was the ’90s, and as a female character actor, there just weren’t many roles for which she was well-suited. “There’s not a lot of work for women in their 20s and 30s unless they’re the lead, right? There’s almost no character work. And the character work that is there tends to be really boring,” she laments. (She does acknowledge that this has improved somewhat over the last decade or so.)

It was during this rough stretch that she had a conversation with her mother, one that completely changed her perspective on the industry and her place in it. “My mother was saying, ‘Look, do you want to be a working actor or do you want to be a movie star? Because movie stardom, you can’t get that. It picks you,’ ” Plimpton remembers. “She said, ‘You can either be frustrated because you’re not getting picked to be a movie star, or you can be an actor. You can be a working actor and go from there.’

“Always listen to your mother,” she concludes, taking a beat. “I mean, if she’s worth listening to.” So Plimpton made the choice to stop chasing stardom and start pursuing a life as a working actor. Which isn’t to say she suddenly became immune to the slog of that venture and all that goes with it, but it led her to a place where she could “chill out a little bit—not be so hard on myself.” She recalls that she even gave her audition process a much-needed burst of levity: “I was just like, You know what? Give yourself a break.

“It’s the ebb and flow of this business. It’s a toughie sometimes, and it can do a number on your ego,” she continues. “But if you can, just try and not take it personally, and

There’s all kinds of jobs we could be doing that are no fun at all, right? And we’re lucky enough to be doing this crazy thing.

remember that you love what you do and it brings you joy and you have fun doing it. There’s all kinds of jobs we could be doing that are no fun at all, right? And we’re lucky enough to be doing this crazy thing where we wear wigs and we dress in other people’s clothes and we talk funny—and we get paid for it.”

Which brings us to her approach, her process—how she does what she does. She insists that, on set, no matter what kind of scenes are on the schedule for the day, she always prefers to be surrounded by laughter, noise, and a slight air of human chaos than hushed assistant directors and isolated prep in a corner. Not only does this allow her to more readily access what she’s feeling on the day and use it in her performance; it also eliminates the risk of overpreparing.

“There’s a lot of work involved, but you know, who thinks about [it like] that? If you talk too much about it, it loses its zing. It loses its spicy pepper,” Plimpton says. By that same token, if you get bogged down worrying that you’re blowing a scene, the worst