In a time when we as American need a reminder that we are both a nation built on religious freedom and on the right not to practice any religion, the story of Madalyn Murray O’Hair seems like a fitting one. Played in the new Netflix film THE MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA by Melissa Leo (an Oscar winner for THE FIGHER), O’Hair founded the American Atheist organization at a time when it was singularly unpopular to speak out against anything that appeared to be separating church and state. She fought to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance and stop public schools from forcing kids to pray as part of their daily morning routine. In many cases, she won, and she and her family (including two sons and a granddaughter) led the charge to keep God out of government for decades.
But when she was kidnapped by former employee David Waters (Josh Lucas, of AMERICAN PSYCHO and A BEAUTIFUL MIND fame) for ransom he knew she had illegally stashed away in off-shore accounts, law enforcement where she lived in Texas was strangely disinterested in locating her. It took the efforts of a local newspaper (represented by a reporter, played by Adam Scott) and a few close friends to discover the truth of her disappearance.
I had the chance to sit down with Leo and Lucas at SXSW earlier this month to talk about their characters and the strange but important place that O’Hair holds in the history of America. They’re both incredibly open actors who enjoy talking about their craft, and I had a tremendous time chatting with them. Please enjoy my talk with Melissa Leo and Josh Lucas…
Capone: I don’t know how much you remember about these events from when they happened, but when you find out they’re making a movie about this and you get a script, what do you remember responding to initially about your individual characters?
Josh Lucas: What I loved immediately was the incredible passion of it, right? To go to this Gandhi/Obama/very basic idea that one individual can change the planet. Look, you don’t need to have power, you don’t need to have politics, you don’t need to have money, you need to have whatever extraordinarily wild, powerful belief that’s going to drive you like this woman had, and that’s a fascinating character, and then where it goes is surreal, and entertainment and strange.
Melissa Leo: I was born in 1960, and so just prior to my being born the government had begun to embellish the dollar bills with “In God We Trust” and taken “indivisible" and replaced it with “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, so those things occurred, and I was born into the world in which Kennedy was shot just as I was old enough to cognate something like that. So I didn’t know anything about her really, I have to say, and really I got to know Madalyn Murray O’Hair though Tommy O’Haver’s script, through Tommy O’Haver’s adoration of her, and thorough the information that he provided for me.
So I kept a narrow corridor, so I would be working with Tommy. I’m sure there might be all kinds of other extraordinary things to think about where Madalyn is concerned, but the story we wanted to tell was the story that Tommy was telling, and there seemed to be plenty of information there to work with.
Capone: When you finally got a grasp on the fact that you’d be playing across 40 years of her life…
JL: In 21 days, with no money.
Capone: Is that an actor’s dream? “If we’re going to go for it, let’s go for it. Let’s just do it.”
ML: In absolute truth, there’s a bit of a funny story about it, because although I knew that for many, many years—Tommy sent me the script five years before we actually got to shoot it—so clearly there it is on the page that she’s 35-ish, and then she gets to 70-something. “Me, the whole time. Oh, gosh.” Then I was shooting something else, and just as I was wrapping that shoot in Nashville and getting into the script to prepare myself to come be Madalyn, it dawned on me, and I panicked and called the company and said, “What are we going to do about that?”
So the very first saving grace was Molly O’Haver, the costume designer, who got it immediately and began to build these undergarments for me so my body could grow. And then there was this extraordinary young man, Matthew Mungle [who did the prosthetic] makeup, who went right to work when he heard about the project without really being asked, but he knew they had my plaster cast on the shelf, and one weekend when it looked like it really wasn’t going to work out, we weren’t going to be able to afford the prosthetics that we needed, we’d waited until the last minute, there was no time, this young man took my plaster cast down and began to sculpt Madalyn on me, and that weekend made all that makeup possible—his incentive on that weekend.
Capone: I was at Sundance and saw NOVITIATE [in which Leo plays an overly strict Mother Superior nun]. Did you get whip lash from going from one extreme about religion to the other?
ML: All I can say to that is, thank you so much for noticing. As soon as I finished Madalyn, I left the county and flew to India where I play an American woman who has resided for more than 20 years in an Indian ashram, just to round it out [laughs]. Three months at the beginning of last year. NOVITIATE, this, THE ASHRAM. So thank you for noticing.
Capone: I was fascinated with the dynamic of this hotel room where you and your family are being held hostage, because it feels like a play. It’s just the six of you going in and out. It’s very tense at the beginning, but just before it ends you’re all just hanging out. And I understand that’s kind of how it was too in real life. But tell me just about the dynamic, and were you able to shoot those scenes more or less chronologically?
JL: We didn’t really shoot them chronologically. No movie without a lot of money really has that luxury. Part of it was, again, Tommy’s understanding of the story. That these guys actually hung out, drank together, played cards, fought like couples. It was a surreal environment. Even to the point that they could have basically easily left and didn’t. The whole thing is too weird to be true and only could be true because it is true. I think it’s trying to create that world too as being this place that was, yes, very strange and scary, but at the same time it becomes your ordinary thing that the human experience sometimes does after a period of time like “Well, this is what I’m stuck in.” In the case of these characters, there was a strange chemistry between them, a strange like even slightly romantic, sexualized relationship.
Capone: I was going to ask you about that. Certainly in the office flashback scenes, it feels like there’s a bond that they have that she doesn’t have with any other man that we see. I almost get a sense that when David first comes into her life that he’s trying to better himself to a certain degree. This is his second chance, basically.
JL: I agree with that. I absolutely think that’s true.
ML: And there’s a good mark.
[Everyone laughs]
JL: No, I think that comes later.
Capone: She almost draws the badness out of him with this embezzlement stuff. It’s actually kind of great.
JL: I think people wake up often times in the morning with their best self in mind, and they go to bed with their worst. In this case, he respected her, he thought she was brilliant, he knew she was smarter than him, he was in his way attracted to her. There was this really complex, interesting dynamic going on there, and I think it unfortunately shifted to…
ML: There’s that great scene at the Christmas party where she really, literally takes the drinking man’s drink away from him.
JL: She emasculates him.
ML: And I think that’s a beautiful way of depicting that there was some turning point in it, in a very well-matched duo, without a doubt. The setting of that hotel sequence, that it had this “our ground” and “their ground” and this neutral ground in the middle for the playing—the set couldn’t have helped us better in exactly the way in a good stage play the set can make it come alive, and Tommy’s casting across the board, just impeccable, beautiful. It easily played amongst all of us.
Capone: Tommy said that for the most part, you kept your people separate from their people in that apartment set. That’s great.
ML: I didn’t really know I was doing that, but it was definitely in play, yeah.
JL: Yeah, we totally did.
Capone: The secret weapon in this is Juno [Temple]. I didn’t recognize her at first, and then I’m just wondering “What is she doing?”
ML: How does she do all that with this much [moves her hand around her face]? How does she do that? Beautiful.
Capone: The structure of the film is really important, because we know they know each other fairly early on, we don’t know what caused this rift, and when we finally see that scene where they meet where he comes in for the job interview, they get along great. There’s a chemistry. It just reveals itself so beautifully. Did you have to keep track of where the emotions were at any given moment?
JL: Yeah, I think we even did some of the hotel scene the same day we did that scene you’re talking about. It’s always I think the Rubik’s Cube of a performance with a film, particularly when you don’t have a budget or schedule that allows you to nuance it that way. And some of it starts to inform itself, meaning by shooting something late later in the movie you go “Oh wait, I need to then track that these characters at one point liked each other.”
ML: There’s a whole element of working for an actor that doesn’t really get seen that’s the breaking down of the script. In fact, the entire company, every crew member in their own way is doing this thing we call breaking down the script, and a part of that is getting us ready, because now the script is going to be broken all to pieces until the editor puts it back together. That’s just the way we work, and you do, you find the way to fill in the emotion, even if you haven’t played an earlier scene yet. When you’re rehearsing a play and you’re going through it, sometimes once you find “Oh, that’s where the end is” that you begin to know where to begin.
Capone: Congratulations on this. And Melissa, I can’t wait to see your Showtime show [“I'm Dying Up Here”] either.
ML: That’s a whole other lady! [laughs]
Capone: It was great to meet you. Thank you so much. It was good to see you again.
