Good things are coming in twos for actress Vera Farmiga

by Steven Rea

The Philadelphia Inquirer

25 January 2007

It’s not really about the hair, but that’s a good way to remember. Vera Farmiga, an actress who’s been on the brink of big things for years, can look back at the crazy time in 2005 when she was shooting both “The Departed,” in which she plays a Boston police psychologist, and “Breaking and Entering,” in which she’s Oana, a smoky-voiced London streetwalker, and think about her `do.

“I had a six-week hiatus, when Jack Nicholson was to be working on `The Departed,’ so I shipped off to London for `Breaking and Entering,’” Farmiga recalls. “And I had my `Departed’ extensions under my Oana wig.”

The whole process, from auditioning for the roles, confabbing with the respective (and respected) directors, and shooting the two films, was an overlapping, keep-your-head-on-straight, scheduling free-for-all.

“It was a little nerve-racking,” Farmiga says, on the phone from New York the other day, about reading for the parts. “I really didn’t believe either of them were going to pan out. I held my breath for a long time.”

In Farmiga’s recent past, she’s come tantalizingly close, then lost out at the eleventh hour to someone with a higher Hollywood profile. In fact, she’d met with Martin Scorsese, who directed her in “The Departed,” for his “Bringing Out the Dead” in the late `90s. ("I guess it was enough to make an impression,” she quips.) “And here, all of a sudden, two extraordinary opportunities came at the same time. I had one foot on each scale, going between these two incredible directors.”

Scorsese, of course, took the podium last week to accept a Golden Globe for “The Departed,” for which he received an Oscar nomination this week. “Breaking and Entering” was written and directed by Anthony Minghella, of “The English Patient” and “Cold Mountain.” It’s set in King’s Cross, a London neighborhood transitioning from grit and crime to gentrification.

Almost all of Farmiga’s scenes are with Jude Law, who plays an architect overseeing an ambitious project that will change the fabric of the area. She’s a hooker with a thick Romanian accent who spends her time between tricks sharing coffees with Law’s character in his car. Why he is in his car in the middle of the night in King’s Cross - when he has a wife (Robin Wright Penn) and a daughter and a nice flat across town - has to do with a burglary and its aftermath.

Farmiga’s time in the film isn’t long, but her performance is memorable - and not just for Oana’s humorously raunchy mouth. “It can be a cliche - you know, the prostitute character - but Anthony doesn’t write cliche characters,” says Farmiga, 33, who grew up in Irvington, N.J.

“I loved her contradictions. She was so vivid to me,” she says. “Oftentimes, characters that I’m drawn to in scripts are women that I strive to be like, and for me, I found that Oana, despite her weariness and her profession, despite that downtrodden quality, (is) very refreshing ... I loved her bluntness, how insightful she was… .

“She was a woman actually very much in control, and very open. In a script about people trying to connect, being open and willing to connect, I found her to be one of the most open of all of them.”

As for Madolyn, the shrink who counsels the stressed-out Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Departed,” and who takes to bed another Beantown law enforcer - played by Matt Damon - Farmiga says the role was a dream. “The script was a pretty great springboard,” she says, and “Marty gave us room to improvise. For my character, we just worked to make her as human as possible, and not just a peripheral princess. To give her as many contradictions as the boys have.”

The actress, who lives north of New York City, said it wasn’t alienating being the sole femme in a film teeming with men - Damon, DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Nicholson among them. “It wasn’t weird. They all have such feminine qualities - Leo and Matt and Marty,” she responds, with a chuckle.

Right now, Farmiga is in Sundance, where, in 2004, she won a special jury prize for her lead turn in a tough little indie film about a woman fighting drug addiction, “Down to the Bone.” The film hardly reached moviehouses, but became Farmiga’s “calling card” for Scorsese and Minghella.

This year, Farmiga has two titles in competition at the film festival: “Never Forever,” from director Gina Kim, and “Joshua,” by George Ratliff. (Yes, things seem to happen for Farmiga in twos.)

“‘Never Forever’ is a story about an American woman who’s married to a Korean American man, and they can’t conceive, so she embarks on a dangerous relationship with a Korean immigrant in order to bring their marriage hope, which she thinks is in the form of a child ... It’s adultery for the sake of saving a marriage.

“And `Joshua’ I did with Sam Rockwell. It’s the story of a family that becomes unraveled at the seams. I play a wife and a mother suffering through a bout of psychotic postpartum depression ... It’s about what happens when parents think that they’ve given birth to a sociopath.”