The scene-stealer ofWhite Noiseon working parenthood and making geeky glamorous.
Jodie Turner-Smith has sent her husband and their daughter out for a walk.
Same here, actually.
She is Zooming from London, and I am in New York.
Its a Saturday, and the moms are working while the dads perform child care out of earshot.
Turner-Smiths husband comes home first.
He has gotten their 2.5-year-old McDonalds.
Dads and what they feed the kids, she says.
Later, there is noise in the next room, and she mutes her microphone to speak to him.
When she turns it back on, she explains: diaper situation.
We commiserate a little about working parenthood.
Its an ongoing journey, she says, Right?
The kind of couple so enchantingJ.Crew picked them to sell you holiday pajamas.
One of the perks, Turner-Smith tells me, is that paparazzi dont venture up there.
But the reality is that there is an underbelly that it’s very hard to deal with.
(They do now.)
Turner-Smith accepts this, if uneasily.
You don’t belong to anybody else.
For the purposes of self-preservation, she has deactivated Twitter and disabled Instagram DMs from strangers.
But most of her concern is for her daughter.
I think the bottom line is, I accept the thorns that come with the rose.
I accept them for me.
I don’t accept them for my daughter.
Turner-Smiths mother lives with the family, and they usually have a nanny.
That has been working for us so far.
She likens the challenge to trying to create a new reality.
This, improbably, was at the suggestion of Pharrell Williams, whom she met backstage at an N.E.R.D.
Before the fateful Pharrell encounter, she wanted to be a writer.
I asked Turner-Smith if she still writes or if acting scratches the same creative itch.
When I used to write a lot, I had a different life, she says.
I would always say that what I was doing was turning the mundane into something magical.
Gladney (Adam Driver), who has discovered his wife is using it.
Turner-Smith was not familiar with the novel when she auditioned, but Jackson was.
He was like, Oh, this is a very cool book, she says.
That, plus Noah Baumbach, were enough to get her interested.
DeLillos Winnie is a tall gawky furtive woman, and Turner-Smiths character is nothing like this.
Her Winnie is kooky and delightful; she drinks chocolate milk and loves junk food.
Jodie played it with such seriousness and assuredness.
She really helped shape and defined the character for me.
He adds, She was also very funny.
She just carried it all so lightly & effortlessly.
Characterizing Turner-Smith as a person, Gerwig says, Joy, pure joy.
She lives and acts to her fingertips, which is the most joyful thing I can think of.
She has the sort of off-the-charts actorly charisma that makes it impossible not to.
Turner-Smiths role inWhite Noiseis small.
Winnie Richards is only in the movie for a couple of short scenes.
Everything I do is political.
But luckily, smart and fun are not mutually exclusive in movies.
And in their scenes at College-on-the-Hill, she and Adam Driver seem to be having a lot of fun.
The crowd at Alice Tully Hall eats all of it up.
This is Noah Baumbachs film festival, said the festival director in his introduction of the film.
But the moment belonged to Turner-Smith.
And every moment she was onscreen belongs to her as well.
