Marcia Gay Harden

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Marcia Gay Harden has been a veteran actress who has appeared in wide range of films. These include Miller's Crossing, Flubber, Space Cowboys, and The Hoax.

Harden has appeared in quite a few odd films over her 20+ year career, but nothing could be stranger than her latest film. It's a film adaptation of Stephen King's popular short story The Mist, in which she plays Mrs. Carmody, an fervently religious woman caught in the middle of a powerful and mysterious mist engulfing a small town.

When we spoke to the now 48 year-old actress, the first thing we asked was how Marcia felt when she was approached to play such a seemingly over-the-top role.

'Over the top'' Harden replies, 'I don't think she's over the top at all. First of all, I know people like this and you see people like this everyday on televangelism. And you see there's an element of how unusual because most of us don't operate on that very pedantic, verbal area.'

However, when she was approached to do the film, the actress admitted she had a few reservations about appearing in a film version of The Mist,.

' [Director] Frank [Darabont] and I began to talk,' Marcia recalls, 'When I first read the script, I go, is this a bug movie' Am I going to be screaming and running to the car and like in a horror movie, I supposed, when you're scream is supposed to be sexy, that if you're not the sexy one, you're disgusting' So, I didn't want to do that.'

However, Harden was on board as she concluded the script had elements that she considered more thoughtful than found in your average horror film.

'What was intriguing was The Lord Of The Flies element about the script and that it's this complicated lockdown in a store,' she says, 'And how do people battle the exterior elements and how do they battle the interior elements, which ultimately, the human element, I think, is scary, or if not more scary, than the exterior bug elements. And where do people go' It parallels with the fear-based leadership and committing human atrocity in the name of religion, freedom, country, whatever safety were really, really fascinating.'

An interesting aspect regarding Marcia Gay Harden is her apparent love of wearing costumes. She spoke of the rather interesting costume process she underwent with costume designer Giovanna Ottobre-Melton, which had the actress go through several unusual early looks for the character from 'The Hippie', 'The Nun', and 'Tammy Faye', before finally deciding on a look Marcia describes as 'The Preacher's Daughter.'

'It was a woman that never was a mother, she had a shopping cart, and a big purse and she was a community person with a tight smile and we created her,' she describes, 'The one that we chose was 'The Preacher's Daughter', and she was a little vulnerable and she was prim and proper and she was a deep and devout believer. She had an incredible past, an incredible history, as preacher's daughters will, only child, and so I began to create this person.'

When asked about whether she believed a fervent Christian character would offend the Bible Belt community, Marcia took the opportunity to explain why she believes there will be no public outcry over it.

'I know people who could say there could be religious backlash,' Harden insists, 'And I know there's more than two types of people who read the Bible, there's many types of people who read the Bible. I think the good that any churches do, whether they'd be Christian or Jewish or whatever your institution does, there's an enormous amount of good that it does, the welfare, the help they give to the needy, the feeding the poor, the taking care of people at Christmas and things, not just holidays, but year-round.'

'They're enormous and that's simply and apparently not dramatic because those people are rarely featured,' she continues, 'People want to get pissed off because of her right-wing and like, how can you portray a right-wing' I mean, come on! The KKK was Christian, right, and we all know what they did. I mean America committed enormous atrocities on the Indians. How can you begin to tell me you are a good Christian and murder a village of Indians or hang a person because they are black or not like gay people' There's such a contradiction. I think people who are really clear about their relationship with God or Christ will not be threatened by Mrs. Carmedy at all.'

Harden also spoke about how well she worked with Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Frank Darabont, whose worked on The Shawshank Redemption and previously adapted Stephen King's The Green Mile

'Frank's gorgeous, so incredibly collaborative,' she replies, 'He's a ringmaster, with a whip that he loves to crack with a smile, but he's tongue in cheek, right' And he's loud on set and energetic as they come and bang, bang, bang, let's go, everybody on set, all the time. Three roving cameras, two sometimes, means that you always have to be there, and you would say, I'm a speck in the back of the shot. Please, can I go, Frank' And he's like, Nope! Nope! You never know where it's going to be. And he would just like full on, great guns, 100% energy, and then, collapse in the director's chair, and sit staring blankly at the monitor without a thought in his head and smoke a little brown cigarette, not pot.'

'And he would bounce back out with 9,000 thoughts and energy and love for everybody and go, go, go till the end of the day,' Harden adds, 'And he did that day after day after day. He's really incredible and very collaborative, very lovely. Frank didn't come running in when I had an idea and said, it's my film, it's my film. He didn't say that it. He said, oh, that's great, let's look at that. He's not threatened. A real man isn't threatened by stuff like that.'

One exciting aspect about The Mist are the fantastic CGI effects employed throughout the film. We asked the actress whether she enjoyed or not having to perform in reaction to things that don't actually exist until the final film.

'It's a blast actually, because it allows you to be technically-oriented for a while,' Marcia enthuses, 'So you have to meld your emotional state with this technical thing there, with understanding where the other roving camera is, where this is the imagination where the bug is, and you get to be improvisational. You can say to somebody, listen, when the bug goes to be above the counter, can somebody just yell, 'Bug!' so I know to look at 'bug!''

'You get to be very creative and on your feet with it, to make it as real as you can. I loved it,' she continues, 'I didn't think I would, which was why I was rather effusive of the fact I did a lot of it. It was a lot of fun and the potential for the movie to, at least, ask people about the power of fear-based leadership and what it allows for us to do. That makes me think it's a movie that can have some resonance as well.'

One of her most high-profile roles recently were memorable guest appearances as FBI undercover agent Dana Lewis in the series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. We asked Harden whether she'll ever return to SVU anytime soon.

'(In ghoulish voice) If they pay,' she answers, 'Actually, if the strike ends, right' We can't have that if there's no strike. When the producers realize that the piece of the pie is the Internet and their vision is share profitably, then maybe I'll be on it again.'

Wrapping things up, the actress shared with us what she plans to do next in the film world.

'I'm shooting with Christopher Walken, William H. Macy, and Morgan Freeman, in Boston, a film called Lonely Maiden,' Marcia announces.