Susan Sarandon occasionally sees photographs of herself from 30 years ago and wonders just how she got away with it. At Cannes in 1978, while promoting the film Pretty Baby, she ran around in thrift-store castoffs, with no makeup and her hair unbrushed. These days, her daughter tells her off if she tries to leave the house without grooming. “It’s just different now. My daughter’s teaching me how to be a star. She says, ‘What do you mean, you don’t have a stylist?’ The maintenance just wasn’t the same then.”
At 67, Sarandon is in terrific shape, almost eerily youthful-seeming, without the alarmed look of the overly worked-on. After lunch with her assistants in a Manhattan hotel room, she rises to begin the day’s publicity, crossing the room in imperious style and flinching at being made to say hello to the photographer. When a make-up artist starts working on her face, she snaps at her: “This [interview] isn’t on camera.”
Sarandon has made a lot of good films (Thelma & Louise, The Witches Of Eastwick, Bull Durham), won an Oscar for Dead Man Walking in 1996 and continued working, with solid regularity, throughout the danger zone of an actor’s 40s, 50s and now 60s. Nonetheless, she affects a certain boredom with the whole acting enterprise, deriving more pleasure and passion from her politics, which she has been committed to since going on an anti-Vietnam demo in the early 1970s. While married to Tim Robbins, she was half of the most visible liberal unit in Hollywood, a role that Sarandon relishes enormously and would far rather talk about than her latest film, The Calling, a so-so serial-killer flick with Donald Sutherland and Ellen Burstyn, in which she plays a small-town cop with personal problems, hunting down a killer in the face of departmental intransigence. (It’s set in Canada, and there are lots of Fargo-esque scenes of cops milling about drinking coffee in the snow.)
The most interesting thing about the film is its Catholic bones. Sutherland, with whom Sarandon appeared in the 1989 film A Dry White Season, is a priest who has to chew through a lot of Da Vinci Code type cod-theology, to explain the ritual behind the serial killer’s style. “I had to read it over a few times to even understand the deal myself,” Sarandon says. “That was a masterclass in how to take a big bunch of pretty dry dialogue and make it live in that moment.”
She is herself a lapsed Catholic – very lapsed: she hasn’t practised since her teens when, for a short time, her faith was important to her. Sarandon is from a working-class New Jersey family, the oldest of nine children, who was sent to a Catholic grammar school and told early on that she had “an overabundance of original sin”. (This was in response to an innocent question she asked in class: “I put up my hand and asked, ‘If, as the nuns said, you had to be married in the Catholic church or it didn’t count, how were Joseph and Mary married, because Jesus didn’t make up the church until later?’” She was hauled outside into the hallway and told she was sinful.)
Sarandon was not a natural rebel; she wasn’t trying to be smart. Growing up, she says, she believed everything her parents and the wider culture told her. She was terrified that the communists would invade America. “So I was praying every recess when everyone else was making out in the confessionals. I actually wanted to be a good person, wanted to have my faith.”
The religion fell away pretty quickly when she left home to go to college in Washington DC – the fact that it was a Catholic university was just happenstance; after Sarandon’s parents missed the deadline on all her other college applications, it was the only place she could get into. She had given up on religion by then, but a whiff of piety lingers in her flat, affronted air of certainty. She has about her the martyred aspect of one who acts against her own commercial interests, a priority she has maintained since her early 20s.
“In those days, the media wasn’t so corporate, so you were seeing what was going on in the south with the hosing of people, and you saw what was going on in Vietnam. If you had any moral fibre at all, you protested the war. It was just part of being young and being awake.”
Acting was an interest: the college’s English and drama departments turned out to be rather good, Sarandon says, and she started auditioning for plays, without any real hope of ever turning professional. After marrying fellow student Chris Sarandon and moving to New York, everything happened quickly, and to her great surprise she got work almost immediately on a TV soap opera and then won the lead in a crime drama, Joe.
“So I had never taken acting lessons, never thought of myself as a practical actor or anything, but just sort of fell into it.” Chris Sarandon was an actor, too, and got work on Broadway, so they were, among their struggling acting peers, in a position of relative privilege. “We didn’t have much of anything. But we didn’t need much of anything.”
For the next 20 years, Sarandon was in constant demand, an actor who fell outside the traditional Hollywood mould, bringing a delightful, bug-eyed intensity to her roles and whose name, attached to a film, tended to guarantee a certain quality. Off-screen, her marriage ended in 1979 and there were some high-profile affairs – with her The Hunger co-star David Bowie, she recently confessed, and with her director on Pretty Baby, Louis Malle, 30 years her senior.
She is interesting on the subject of the dating age gap, having been on both sides of the equation. Robbins was 12 years her junior, and she is currently involved with Jonathan Bricklin, her business partner in the ping-pong franchise Spin, who is in his mid-30s.
It is not, she says, so much a question of age as of status when you enter the relationship. “The biggest age difference was with Louis Malle, and whatever that balance is in the beginning, it’s very hard to reconfigure. So, if you are an actor in a director’s movie and you meet him when you’re there to make his entire world come true, it’s hard to pull away and not have him be upset.”
In her next life, Sarandon says, she would like to be a therapist; relationships fascinate her, “and they’re probably one of the few things worth investing in on an experimental level, because you learn so much about yourself and so much about the areas you’re trying to protect, and where you’re tethered and where you’re not. And, of course, your relationships when you don’t have children can be very different from when you’re nesting and expect a partner to be there on certain other conditions. Pragmatism takes over at some point, when you’re protecting your eggs.”
Sarandon didn’t use birth control during her 20s and 30s, after a doctor diagnosed her with endometriosis and said it was impossible for her to conceive. (She mentions this with the caveat that though it is not, wholly, polite fodder for discussion, on the other hand a lot of women suffer from similar conditions, so she feels obliged to raise it.) Having children had never been a particular goal and she took this diagnosis on the chin, she says. Somewhere in Sarandon’s late 30s, however, she started to feel restless. “I was praying in every chapel. I had become more and more hands-on political; I had just come back from Nicaragua, and was praying for something to give my life more meaning. I was not looking to have a child – I was almost 40 – but I was not that satisfied in this profession and thought, there has to be something that has more meaning.”
She considered staying in Nicaragua and devoting her life to charity work and activism. “In movies, I wasn’t getting parts that were stretching me so much. I was earning a living and having a good time; I’ve always had a good time. But I was at a crossroads and needed to move on in some way.” And then something odd happened: after a summer fling in Italy with the Italian director Franco Amurri, she got pregnant.
“No one could even figure out how, because it wasn’t supposed to be possible. And with this man who was 12 years younger, who I was just dating. And so I kind of said, ‘OK’ and told him, ‘You can participate or not.’” Did getting pregnant in these circumstances reboot her faith? “Hahaha. You never know where the answer’s going to come from. And it was a great decision.”
Sarandon returned to New York and threw herself into motherhood. There were, she says, advantages to having a child at that point in her life. She had sufficient resources to quit work for a while, and didn’t feel guilty at leaving the Hollywood rat race. “Because I was old – 39 when I had my first and 45 when I had my third – and my profession had been demystified. I thought that being with my kids, at that time, was so much more interesting.”
Sarandon’s other children were born after her marriage to Robbins, which was for many years held up as a rare example of a great showbusiness marriage. That’s all very well, Sarandon says, but people and relationships change, and most of us aren’t set up to accommodate either. She has a theory that long-term marriages are sustainable only with better management systems in place. Such as?
“The difficulty is growing with someone you pick at a certain point, through all those different stages. I always thought marriage contracts should be renewed every five years, so you get together and then there’s a no-guilt release clause after five years. Then, after the next five years, you talk about it again. If you knew that the five-year deadline was coming, you’d be on good behaviour; you’d work harder and maybe you wouldn’t take your partner for granted. Maybe you’d help out a little, with the kids, because you could see that she’s getting worn down.
“That’s the built-in problem with long-term relationships: you get to a certain point and you try to hold on to that, instead of constantly seeing it as an organism that’s moving and needs to be fed and re-examined and let some air in. You just try to maintain the status quo, and that doesn’t work because you can’t control anything or anybody. You’re fighting a losing battle.”
Fame adds another level of pressure, of course, although one imagines there is something intimate about sharing the bubble of celebrity with someone in the same position. “Assuming that they’re not competitive,” she says. “That’s the problem when two people are in the public eye. Do you feel bad when they come and ask you for an autograph and not him?”
Two of Sarandon’s children now live in LA and work in the film and TV industry; her daughter, Eva, acted alongside her in the 2002 movie, The Banger Sisters. The third is a musician, who lives in a building in Brooklyn in which Sarandon recently bought a stake. Real estate, she says, is the only conscious and smart investment decision she has made, “mostly so that my kids each have a place where the maintenance isn’t too high and they’re safe. I’m actually in a lawsuit now with my past business manager, so that shows you that I wasn’t very shrewd. I just glaze over when people start talking about numbers.”
Her ping-pong business is doing very well, with new franchises opening on the west coast of America and in Dubai; so she must have a certain amount of business know-how. Not so, she says. “Yesterday, we had a big meeting for Spin and I purposefully missed the first hour, which was the financials, because I’m just not interested. I’m interested in the hospitality end and giving people a good time and coming up with good ideas. I know, for instance, that Goldie Hawn is really clever with money. I think Private Benjamin was one of the first really big deals, where she owned part of it. And she has houses everywhere. [Diane] Keaton, too. Those gals are smart. One would never accuse me of being a shrewd business person.”
Sarandon saves her energy for other enterprises, first and foremost her politics. When she started becoming well-known, she was asked by various causes to make public appearances on TV and at rallies, and initially hesitated. “I’m still not very comfortable when I have to speak in front of a crowd. I try to keep it simple.” The coverage hasn’t always been flattering. “When I went to Nicaragua in ’84, I remember I was splashed across People magazine in a scary way. Hanoi Susan.”
At this point, her campaigning is part of her image and probably attracts as many people as it repels. On the whole, her agents and business managers have never tried to get her to tone it down, she says, mainly because she doesn’t tell them what she’s planning ahead of time. “I would always tell my kids if I was going to get arrested and explain what was going on and bring them back the plastic cuffs.”
Before the start of the second Iraq war, Sarandon talked with other Hollywood liberals such as George Clooney and Sean Penn, her old co-star from Dead Man Walking, as well as Michael Moore. “We tried to be there for each other. It’s not so much that you’ll never work again. It’s really the shunning thing that’s the scariest. From your peers.”
She is fairly immune to opposition. “Just the other day, I repeated some kind of statistics about the shelling of Gaza, that was a UN statistic, how many kids have been killed.” A few people replied, she said, with “things like, ‘Oh, and it’s all right for them to be shelling Israel – what, do you hate Jews?’ And my dog tweeted back, ‘I don’t think violence is the way to solve any problem.’” Penny, Sarandon’s Pomeranian-Maltese cross, has her own Twitter account (@Mspennypuppy) which, as you can see, is pretty adorable.
“The good news and bad news about Hollywood,” she says, “is that they’re not political. They probably would punish you more for getting overweight or getting old.” That’s why she lives in New York. “In LA, you can lose a job over a head of lettuce in a supermarket if you’re not all pulled together. You know: ‘I saw her, she’s not looking so good.’”
She has been to Africa to highlight the Aids crisis, and on the Phil Donahue show to talk about Haiti. “I’ll ask questions. But I don’t ever tell anyone what they should think.” She highlights inconsistencies in the public interest. “Some woman called in once and said, ‘Why should we listen to anything you have to say?’ I said, ‘I can’t think of one reason you should listen to what I have to say, and I can’t think of one reason you should care who I’m sleeping with, either.’ All I’m saying is, these people can’t get on TV. I’m a UN representative, that’s why you have me going into sub-Saharan Africa to cover the beginning of Aids years and years ago, and when some person – I don’t know if it was the BBC – said, ‘Why should we care what you have to say? You’re not an expert on Aids.’ I said, ‘Well, why weren’t you here before I got here?’”
Her daughter Eva recently had a baby girl called Marlowe, Sarandon’s first grandchild, and soon after the birth she flew to LA to be with her family. Getting older has its compensations, and playing older does, too. The role she took in Melissa McCarthy’s recent comedy, Tammy, in which she aged up to her 80s, had a certain liberating feel to it, not least because at the end of the day she could take off all the makeup and feel rejuvenated. (“My makeup artist had just come off 12 Years A Slave, so she was used to the heavy prosthetics.”)
She’ll see what comes next in terms of movie roles, but, “I’m glad I’m kind of out of the dying groove”. For a while, that’s all she would get cast as – the dying – “and then I played three alcoholics in a row”. She’d like to get more into documentary film-making. But, she says, don’t mistake her for someone with a coherent plan. That’s not her style. “I don’t see myself as an expert on anything but my own survival.”
• The Calling is released in the UK on 10 October.
