Patti LuPone may be a theatre legend – three Tony wins, two Olivier Awards and two Grammys attest to that – but by her own admission, she has never quite cracked the movie business. “My film career has been elusive,” she says frankly, speaking over video from her Connecticut apartment. “I would have loved to have done more film. I don’t know if it’s my face. I don’t know what it is. But nobody was interested.”
This would seem bizarre, given LuPone’s early movie career included a role in Steven Spielberg’s Second World War film 1941. “First of all, it was Steven Spielberg’s only flop!” she laughs. “And what happened after 1941 was Evita.” In 1979, LuPone played Eva Perón in the first Broadway production of the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. “So then all of a sudden, I became this tap dancing fascist bitch.” She won her first Tony and her theatre career exploded.
Ever since, film has been largely just out of reach for LuPone, now 74, despite sporadic parts with great directors like Peter Weir (Witness), Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) and Spike Lee (Summer of Sam). On television, she’s fared better – whether it’s being Emmy-nominated for her Aunt Zora in an iconic episode of sitcom Frasier or teaming up with Ryan Murphy on American Horror Story, Pose and Hollywood.
Still, you can bet your bottom dollar she was pleased to be cast in Beau Is Afraid, the new film from Ari Aster, the gutsy director behind thinking person’s horror films Hereditary and Midsommar. She plays Mona Wasserman, the controlling mother to Joaquin Phoenix’s anxiety-riddled Beau. “Oh, my God!” she exclaims. “I tell you it’s the best role I have ever had on camera. I am so grateful to Ari. I hope it opens the doors for more film – even at my age.”
She was surprised by Aster wanting to meet. “At first I thought, ‘Is he a musical theatre queen? Ari Aster wants to talk to me?’ And I said, ‘Why me, Ari?’” It turns out that Aster is friends with Clara Mamet, daughter to the esteemed playwright and director David Mamet. “I cut my teeth on Mamet. I’ve been working with David since 1976,” says LuPone, who has appeared in numerous Mamet productions – including the two-hander The Anarchist, which Aster saw back in 2012. “He said he talked for a week afterwards about how I handled David’s language.”
Nevertheless, it’s quite a leap from Mamet to Beau Is Afraid. Intense, surreal, scary – like the lovechild of Charlie Kaufman and The Truman Show – it’s a near-impossible film to describe without spoiling, but what I will say is that Phoenix’s Beau sets out on a journey to visit his mother, one that starts hellishly and gets stranger the longer it goes on. As for Mona, is she the most vicious character LuPone has ever played? “Well, I don’t think in those terms, so I wouldn’t call her vicious. I would call her, perhaps, an overly devoted mother.”
From a corner of their living room, LuPone’s husband Matthew chips in with a woman comparable to Mona. “Mrs. Lovett!” he shouts, referring to the pie-baking psychopath in Sweeney Todd – a role she played in a 2005 production (gaining her another Tony nod). “As Stanislavsky says, you can’t play a villain without showing their good side,” LuPone continues. “And so I don’t think she’s villainous at all. And I don’t think she’s vicious. I think she’s a mother and overly protective. Perhaps too much so of her one son – the one thing she loves more than anything in the world.”
LuPone is energising company, cackling and telling indiscreet stories throughout our chat. On location on Beau Is Afraid, she stayed in a hotel room next to Phoenix and Aster, and every morning would greet them on the terrace overlooking a lake. “I would just say, ‘Does anybody want coffee?’ and I was in my little white night gown!” You can imagine she loved playing mother. Talking of which, her grown-up son Josh, also off camera, slides a plate of food in front of her. “My son is feeding me,” she says. I can’t resist: is their relationship anything like Beau and Mona’s? “Josh, would you think I’m Mona to your Beau?” A disembodied voice yells: “You’re nothing like that!”
Born in Long Island to Italian-American parents – her mother was a library administrator, her father an English teacher – LuPone has performing in her blood. Her great-great aunt was 19th-century opera singer Adelina Patti, but it wasn’t this that inspired her towards showbiz. She was 4 years old, at a concert at a Miss Marguerite dance studio. “I see it like it was yesterday. I was tap-dancing. And I remember I said, ‘They’re all smiling at me. I can’t get in trouble up here. I can do whatever I want. And they’ll still smile at me.’ I said that at 4 years old. And I never looked back.”
After graduating from Juilliard in 1972, LuPone began getting roles on stage, though everything accelerated when she won the role in Evita. “It was the thing that launched me as a star. Controversial, however, but a star. So Evita… there was so much hype around it. Everybody wanted to play Evita in America. And it was weird. It was not a happy experience. It was a very difficult role to sing. It was a horrible environment backstage.” In the past, she’s spoken about producers who treated her like a nobody, and howling her way through a role “that could only have been written by a man who hates women”. Today, she simply concludes: “The audience made it a success.”
So she wasn’t bothered when Madonna played the role in the 1996 film version? “Well, I’m bothered by Madonna. Period!” she hoots. “I mean, I’m always bothered when I see, I suppose, less talented people thinking that they can act. What I mean by that is that they’re not actors. It’s hard enough to act. It isn’t an easy thing to do. It is a craft. And so it bothers me when I see people that go, ‘Yeah, I can act.’ Well, maybe you can’t. So Madonna doing it… I saw a little bit of it. It looked like it was laborious. And Madonna is not an actor.”
While LuPone has found fame performing solo concerts of show tunes, theatre has remained her lifeblood – winning her further Tonys for productions of Gypsy and in 2022, Stephen Sondheim’s Company. And now? “I love the stage but I’m taking a break from it. I’m tired. I’m tired of eight shows a week. I mean, if I go back, I’m gonna say it’s not gonna be eight shows a week. And I don’t want to go back to Broadway. I love the West End. I would rather work in London theatre. I would love to work at the National. I would love to work at the Almeida, the Donmar. I don’t want to work on Broadway anymore because it’s a circus.”
When we speak, it’s just after illicit naked photos of James Norton performing on the British stage in A Little Life were circulated online. More than once in the past, LuPone has called out audience members for using phones, even grabbing one as she left the stage during a production of Show For Days. Does she feel they should be banned from theatres? “I do. Yeah, I totally think they should. I don’t understand why people can’t put the phone down for just two hours. You bought a ticket – and tickets aren’t cheap – to have an experience. Have the experience! We’re addicted to the phones.”
She fumes, momentarily. “It’s just public manners. Be respectful of people that are around you. We just lost public manners.”
Next, she’s heading to TV again, appearing in Marvel’s Agatha: Coven of Chaos, a spin-off from WandaVision, alongside Kathryn Hahn, although I’m more interested in Frasier, which is being brought back years after the series ended. Would she consider revisiting her one-off character? “As Aunt Zora? Don’t you think she’s dead at this point!?” She hoots again. “Oh sure. I’d come back.” Kelsey Grammer – I hope you’re reading this.
Beau Is Afraid opens in cinemas today
