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There was a point in time where actors like Merritt Wever didn’t have to give interviews. They’d be known as character actors, men and women with strikingly singular faces, who’d slot into the cracks of ensemble casts, be extraordinary and memorable, then bounce. You’d have no idea who they actually were, but my goodness weren’t they great? It’s a space that’s been Wever’s bread and butter for decades, which is why a Reddit thread about her brilliance gives way to dozens of suggestions as to her finest role: was it as Scarlett Johansson’s frantic sister in Marriage Story, or as the adorkably chipper medical student in Nurse Jackie? The vulnerable plaintiff in Michael Clayton? The wife of an outie who kisses her husband’s innie on Severance? “She’s one of those actors that’s always good and I’m always happy to see,” a person writes, summing it up quite nicely.
Wever would probably blush at all that. She doesn’t especially like talking about herself, or her work. When she won an Emmy for Nurse Jackie in 2013, she famously reached the podium and delivered what is officially the shortest speech in the event’s history: “Thank you so much… um… I gotta go, bye.” A recent New York Magazine profile – to promote her part in Robert Pattinson’s To Catch a Predator-inspired Primetime, which arguably serves as her highest-profile role to date – was an exercise in maddening if winsome teeth-pulling, Wever treating the dictaphone between herself and a journalist much as one would treat a loaded gun. Today she’s sitting in a London hotel suite tiny and nervous and talking with me about book shops. As soon as I pull out my phone, though, letting her know I’m about to hit record, she winces.
“I’m sorry,” the 46-year-old says. “It’s like you get to relate to each other as people, and then you have to switch gears. Maybe we’ll find a happy medium.” She’s aware she has a bit of a reputation now. “Everyone’s like, ‘I hear you hate this.’ But I’m really trying to lean out of that because I feel like it sounds very ungrateful. So I’m giving it the ol’ college try.” It also sounds as if she’s negotiating the entire promotional process in real time. Yesterday, she says, she joined Pattinson at an on-stage Q&A for Primetime, and watched as he handled the questions posed to him like a pro. “I noticed that even for someone who’s as visible as he is, he finds a way to not give up a ton of himself,” she says. She found it fascinating.
I was more of a child auditioner than a child actor, which is a much sadder existence
Primetime casts Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the architect behind To Catch a Predator, the mid-Noughties TV phenomenon that saw paedophiles unsuspectingly walking into sting operations – they’d have no idea the underage person they’d been talking to online was actually an adult crew member, that the “child” they’d meet in an empty McMansion for sex was actually a grown-up actor in disguise, and that Hansen and a camera crew would emerge to confront them about their predilections within minutes. It was a grubby, morally rock-bottom series, and has been transformed here by director Lance Oppenheim into a grubby, brilliant thriller and blacker-than-black comedy.
Wever plays Hansen’s producer, and also his wrangler, his mother, his work wife. Andie, as she’s called, slips between guises, transforming into whatever she needs to be in order to get the show made. There is a scary emotional detachment to her, too, possibly by design. She seems to feel nothing – it’s about numbers and product and not humans, be they perpetrators or victims. Wever tends to play kind, empathetic women. Primetime, she says, was a challenge.
“She’s so rotten, and so determined to be rotten,” she says, practically spitting the words. “By the end, I was eager to get her out of my body.” It’s to do with age, she suggests. “As you get older, everything wears a little harder on you, especially if you’re used to playing people who aren’t so nasty.” She’s at a point in her career now where she can be a bit more selective about the parts she plays, and while Primetime was incredibly gratifying, she’d have to think about it before going back to that emotional state anytime soon. “You realise what the cost of each job is, and you have to decide if you need to pass on it, or pay that bill yourself.”
Merritt Wever and Robert Pattinson in ‘Primetime’ (A24)
She spies my expression, which has fallen into a sort of kindly pitying. “Your face!” she hoots. “Honestly, my specialty is depressing an interviewer and leaving them, like, really crestfallen. I can turn up the melancholy on the most jovial of situations.”
Primetime depicts Chris Hansen as a sweaty, strange ET of a man; part fanboy, part scoundrel, part absolute kook. A few days before I meet Wever, Hansen says that he’d seen the film but found it “such a bizarre and over-the-top fiction that it was hard to get upset about it, because it’s ridiculous in so many ways”.
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“I don’t know about ‘bizarre’,” Wever says when I quote him. “But he’s right that it’s not a biopic. It’s elevated, stylised, at times surreal and horrific. Sometimes comic.” She’s deliberately avoided reading Hansen’s responses, at least until she’s done promoting the film. “But although the character is Chris Hansen, and it’s his show, and about things that really did happen, it’s also a very dramatic departure from whoever he actually is. I hope he finds comfort in that.”
Wever started acting as a child growing up in New York City, having got an agent through the dance classes and performing arts camps she was enrolled in by her mother, a feminist activist and single mum by choice. She did lots of theatre, and starred in a boarding school comedy with Kirsten Dunst called The Hairy Bird at the age of 17, then as a snarky pharmacist in M Night Shyamalan’s Signs at the age of 21. I tell her it’s easy to forget that she started out in the business so young.
“It’s not easy for me to forget,” she laughs. “I feel like an old show pony.” She hesitates to call herself a former child actor. “I was more of a child auditioner, which is a much sadder existence.” I laugh, then wonder if I shouldn’t have. “See, I told you how good I am at turning the mood down in a room.”
Wever alongside Edie Falco in ‘Nurse Jackie’ (Shutterstock)
What’s her relationship now to that time in her life? “I mean, the word ‘ouch’ comes up,” she sighs. She says she’s worked with lots of young actors in recent years, women in their late teens and early twenties and at the start of their careers, “and it’s helped me have a lot more compassion for myself when I was that age.” She takes a beat. “It’s also helped me see how dreadfully young I was in these very grown-up and demanding environments.”
A few years ago she read Run Towards the Danger by the child actor turned filmmaker Sarah Polley, a memoir in which Polley wrote about the traumas and confusions of being a minor on film sets. “I never worked at her level, but I found something so emotionally resonant about her passages about being a young person in a very adult world, even when those adults only ever had the best of intentions,” she says. “I don’t think it’s wonderful for any young person struggling to figure out who they are, or how to walk through the world… to also be walking into audition rooms to be judged like that. Especially back then. The things that are said to you, the way you’re treated…” She trails off. “It was a different time.”
Wever at the Venice Film Festival in September, alongside her ‘Primetime’ co-stars Bokeem Woodbine, Phoebe Bridgers, Robert Pattinson and Skyler Gisondo (Getty Images)
Did she end up finding her tribe? I mention that she’s thanked in Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick, having played her estranged high school friend in Tiny Furniture, the indie film that put Dunham on the map and led her to making Girls. “I was a lot more introverted than her,” she recalls. Dunham befriended a host of similarly aspirational talents back then, sharing New York office space with a pre-fame Greta Gerwig and Josh and Benny Safdie of Uncut Gems. Wever only ever orbited that world, she explains. “I think I’d been acting for so long by that point that I was already old and tired by the time all of those people felt so enlivened in the city and wanting to meet up and make work together. I was probably already like… ‘I’m gonna stay home.’” She wishes now, though, that she did things differently. “I lament that I didn’t build more of a creative community when I was younger, because I think it can be beautiful to find your comrades in arms at that age.” She grows wistful. “It would have been so valuable, you know?”
A publicist enters, calling time on our conversation, and Wever lets out a big exhale. For the very first time in my years of interviewing people, I inexplicably tell her she did a great job, as if I’m a doting parent proud of their child’s homework. She seems to find it comforting, at least. Does she think she’s turned a bit of a corner when it comes to this stuff?
“Well, hindsight is 20/20,” she says. She thumbs over my question for a few seconds, as if trying to decipher what it really means to step out of the shadows after all this time. She starts, then re-starts her answer, trying to articulate her feelings just right.
“I hope nothing gets lost,” she says, finally. “I hope, in all of this, that nothing is given away that I didn’t mean to give away.”
‘Primetime’ is in cinemas from 30 October