Marielle Heller’s ‘Queen’s Gambit’ Performance Took Notes From Edie Falco

Anya Taylor-Joy’s chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, may be the ever-cunning figure at the center of Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit”; but it’s her relationship with her adoptive mother, Alma Wheatley, played by Marielle Heller, that gives the show its heart. In the midst of her first Emmys campaign, the acclaimed filmmaker behind “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” recounts being lured back to her acting roots by series co-creator Scott Frank, and by the role itself, one she calls “sweet and sort of tragic.”

How was it that you came to the show? Had you been actively looking to get back into acting? 
No, not at all. I’m friends with Scott Frank. We’re really director pals. We became friends through the Sundance Lab, and he was an adviser on my first movie and we stayed friends. He knew that I had started as an actor, and kind of for fun, I did a bit part in his movie “A Walk Among the Tombstones.” I got totally cut out of the movie, which I knew was going to happen as I filmed the scene. But while I was doing it, he turned to me and was like, “Oh, you’re actually an actor.” And I was like, “Yeah! That’s what I did for a long time.” And he has since then said, “I’m going to make you act for me—you’re actually good! I have to make you do something.” So it’s been a threat for years, that he was going to make me act in something. He tried to get me to be in “Godless” when I was making “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” so I couldn’t do that. And then he lured me to this show by… I was supposed to play a much smaller part with a much smaller commitment. And then when the actress who was going to play Mrs. Wheatley dropped out, he called me and asked me if I would play this much bigger part. It was a very roundabout way to end up doing it. But it was just something that I couldn’t pass up, once he actually offered it to me.

So much of the pain Alma experiences is never directly acknowledged or addressed. How did you find your way into this very emotionally complex person? 
There were hints in the writing all along, and they would be very subtle hints that wouldn’t necessarily tell me the whole story but would give me a hint of her pain. Things like mentioning that we had a child—Beth says, “You had a child?” and I say, “We did.” And that’s it. That was all I got from the script. Clearly that belies such a depth of pain underneath the surface, and just knowing she was a character who had such unrequited talent and could have been a different woman had she been born in a different era—could have pursued being a pianist, could have just lived a different life; she probably could have had multiple lovers. I think about her kind of sadness. She was so excited they were going to travel to Paris, and she doesn’t get to go. But it was easy to tap into that pain and all of the things that she didn’t get to accomplish, because I think I just found her incredibly empathetic and felt for her. I found her, I don’t know, sweet and sort of tragic. And it still makes me happy that she and Beth have this last kind of hurrah together and that she’s able to really live out some version of her own happiness in these final years with Beth. 

Since you really hadn’t acted in a number of years, how did you prepare to flex that muscle again? 
The truth is, I seem to view acting and directing as all sort of different pieces of a whole. It didn’t feel like such a foreign thing that I had been so far away from for so many years. I work with actors every day. I work on the process of breaking down a scene every day, and it feels like it’s all just different ways of approaching the same problem, or different ways of solving the same problem. I wanted, in a funny way, to be the actor who I always want to have on my own sets. I tried to be incredibly accommodating to Scott and his vision. You know, he asked me if I would cut all of my hair off, and I was like, “Sure! I always want actors to cut their hair off; I have to say yes to that.” And he was like, “Do you think you could actually show up to Berlin tomorrow? I know you’re supposed to get here in a week, but it would help my schedule if you showed up tomorrow.” And I’d be like, “OK! Sure!” 

But also, in terms of just showing up and being a team player, I think from the last time I acted, say, 10 years ago, I’ve really gained an appreciation of what a team sport filmmaking is, and how much, as an actor, you’re coming in at the eleventh hour. Everybody else has been working on this project for months and months, planning the production design and the costume design, the script, all of it. And, really, you’re there to, hopefully, not drop the ball for that last moment. I’m not good at sports analogies. Whatever the correct analogy is. You’re coming in to finish the job, and everyone else has been working so, so hard, waiting for you to get there. I didn’t have that perspective before, when I was acting: realizing how much work had gone in before you ever show up on set, and that it’s your job to pick up where everyone else is handing it off to you and finish that strong. In some ways, that made it a lot easier, because I could recognize that I was just part of a much bigger whole.

Were there moments when you found yourself resisting the urge to put your director’s hat on, when you were meant to be there as solely an actor? 
Scott and I had running bits going on set where he would always be like, “Well, how would Mari direct it? Everyone’s waiting to find out how Mari would do it, where Mari would put the camera.” But, truthfully, he did ask for my opinion a lot, and we would talk things out, and it was really fun for me to be on a set where I wasn’t the one in charge and it wasn’t my responsibility. I could offer an opinion, and he could take it or leave it. But Scott’s a very confident director, and he wanted my opinion, because that’s how confident directors are. He wasn’t threatened by that; if anything, he was just happy to have another set of eyes—someone to ask, “Does this make sense to you?” Both he and I joked that we need other directors on set while we direct. It’s hard to do it without. When I was killed off and I was leaving, he was like, “What am I gonna do without you? I love having you on set; it’s so nice to have my backup here.” But, no, for me, the difference in terms of responsibility was so night and day. It was so nice to just get to focus on acting instead of thinking about every single thing for the shoot. It was like using a different part of my brain in a really nice way.

I want to ask one question about your other Emmy-eligible project: directing Amazon’s filmed version of “What the Constitution Means to Me.” How was that experience different from directing a traditional feature? 
It was totally different because, really, I was there to serve Heidi [Schreck’s] vision. And it was so fully formed. I almost feel weird calling myself the director of that, because there obviously was a director of the play who did a beautiful job directing it, and Heidi is the engine behind that entire thing. I was really there [as] more like a translator. I was there to translate it into film—to take this thing that was so beautifully realized and to just add another language to it, which is the film language of camera movements and editing, and to translate it into that medium. I was there to serve in some way—just to say, “Let me come on as a producer and help bring this thing to life.” Because it was going to close on Broadway, and it was going to be gone. There was this feeling of: This thing needs to be seen by as many people as possible. Of course, we could not have seen the pandemic coming. But in a funny way, it became even more important that it get seen by more people as the pandemic shut down live theater. But I felt like I was really there just to serve that story and to help Heidi bring her really important play to the world.

What is one performance every actor should see and why? 
Carmela Soprano [on “The Sopranos,” played by] Edie Falco, particularly when she and Tony are getting divorced, in Season 4, I think. Their big fight. In some way, I sort of thought about her when I was playing Alma, because she’s such a woman who would be overlooked in so many ways. She’s such a kind of a stereotype of a mob wife, but with this enormous depth underneath the surface. There’s so much going on for her, and she’s so complex and so smart. But there’s also a facade. She’s just a force of nature.

Do you have an audition horror story you wouldn’t mind sharing? 
I mean, really, when I sort of quit acting was when it was winter in New York and I was going to, like, my third commercial audition of the day. And I was supposed to wear a bikini, and it was a snowstorm. So I put my bikini on under my winter coat and went into some, you know, gross office, and had to take off my clothes and hit a beach ball in the middle of January in New York. I didn’t have any lines; I just had to gasp. And I just left this audition going, “I went to theater school and studied ‘Macbeth’ to do this? What am I doing? I hate this, and I’m never gonna book these commercials. They can tell I hate it. What is the point?” It was sort of when I was like: I gotta get more in control of my own creative life. And it was part of what led me to writing and then directing, was dissatisfaction with that life.

What’s the wildest thing you ever did to actually get a job, either as an actor or filmmaker?
Truthfully, when I was trying to get the rights to adapt “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” I did everything and anything in my power to convince Phoebe [Gloeckner], who wrote the book, and her agent that I was the right person to adapt this book—including taking pictures of my cats and sending them to Phoebe, going to visit her in Ann Arbor, staying at her house and cooking dinner in her kitchen, trying to let her know I was not a crazy person. And also stalking her agent: I sent cookies to her agent’s office, not even realizing that she was pregnant at the time, but it was, like, the perfect thing I could have sent. I just basically wouldn’t take no for an answer. I just made myself part of their lives until they finally realized I wasn’t gonna go away, and they should give me the rights to the book.

How did you get your SAG membership? 
My husband was a PA for “Spin City” back in the day. I had him slip my headshot on top of the casting pile, and I came in and auditioned for a guest part on that show. We didn’t even tell people that he knew me. We made it this secret. And then I booked a guest-starring role on “Spin City,” back in, I wanna say, 2000 or something. And, yeah, I had a scene with Charlie Sheen. That’s how I got my SAG card.

What advice would you tell your younger self? 
Don’t waste too much time auditioning for dumb commercials! But, really, that nobody was going to do it for me. That I needed to figure out a way to make my own art, and make my own projects, and stop waiting for somebody to cast me in something, and, instead, do it myself.

This story originally appeared in the June 3 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.