“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” 

–Carl Jung

In the history of cinema, there are only a handful of actors whose breakout role hardwires them into the celluloid collective unconscious, and among them is undoubtedly Naomi Watts—the award-winning British-born actress whose real-life dream of becoming a Hollywood star was reflected through a glass darkly in the late David Lynch’s iconic masterpiece Mulholland Drive. 

Since shining so brightly as an aspiring actress in an unsettling dreamscape of Los Angeles a quarter of a century ago, the chameleonic talent of the star has glittered via a veritable prism of roles that span the entire emotional spectrum and often delve into the Jungian shadow, from the likes of a mother under siege in Michael Haneke’s brutal arthouse offering Funny Games and the morally ambiguous protagonist in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, to the iconic character of Ann Darrow in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, for which she won the London Film Critics’ Circle Award for Actress of the Year. 

It’s one hell of a resume for a woman whose first introduction to acting came via the modest Shoreham Village Players in the county of Kent in England in the 1970s, and whose formative years were blighted by the tragic loss of her father—a sound engineer who worked with the legendary Pink Floyd—to a heroin overdose at just seven years old. Watts would subsequently move repeatedly between North Wales and England throughout her childhood with her young mother and brother, and attended countless schools before the family emigrated to Sydney, Australia when she was 14. After five years, with a handful of Australian television roles under her belt, Watts moved out to Hollywood on little more than a wing and a prayer, experiencing financial hardship and artistic rejection for a decade, until the fateful meeting with Lynch that changed everything. 

We meet over Zoom to discuss her latest projects: dual Ryan Murphy titles, American Love Story (which sees Watts as Jackie Kennedy in the story of the romance between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy) and All’s Fair (where Watts embodies a no-prisoners female divorce lawyer), as well as a recently published New York Times bestseller, Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause. I can’t help but begin by asking her whether she feels like her status as one of the most critically respected actors in Hollywood feels like a product of fate.

“Well, I think we can definitely conjure and intuit things, but I like to think there’s a lot of intention involved, as well,” she says, speaking with an easy conversational grace that makes you feel as if you’ve known her for far longer than five minutes. “Exploring all these different characters, and talking in other people’s voices, all feels like part of my journey, and like it was supposed to happen,” she continues, before pausing, thoughtfully. “Certainly, as I was growing up and going to so many different schools where people were talking differently, or behaving differently, I was just constantly feeling a bit outside of everything, you know? I was watching, learning and absorbing, and I do think it shaped who I was in the larger picture. I think absolutely everything led me to this place.”

There is a sense, when you look into her history and the panoply of women she has portrayed, that Watts’ creative path has been consistently defined by there being no need for a roadmap, and a seemingly fearless ability to take a leap of faith. “I definitely have a survival mechanism that drives me,” she tells me, when I ask where these apparent qualities stem from. “Moving from school-to-school, I always felt this constant need to reshape myself and fit in. Some people don’t feel the need to do that, but I just was not that person. My accent still changes all the time, depending on whom I’m with, and it has changed throughout my life. So, yeah, I guess there was always this sense of a constant need to reinvent oneself, but it wasn’t a bad thing,” she says. “I think we learn the most about ourselves when we’re out of our comfort zone, or we’re experiencing failure or uncertainty, because that’s when we really start to challenge ourselves.”

Watts is undeniably an actor at home with a challenge, and is celebrated for her emotionally raw performances, which ricochet from the likes of a woman enmeshed in a criminal underworld in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, to the grief-stricken mother in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, which garnered her critical acclaim and award nominations. Widely lauded for her versatility in the many roles that populate her career, I suggest that she seems to have a rare sense of ease with the flux of identity. “Maybe. I still have no certainty of anything in terms of where I’m going,” she states. “I’m just always looking to be surprised and grow and be moved.”

In a creative landscape seemingly increasingly populated by wealthy celebrity progeny, Watts exudes a refreshingly down-to-earth energy, which is likely to do with a rocky background. One can only imagine how difficult those early years were for her young mother, bringing up two children in the wake of their father’s passing. “I do have memories of getting a new pair of shoes and just being, like, ‘Oh my God, they have to be beside my bed,’ so that they would be the last thing I looked at before I went to sleep, and the first thing I saw when I woke up. Then, of course, there were certain people knocking on the door at home, loudly—debt collectors, and whatnot. Those sorts of things stay with you, and they do make you sure of being very organized in your planning, your direction, and making sure that you’re not going to have to live that way, with that kind of fear.”

I suggest it’s the kind of ever-changing environment that could lead to an overly active mind that is always on high alert. “Yeah. I can’t sit still. I literally can’t. It’s so hard for me. I’ve always got to be doing something, you know?” she says, with a smile. “Even if there’s a day off and there’s nothing to do, I can’t sit around and nap, absolutely not. I mean, I can fall asleep by accident, but I’m not going to intentionally put myself to sleep because I deserve it. It’s a problem,” she laughs. “My husband has strong words with me about it.”

Watts has been married to actor Billy Crudup since 2023, and has two adolescent children by her former partner Liev Schreiber—two occurrences that come as something of a miracle given that Watts experienced very early menopause, which she has written about candidly in the aforementioned bestseller Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause to wide critical acclaim, opening up a conversation that still in the 21st century remains very much misunderstood and outside of mainstream discussion.

So, before we get into discussing the craft for which she is rightly celebrated, garnering several impressive accolades (including two Academy Award nominations), I am keen to know what were the parallels she discovered between penning her first literary foray and the discipline of acting.

“It was very different, and it took me a long time to spark the courage to write,” she says modestly of the undertaking. “I certainly wished there was a book when I was going around in my early 40s, wondering what the hell was going on with my body. I was 36 when the word menopause was first uttered to me. I was trying to start a family, so panic set in, and it really felt like menopause was a conversation that was just nowhere. I wished there had been a handbook that just made me feel safer in that place.”

She is not alone. Societal stigma, sexism, and ageism have fostered a culture of silence around menopause that has led to almost zero education for women and healthcare professionals, resulting in a profound lack of confidence in seeking support. I suggest that it sounds as though the idea to write a book about her experiences stemmed very much again from a survival instinct. “I had the idea because I needed it myself,” affirms Watts. “I remember voicing it to a friend a long time ago, and she said, you should write the book. I was like, ‘Yeah, but I’m not a writer. And, you know what, no way! That would be career suicide, to tell everyone in Hollywood that I’m barren and it’s all over.’ How would I ever play a leading lady again?” she says with a wry smile. “Anyway, I sat around on that. Then, finally, when I got to about the age of 50, I felt like, you know, this is the average age for menopause, and I’m allowed to be in menopause now. So, why not start speaking about it?”

Dare I Say It is twinned with her brand Stripes Beauty, a wellness and beauty offering designed to destigmatize menopause and support healthy aging, and its success has witnessed Watts being interviewed on some of the biggest morning shows across America. That being said, the most important outcome for Watts has been the community of women it has inspired, rather than personal satisfaction, and it speaks to drive fueled by a sense of purpose.  “I mean, I’ve built a business and written a book, and I feel proud of both those things hugely, but it’s incredible to feel connected to women from late 30s all the way through to my mother’s generation,” she says. “Women have come up to me on the street and said, ‘I just want to thank you for being instrumental in opening up the conversation because I’ve been able to talk to my husband freely, and to my children more openly.’ Considering half the population will experience menopause, if they are lucky enough to get there, it’s crazy that it’s not talked about in the mainstream.”

“Things are changing, though,” she continues. “There has been a massive shift in the last five years. I mean, last year alone you saw a litany of great roles in Hollywood for women in their 50s, and that is really encouraging—Pamela Anderson, Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore…I mean, there was a whole load of them, so I hope that continues. Women’s stories matter at every single age, and we are consumers of film, so we should see ourselves,” she pauses. “That’s what we all need. We all need to have ourselves and our stories reflected.”

Indeed. And Watts has reflected a myriad of stories, playing practically every kind of woman imaginable in a filmography as long as they come, including the likes of a comic turn as a Russian hooker in St. Vincent (opposite Bill Murray) and a meta-performance as herself in the animated series Bojack Horseman—a hilarious turn in the tinsel town satire that poked fun at her own image and career. Given her history is populated by such a diverse stable of characters, one can’t help but wonder which of them she feels is closest to her own sense of self? “Oh, God. I’d have to literally go through my IMDb, and look closely,” she says, with a laugh. “I mean there are little bits of every single one, I would say? All the women that I step into are accessed through different paths of myself. They all inform me, and I learn so much from them.”

“There’s also some I wouldn’t ever have imagined that I’d play! I’ve just played Jackie O, for crying out loud! Someone who is so far from a world I know. I mean, America’s darling, right?” she says, with a sudden infectious enthusiasm. “I’m sure no one else thought of it either. Except for Ryan Murphy. But, however daunting it was stepping into that role, it was also exciting, and there were a lot of surprises along the way.”

Watts plays Jackie Kennedy in Ryan Murphy’s upcoming FX anthology series, American Love Story. She first worked with Murphy in 2022 for Netflix’s The Watcher, followed by her outstanding turn as Babe Paley in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Murphy’s mini-series (on which she was also an executive producer), perhaps most notably directed by Gus Van Sant. The show explores the high society women that turned on Truman Capote (played by Tom Hollander), after he revealed secrets of their scandalous lives in Esquire. Watts’ portrayal of the betrayed woman is, as ever, exquisitely layered. “There was major dysfunction there, and all the relationships were probably transactional,” she says about the show, which shone a new light on the writer and LGBTQ icon. “They all knew his pen was on the ready, but I think when anyone is fascinated with you, it’s hard to resist. And all of those women thought, ‘Oh, isn’t it so glamorous hanging out with an entertaining, clever, and cultured human being?’ The way I wanted to play Babe Paley was not purely transactional, though, but with complexity. There’s just something deeply beautiful about these two souls that had not been loved in the right way. They saw that in each other, and it felt like Babe was able to give herself to him in ways that she hadn’t in any other relationship, romantic or platonic."

Watts is also soon to be displaying her penchant for complex and powerful women in Murphy’s All’s Fair alongside Kim Kardashian, Glenn Close, Teyana Taylor, and Sarah Paulson. In the series, out via Hulu this November, she embodies a lawyer dismantling the patriarchy from the high stakes theater of the courtroom floor while traversing her own demons and interpersonal battles with colleagues and rivals alike. 

Having pretty much already run the gamut of persona in her oeuvre, it begs the question where on the emotional spectrum does she most enjoy to be when acting? “I like to be weird. I like it when I’m free enough to access any emotion, and ideas are freely flowing,” she says. “It’s so wonderful when you’re in the presence of a director that you really trust, and you know that they trust you. Then you can just let go and forget the cameras, and that means being with another actor at the same time—feeling connected, and feeling free enough to listen carefully to what they’re doing and react. It’s a dance.” 

It’s an interesting metaphor, because there is a sense, when you watch Watts on-screen that she is quite literally dancing with the vagaries of selfhood and emotion, accessing something primal or archetypal even. “There’s nothing as satisfying as being in that zone, actually, for me. It’s just magic,” she continues. “I had that experience with Tom Hollander [as Capote] so profoundly.”

I suggest it sounds like the space in which she accesses her joy, the contagion of which is the theme of this issue. “Absolutely! The first time I entered onto the set with Tom, I was in a group scene, and we were all watching him with his behaviors, and his languishing of the words, and it was poetry. I felt like I was in the presence of some major artist, and I was like, ‘Oh, I want to get to that level and meet him there exactly.’ Then, by the time we got to do one-on-one scenes, I just found myself in that space sharing it, and it was like ballet, you know? It was jump and you will be caught, and that is probably the greatest kind of joy you can experience as an actor.”

Watts’ aptitude for balletic transformation is well documented, and it’s a talent that begs the question whether that joy in “letting go” comes in part from her practice of transcendental meditation, of which her late friend and mentor, David Lynch, was perhaps one of the world’s most famous advocates. “Well, I wouldn’t say I am a Buddhist,” she says. “But I have adopted certain facets, you know? I’m no David Lynch, though. David never missed a meditation for 40 years, or maybe more by the time he died. I’m not that committed. But sometimes, even just saying your mantra to yourself as you sweep the floor, or go for a walk or sit on the tube, or something, is enough.” 

With our discussion turning to the iconic creator of the chimeric and brilliant Mulholland Drive, I take the opportunity to ask what she feels she learned from the auteur. “I mean, so much that it’s hard to say one thing,” she says, reflectively. “I suppose, to trust, and also this sense of knowing you’re enough. I mean, he was just the most original and authentic human being I think I’ve ever met. There was no one like him, so it was just wonderful to watch him, and to be around him. He was magnetic, and everything he said and did was just so uniquely his own, and from his own world, so to watch it and absorb it was quite something. The trusting he had of himself was just so wonderful to witness, because, I suppose, there were so many things that went into it, with meditation being a big part of it. How he was able to access his ideas with such purity, and his ability to share them, was kind of extraordinary.”

I tell Watts that in my own one-off experience of talking to the cinematic maestro, some 15 years ago, we got on to discussing joy and the myth of Sisyphus, and that he said to me we have to strive to find the joy in pushing the rock up the hill but still “have a few Coca-Colas along the way.” Watts leans back with laughter. “You see! He had such a great sense of humor. I wish he was still around.” 

Watts’ most recent film The Friend witnessed her working with another industry legend, the aforementioned reclusive comic Bill Murray, and it’s another relationship that feels significant: “It’s the second movie we’ve done together, and we have a lovely friendship,” she says, when asked about the film, which depicts the life of a New York woman bequeathed the stewardship of a Great Dane when her best friend takes his own life. “The film was in my world for a few years before it actually got made, and the writers had said very early on that they had their heart set on Bill to play the lead man,” she explains. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a problem, because, one, he’s impossible to get hold of, and, two, I’m not going to be able to play it with anyone else now, because I’ve seen him in that role in my mind, and I can’t undo that thought.’ Anyway, I reached out, but it just takes a lot of time with him,” she continues. “I hand-delivered the book, a hard copy of the script, and a bottle of red to his hotel when I found out he was in New York, and that led to a multitude of conversations.”

The film, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, and based on Sigrid Nunez’s hit book of the same name, explores the strange idiosyncrasies of bereavement, and, given that it is a complex emotional landscape that Watts has explored a number of times in her work, I ask her if she was drawn to the story because it offered a fresh creative exploration of the subject. “I just thought this was a lovely story of grief, because of the dog, and because of this question at its center: how do you move through grief without words? Is it possible?” she answers thoughtfully.  “And indeed it was for this woman, despite the high level anger she feels in the beginning of the story. I mean, he abandons her by suicide, and then lumbers her with this gigantic beast, when he knows that she of anyone was the least likely candidate to look after the dog, as she lives in a five-story walk-up rent controlled apartment in the West Village. But she’s falling in love with this creature every single day, and that turns out to be just the kind of jolt that she needed to get her back on her best creative path, as well as move through the grief she felt for her friend.”

There seems here a parallel with the loss of her father, and I wonder if she feels that his passing was the most formative thing to shape her own creative path. “Probably, yeah…I think it must have,” she says, with consideration. “Because, I always had an on-going conversation with him, and always felt his presence in everything I did, good or bad. I do feel like he was a major catalyst in moving to a different place, and that maybe I had to go through all of those things. You know, not to get too corny here, but my little girl’s voice in my head is like, ‘My dad took me to this place.’”

Her statement seems far from corny, and makes me think of something else from my erstwhile conversation with David Lynch, in which he said the following: “I always say human beings are like detectives—we look at the world and we kind of figure things out, and we do rely on that still small voice inside.” It makes one wonder if this apparent sense of a deeper reality might just be the reason that the “place” Watts inhabits lies so far west of the vacuous cul-de-sac of celebrity culture that so many of her peers seem only too happy to pootle about in. 

Watts feels driven by a strong sense of purpose. “I think that’s really come to me as I’ve gotten beyond my 40s,” she says. “And I think there’s a lot more for me to do in the world of purpose. Telling my story and connecting with the women publicly through the book and my company has certainly fulfilled me in ways that feel meaningful. And that’s what purpose is, right? And certainly my acting has done that—there have been times where it hasn’t been fulfilled in the right ways, but I’ve had great moments. Then there are my children, obviously, and seeing them turn into young adults forming their identity—I’m really looking forward to seeing where they go…”

The book, the vast filmography, the ambassadorship, the family, the wellness brand—there are seemingly limitless strings to Watts’ proverbial bow, and I am fascinated to find out what she believes has been most personally transformative moment in her career across the different disciplines she seems to effortlessly straddle. “I mean, definitely the David Lynch moment,” she says without hesitation. “But also the fact that I got around to writing the book. That was a massive undertaking that was so far outside of my comfort zone,” she continues, with a beguiling and self-deprecating smile. “My least favorite thing to do in the world is speak publicly in front of audiences. I really don’t feel self-assured in that world. It’s a very different art form to be on stage trying to be, like, ‘Go get it girl!’—that is really not my nature,” she laughs. “I do feel like I have a story that connects with people, though, so trusting that is a big thing. It was worth going through all of that, to do that.”

Our time draws to a close, so I take the opportunity to ask about the most profound reaction she has had to any piece of work in which she has been involved; one that has really touched her deeply. “To this day, I’m still incredibly moved by the feedback from Mulholland Drive,” she says immediately. “It just lives on that project. I mean, I hear of my kids’ friends who are watching it now and falling in love with it, and students studying it in film school. People still want to talk about that. It’s incredibly moving that it’s affected people in so many different ways, across so many different generations.” 

Perhaps looking back on that period of her life from the vantage point of now seems somehow magical? “Yes, in a way, because I was destitute emotionally and financially. My bags were physically and metaphorically packed. I thought Hollywood had spat me out. I thought I was done and not able to stay any longer despite the fact that feeling acting was my dream. I just thought, ‘Well, you’ve got to now face the reality that it’s not here, here for you.’ And then that one meeting with David Lynch changed my life.” She closes her eyes briefly, before concluding. “I mean, that is magic, isn’t it?”

It is. I can’t help but wonder if she now has a second guardian angel watching over her. 

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Photographed by Su Mustecaplioglu

Styled by Christopher Campbell

Written by John-Paul Pryor

Hair: Rebekah Forecast

Makeup: Genevieve Herr

Nails: Miki Higuchi

Flaunt Film: Grayson Kohs

Flaunt Film Music: Ailbhe Reddy 

Flaunt Film Colorist: Cédric von Niederhausern

Producer: Anya Panova

Gaffer: Luke Nilsson

Photo Assistant: Joel Lora

Styling Assistant: Mia Hurley