This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
The versatile Emmy winner speaks with Shondaland about what went into playing Frankie in “Tiny Beautiful Things” and her process as an actor.
Merritt Wever doesn’t require dialogue to steal a scene. She’s the kind of actor who wields the power of nuance; her facial expressions speak volumes in their resolve as she leverages the power of a glance or a well-timed pause with a full understanding of how the spaces between her words lend weight to the lines she ultimately utters. Case in point: her most recent role, as reluctant advice columnist Frankie in Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things, a story adapted from writer Cheryl Strayed’s collection of letters from her “Dear Sugar” column. As Frankie, Wever appears in flashback scenes and in dreams as Clare’s (Kathryn Hahn) mother, grounding Clare’s unhinged wildness like a boulder around her ankle, at once her source of love and existential agony.
Already familiar with Strayed’s work, Wever knew immediately she wanted to play Frankie when Tiny Beautiful Things came her way. “Cheryl writes really beautifully about her mother, about that relationship, about Frankie, about the loss of that relationship, and the effect that it has on the rest of her life,” Wever tells Shondaland. “It was really hard to encounter that writing and not move toward this project as a whole.” Given her deep interest, Wever describes her process of prepping for Frankie as one of immersion and absorption. “I do a lot of reading, I do a lot of talking to other people, I try to find podcasts — it’s like I scour,” she says. “I read the books that Frankie read at the end of her life that were her favorites from school, that she had Clare read to her in the hospital. In general when I’m working, I look everywhere. I tend to look everywhere outside myself and hope that I find something that sparks things in me.”
As the series began filming soon after Wever received the script’s first pages, she described her prep process as “run and catch up, run and catch up,” revealing that even acclaimed actors of Wever’s caliber have moments of self-doubt. Even so, Wever was grateful for the opportunity to, as she says, “learn through the doing”; she also used Strayed’s wildly popular memoir Wild as her “bible.” “Frankie in Wild and Frankie in Tiny Beautiful Things are the same person, but she’s her own version in Tiny Beautiful Things, and I’ve found that can get dangerous for me,” Wever admits candidly. “In the past, I’ve unknowingly or unwittingly planted my feet in the source material, and it’s made it hard for me to move forward sometimes, or get stuck in the muck when it comes to moving forward with the thing I’m actually making.”
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After the absorption period ends and shooting begins, Wever confesses it can be challenging to trust that she knows enough to become the part: “I have to remember to stop reaching outside myself and very much so come back to myself and feel like whatever was out there has made it, as needed, inside, and to stay with myself and stay close to myself, as opposed to trying to be something outside of myself. I’ve found in that way lies death.”
Wever has been a working actor since the age of 15, and her résumé is long, rich, and varied: Her unforgettable, enigmatic, Emmy-winning turn as Zoey Barkow, an innocent foil to Nurse Jackie’s Edie Falco, made the power of her presence obvious to all. She also won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie in 2018 for her work as a gender-nonconforming widow in the miniseries Godless, and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Limited Series or Television Film for her work as empathetic detective Karen Duvall in Unbelievable. She’s recently played the unhinged romantic lead Ruby in the Phoebe Waller-Bridge-produced Run and racked up supporting roles in such films as Michael Clayton (2007), Birdman (2014), and Marriage Story (2019), all of which earned Academy Award noms for Best Picture, and in the case of Birdman, won. Wever held down recurring roles as the controversial Denise in The Walking Dead, Elizabeth in New Girl, and as Suzanne in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. But even before the recurring roles, the attention, the hits, and the accolades, Wever was always out there working, sprinkling her magic all over short parts and cameos in the likes of The Good Wife, Marriage Story, Conviction, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and The Wire.
A native New Yorker, Wever followed the path of many New York aspiring actors: She graduated from LaGuardia High School and then attended Sarah Lawrence College while working, working, working. She credits her own mother with giving her a leg up after graduation. “Being somebody who, after college, could move home for two years and live in an apartment with her mother and not pay rent made a really big difference in my life when it came to pursuing acting. It meant that I wasn’t having to work a really steady, time-consuming day job and pursue and prepare auditions, and find a way to get off work to make those auditions. It made an economic difference having a home, and not having to find a way to pay rent every month in a way that would take me away from my work. I don’t necessarily think it helped me get jobs, but it’s something I think about because money matters.”
Eddie Falco (right) and Merritt Wever (left) in Nurse Jackie.
Courtesy of SHOWTIME
With respect to Tiny Beautiful Things, when it came time to play a mother on-screen — especially the mother of an older child (Sarah Pidgeon, as the younger version of Clare) — Wever describes the process as “a very different, visceral experience.” Veering into the mother/daughter familial love scenes was uncharted territory. “I unexpectedly found that it was almost difficult to withstand being looked at with so much love, with that kind of love,” says Wever. “I haven’t seen that experience coming, and I had to really fortify myself for that experience. I had to open myself up in ways I hadn’t realized would be difficult for me and that I don’t know that I was always successful at.”
She describes working with Hahn and Pidgeon as a huge highlight of working on Tiny Beautiful Things, and her praise of both actors is generous. “I’m very familiar with Kathryn’s work, and I think the world of her. Working with her, you can feel her vibrating on a cellular, molecular level. She’s electric, she’s magnetic, she’s like a major weather event. She steps forward and is willing to move toward you with every fiber of her being. It’s really remarkable.” While she’d never met or worked with Pidgeon before, the two found their creative footing with ease: “I can’t talk about her enough. I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with her. I couldn’t have even come close to doing what she has done when I was her age, and I feel really lucky that I got to work with her and move through this experience in more ways than one with her. I turned to her at the end of the job and said, ‘You were my entire job.’ She was my partner through all of this. I guess I knew that intellectually, having read the script and I knew what it would require, but to have gone through the experience viscerally, by the end of it, I couldn’t have more affection for her, and I couldn’t hold her in higher esteem,” Wever says.
Working so closely with Pidgeon recalled Wever’s days on Nurse Jackie, when she felt a similar dynamic with Edie Falco. “It had me really looking back on the time I spent with Edie Falco, thinking about what she gave me,” Wever explains. “Not because she did anything, not because she had to do anything or try to be anything other than what she was, but what spending seven seasons with her was like and what I learned from her. Not because she was actively trying to teach me anything, but really because of what she provided as a person and as an actor. I was thinking today about how, in a way, I can consider myself someone who was, when it comes to being an actor, raised, in part, by Edie. It had me appreciating all over again what that job and that experience gave me, and [I] consider myself very lucky for it.”
Though her performance as Frankie is, as is typical of Wever, masterful and captivating, artists are often hardest on themselves, and she is no exception. She says she’d welcome another opportunity at some point to revisit this kind of material, armed with all she’s learned in this experience. “I hope that there are aspects of this job and this story that I maybe get to get another crack at or revisit in the future, elsewhere, in some kind of incarnation,” Wever says. “That has happened to me once before where I’ve not really felt like I landed in a job or in a part, and a few years later something has come my way that allows me to reenter from a different direction, and it feels very satisfying.”
Merritt Wever in Tiny Beautiful Things.
Jessica Brooks
When she’s asked what she looks for in a project, it quickly becomes apparent that Wever now feels she’s at something of a crossroads. “You know, someone asked me that question 10 minutes ago, and I gave an answer, but right now, when you asked me, I think the answer is closer to I don’t know anymore,” she says with disarming honesty. I ask if the words she reads on the page just have to hit her in the gut. “I’ve actually found that it’s really difficult to know sometimes,” Wever explains. “When you’re 16, or 22, or 29, any job is a good job. One of the things that happens as you get older is that the goalposts shift. What I hope is a clean and clear and true gut response — I think that’s what I always hope for. The truth is, I just don’t know where I am right now. I don’t know how else to put it. Everything about now feels like being on different ground in all ways and in all shapes and in all areas of my life. I’m sitting here doing press, trying to come up with concrete answers that are somehow true, but what’s true feels very elusive right now. That was the weird part of this part and this job.”
She explains, in so many words, that coming out of Covid thrust her into a different demographic without warning — a more maternal category of roles she had yet to consider. Playing Frankie in Tiny Beautiful Things seems to have outlined this for her. “Playing the mother of a fully grown human and really recognizing, thinking about, and remembering being her age and walking onto sets and seeing that’s not where I am anymore, that’s not who I am — part of this job is having that reflected to me in a really concrete way,” Wever says. “I don’t know what this age is; I don’t know what this time is. I think getting older during Covid — and listen, I’m very aware that everybody, logistically, got older during Covid — but feeling like I moved from one time and place to another, I’m not there anymore, but I don’t know where here is, and that’s the best way I can describe it at this very moment.”
When asked if there were a dream role she might imagine for herself, she answers candidly that she’d welcome some kind of shift — she just can’t name what that might be. “It’s an excellent question, and, honestly, I should go and scheme or something or like make a list of concrete answers I can refer to in these things. I know some people who are so smart when it comes to this; they name exactly what they want, and they name actors and directors they’d like to work with in the moment,” Wever confesses. “I’m never good at coming up with that, and then they manifest it, and I’m like, Ugh! I wish I could do that! I do think that, though, I need to find different places in my heart to use. Sometimes parts come my way, and they’re really reminiscent of things that I’ve done recently. That makes sense, but it’s almost like asking myself to go to a well that’s run dry. I’ve emptied that bucket, and if I were to go back, there’d be nothing there. I’m really hoping to find someone or something that lets me use a different part of myself. I feel like I’ve rented out certain places. Frankie’s a good heart; I don’t think that I can offer my good heart right now. It needs to go away and regenerate and become something new I could mine.”
Self-reflection, it seems, isn’t scary territory for Wever. So, with all she knows about her journey as an actor now, what advice would she give herself as a 15-year-old newbie? “I think it took me a really long time to learn how to act. I think it took me a really long time to understand how I act and what my process is,” she admits humbly. “I think I spent a lot of time as an actor and as a person fitting myself into a format that other people gave me but that I didn’t actually connect to, and it took me a long time to learn that I had to come back to myself. What I would tell myself? I wish that I’d known that, but it’s not the kind of thing you can learn without going through it and doing it, like most lessons that are worthwhile. I don’t ever seem to learn things because someone else tells me it’s the truth. I seem to have to learn the hard way.”