In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Robin Weigert looks back on her iconic performances in Deadwood and Big Little Lies, and how they connect to her current role in We Were the Lucky Ones.
When casting for Deadwood began, Robin Weigert didn’t have much screen work to show. She’d spent years grinding on the New York stage, with only a weepy Law & Order guest spot to put on a reel. But an old friend from graduate school, Julie Tucker, was a casting assistant on the buzzy HBO pilot, and carried just enough sway to give her a shot. Creator David Milch and his producers were searching everywhere to fill the demanding role of Calamity Jane, a lone wolf “who drove teams of oxen with a bull whip across the plains,” as Weigert describes her.
A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races
They met Weigert in New York. “I tried to fill out the dimensions of this massively strong person, because I didn’t feel I was enough of me,” Weigert says. “I did the opposite of what actresses do. I made myself bigger in every way I could. Then the feedback came that they loved the vulnerability.”
Weigert winces a bit at this memory. She’d adjusted herself, her walk and her voice and her presence, to the fullest extent she was able; she wasn’t going for vulnerable. Yet she won the part anyway, going on to embody the indelible frontierswoman with both grit and heartbreak—and never letting the costume overtake the human.
Here was a fitting start to Weigert’s career in film and television, where she’s taken mostly supporting parts—lawyers, therapists, housewives, even demons—and imbued them with palpable poignancy. She commands a certain attention, one that reflects her current career philosophy. “I now believe in acting in a way I can stand behind,” she says. “I thought it was for vain people and narcissists when I was little. But my feeling about acting, unlike then, is that it’s an important thing.”
In We Were the Lucky Ones, currently streaming on Hulu, Weigert portrays Nechuma, the matriarch of the Kurcs, a Polish Jewish family brutally separated—whether in hiding, in capture, or in escape—over the course of World War II. During the series, Nechuma is wracked with guilt over her need to lean on her children for survival; the most recent episode, “Warsaw,” finds her physically separated from her ailing husband, Sol (Lior Ashkenazi), as they begin work in a new factory outside of the Polish capital. We see Nechuma’s spirit begin to break. While this story reaches a relatively happy ending—not exactly a spoiler if you see the show’s title—it remains rooted in historical trauma. You feel Weigert’s weighty journey in her performance.
“David Milch has a highfalutin word for this, which is the ‘transmutation of souls,’” says Weigert, who is Jewish. “This experience I’ve just had with We Were the Lucky Ones may be the zenith of having experienced that in my life. I also experienced it when I played Calamity Jane. I grew from my encounters with these characters. They changed me in fundamental ways.”
In her early teens, Weigert saw Sophie’s Choice and received an instant spark. “I was one child when I walked into the movie theater, and I was another person when I came out of it,” she says. Before reaching high school, she and a friend caught a bus to Georgetown, where Meryl Streep was in production on Heartburn opposite Jack Nicholson. They intended—and managed—to meet her. “There she was, going to her trailer, and [my friend] had the gumption to actually go up and give her a fan letter that he prepared for her,” Weigert recalls. “I just had the breath knocked out of me when she turned around.”
Fifteen or so years later, Weigert was sharing the stage with Streep in Central Park, in a 2001 production of The Seagull. Weigert had, to this point, understudied on Broadway and was just starting to make a name for herself in New York; now she was a brief replacement for Marcia Gay Harden in an ensemble that also included Streep, Kevin Kline, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Christopher Walken. “The two times that I got to go on were almost out of body,” Weigert says. The play was directed by Mike Nichols, who then brought Weigert into the casting process for his HBO adaptation of Angels in America—to read opposite all of the men being considered to play the part of Joe, a closeted Mormon, as his wife, Harper.
Weigert knew it was a long shot, but held out hope that he’d cast her after seeing her run through it a bunch of times. When the part went to Mary-Louise Parker, in an Emmy-winning turn, Weigert felt her heart drop. She cried all over New York. She wondered if she’d missed her big chance. (Nichols did, at least, cast her in a small part in the show.)