TA VOIX, TES YEUX, TES LÈVRES

JENNIFER CONNELLY WON THE HEARTS OF A GENERATION OF CINEPHILES WITH HER PENCHANT FOR THE GRITTY AND THE COMPLICATED. HERE, SHE LIFTS THE CURTAIN ON THE LIGHTER SIDE OF HER LIFE.

By Frankie Dunn

On Letterboxd, there’s a movie list called “Jennifer Connelly standing on a pier.” It comprises the neo-noir masterpiece Dark City (1998), the maximalist addiction drama Requiem For A Dream (2000), and the depressive episode that is House of Sand and Fog (2003). And it’s true. All three movies happen to feature Jennifer standing at the end of a pier, the breeze in her dark hair, gazing out across the waves towards the horizon. They’re just a handful of critically-acclaimed projects from the Oscar-winner’s 40-year career—one that began with roles in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America when she was just 11, and in the fantastical Labyrinth opposite David Bowie three years later.

When she answers my call, Jennifer has coincidentally just returned from a Brooklyn pier where she braved the pouring rain to watch her 12-year-old daughter Agnes—the youngest of her three children—in a soccer match. “I’m thawing out,” she tells me, “but I’m doing great. They play rain or shine, so it was very zesty.”

It’s a scene that offers a rare glimpse into the actress’s impressively private life, where moments of quiet family time, amidst the bustling energy of her native New York City, act as a grounding force. “We always speculate like, Hmm, do we want to live here forever?” she confides. “More and more as I get older, I love being in the mountains. I love to hike and ski. We have a house in Vermont, so now, if it snows, I’m just itching to get up there!”

Tomorrow, Jennifer and her husband of 21 years, the actor Paul Bettany, will fly to Japan to spend a few days in Tokyo with their designer friend Nicolas Ghesquière before continuing on to Shanghai to watch his Pre-Fall 2024 Louis Vuitton show. She and Nicolas first met after he designed the elegant nude dress she wore to accept an Academy Award for her heartbreaking performance as Alicia Nash in 2001’s A Beautiful Mind. “Now he’s one of my dearest friends,” she says. “We go on holidays and spend time with our families together.” Jennifer is an ambassador for Louis Vuitton and has been a staunch supporter of Nicolas’s visionary work there, ever since he took over from Marc Jacobs in 2013 as creative director of womenswear. “Aside from the fact that I love him as a person, I’ve grown to really admire fashion through him,” she continues. “Part of his magic is that he’s always breaking new ground without it ever feeling frivolous, you know? It’s always in balance and proportion.”

Jennifer’s latest project is the mind-bending sci-fi series Dark Matter, based on Blake Crouch’s bestseller of the same name. It’s The Matrix with a side of family drama and an obsession with Schrödinger’s cat. Jennifer stars as Daniela Dessen, whose physicist husband Jason (Joel Edgerton) is abducted into an alternate version of his life. The man responsible? Himself. This Jason is from another reality in which he chose work, money, and fame over his wife and grew to regret it. In an attempt to get back to his family and oust the imposter, he travels through endless worlds—each the result of a life played out differently—where he encounters a series of alternate Danielas in often dystopian Chicagos. It’s a wild and addictive watch. “I thought it was a really fun conceit,” Jennifer says of first reading the script. “A really fun way to tell a grown-up love story; this guy on a sort of Odyssean journey to get home to the ones that he loves, with all of these challenges along the way. It was a smart way of using the idea of a multiverse.” Does Jennifer reckon she’d notice if an imposter showed up in her husband Paul’s place? “I think I would!” she laughs. “My son always says I would have been an amazing detective. I notice things. For better or worse, I’m hypervigilant.” Epic love story aside, Dark Matter also provides a terrifying look at the concept of a sliding doors moment—of exploring roads not taken. Who might we have become if we made a different decision somewhere down the line? What kind of life would we be living?

Having started acting at such a young age, is Jennifer curious about her own roads not taken? “Sometimes I wonder about that,” she says. “I really loved school, so I would’ve spent a lot more time figuring it all out.” Jennifer studied at both Yale and Stanford but never graduated. “Much to my chagrin!” she notes. “Sometimes I think about trying to go back, and sometimes I even follow along with online courses.” These days, she’s keen to study literature, but also history and maybe science. Jennifer is interested in everything. “It wasn’t my idea to start doing this,” she says of her career. “I started as a child model when I was 10; that was my mom’s idea. I started doing commercials, which led to auditioning for films—so that wasn’t initiated by me either. I wasn’t a kid who was into theater and I wasn’t doing plays in school. But I got jobs! I had fun but it wasn’t something that I was…” Jennifer trails off, gathering her thoughts. “I was passionate about doing what was before me—trying to do a good job and make people happy. I was very invested in that, but it wasn’t that acting or films were my passion.”

There’s a Labyrinth-era interview online in which a reserved but charming 15-year-old Jennifer mentions she had dreams of becoming a vet or a carpenter. I ask her if she remembers these childhood ambitions. “Oh yeah,” she laughs. “I was definitely into medicine and I remember wanting to be a vet. I remember wanting to be a doctor, too—I still find that interesting. I was watching a documentary about surgeons recently and I was like, Well, I don’t think I could be a surgeon, but medicine… that could be fun.”

In early adulthood, Jennifer did indeed reevaluate whether acting was something she wanted to stick to—fully prepared to walk away from her already-successful career. “I’m still not convinced that it’s something I’m really good at,” she says, unnecessarily humble for a Best Supporting Actress winner. “It was in my early 20s that I more actively chose it for myself.” When that happened—post-John Hughes’s Career Opportunities, with her bushy eyebrows reaching iconic status—everything changed. “That was a huge shift for me because it became much more gratifying and creative at that point, and much more exciting. I think it’s like anything in life: It’s very different if you’re doing it for someone else versus because it’s something you want to do and have agency over. So I learned to love the job.”

One of the beauties of making a TV show is the space for real character development, and Dark Matter required Jennifer to explore multiple versions of the same character. “It was a really fun aspect of the job,” she enthuses. “There’s only one other version that we spend significant time with—we called her Daniela 2, not a very original name. I enjoyed thinking about how she got to where she was, the different choices she made, and how they might manifest in her home and her affect and the way she presented herself.” Filming went back and forth between Danielas and so, to aid the transition, Jennifer turned to music to find the right headspace. “I listened to a lot of Grimes for Daniela 2. I often have playlists for characters. I listen to them in the morning in my trailer and on the way to work. The majority of preparation happens in the weeks and months before shooting a scene, so I show up having done that more cerebral work and just try to be available.” Sometimes, Jennifer grows attached to her playlists, revisiting them years later. “I have one for Bad Behaviour that I was listening to the other day, actually, and my son was like, ‘Oooh what is this?’” she chuckles.

For Jennifer, motherhood is everything. “My kids are my favorite people to spend time with, for sure,” she says. “You know, two of them are out of the house already, and now Agnes is turning 13. She’s at that little twilight stage, it’s wonderful. I’m savoring the time that we have her at home because it goes so fast.” Approaching the age Jennifer was when Labyrinth made her a household name, Agnes meanwhile is into sport and writing letters to her 100-year-old pen friend who she met at her brother Kai’s graduation five years ago. “Agnes sat on a couch with her throughout the ceremony and they talked for hours, traded addresses, and have been writing letters back and forth ever since,” Jennifer says with admiration. “She’s a very thoughtful, interesting person. She’s so strong in her own convictions and very confident.”

When she returns from Shanghai, Jennifer will be heading to LA for the premiere of Dark Matter—something she’s particularly looking forward to, though not for obvious reasons. “I’ve loitered [in LA] but never moved there,” she says. “My son lives there now, so I’ll get to see him and he’ll come with me [to the premiere]. That’ll be wonderful and celebratory. I get kind of shy doing things like this and talk shows.” It’s a reminder of Jennifer’s introverted personality; of why and perhaps how she’s managed to retain the level of privacy she has.

Jennifer is a hugely talented actor and certainly looks the part—a new generation of fans means edits on TikTok, declaring her “the most beautiful woman in the world”—but embracing celebrity is just not in her nature. “The actual sitting and talking about myself is not my favorite part of the process, but there are lots of lovely parts,” she shares. “Each day I work, I’m so aware of what a great privilege and opportunity it is and how blessed I am to be there.” For now, though, she’s perfectly content hanging out with Agnes—even if that does often involve standing on a pier in the pouring rain.