Leslie Mann’s advice to parents of teenagers: ‘You’ll never win’

When it comes to parenting teenagers, actor Leslie Mann advises you to give in. You’ll never win, she says, even if you are Hollywood royalty.

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When it comes to parenting teenagers, actor Leslie Mann advises you give in. You’ll never win, she says, even if you are Hollywood royalty.

“You have to pick your battles … because they’ll just lie to you,” she says. “They’ll get sneaky, so you have to be really smart, because if you are constantly hammering them they won’t listen to you and will start lying.

“You are better off letting them do what they are going to do, try to help them manage it and make good choices and then hold your breath,” she says.

Mann at this year’s Vanity Fair Oscars party. Picture: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images/AFP

Mann, 47, famous for playing quirky female roles in movies like The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and This Is 40, is refreshingly open and honest.

Married to writer and director Judd Apatow, 51, they are parents to two girls, Maude, 21 and Iris, 16. And while many actors insist their home life is off limits, not so Mann, who is candid and charming and happily chats about combining motherhood and Hollywood.

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Mann is in a London hotel, reminiscing about the struggle of being a working mum.

“When I had kids, I felt a little frustrated because I wanted to work but I had so much guilt about being away from them,” she says. “But then as they got a little bit older that’s when we figured out, ‘Oh we can work together and we don’t have to make the choice to work or be with the kids, we can do it all.’ That was nice for a little while.”

The couple took their young daughters on set of movies such as Knocked Up, Funny People and This Is 40, in which they also appeared. But Mann admits it was not easy.

“It was really hard; it was double the work because the kids would get in fights, be hungry and fall down and need me, and I was also trying to work, but it was super-fun and I am so happy we did that,” he says.

Mann with her husband, writer and director Judd Apatow. Picture: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

Mann and her two daughters are active on Instagram — how does she cope with them being on social media?

“Every parent I know is struggling with that because their kids are so addicted. They are aware they are spending too much time on social media,” she says.

“But I am OK with them being on Instagram, I have seen it so many times where
if the parents say no they just go behind their backs and do it anyway.”

Having worked solidly for almost 30 years — “I have been very lucky having such a long career, I always try to choose things that touch my heart” — her latest role is in what is undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s more unusual recent movies, Welcome To Marwen.

The film, starring Steve Carell, Diane Kruger and Game Of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie, is written and directed by Forrest Gump’s Robert Zemeckis and based on the real-life story of American artist Mark Hogancamp.

Mann in a scene from Welcome To Marwen.

Hogancamp, a cross-dresser, was brutally attacked by a gang of men, after which he retreated into a fantasy world he created consisting of dolls enacting stories from World War II in the model Belgian village of Marwen he built in his backyard.

His hero fights Nazis and other evil forces, with the help of an all-female army of busty babes, named after real women in his life.

Mann plays Nicol, who moves next door to Hogancamp (Carell) and unwittingly joins his recruits.

If it all sounds bizarre, it is — especially the scenes where the actors play the dolls in real-life sequences, their faces superimposed on doll bodies by motion capture. The movie met with a mixed response and was pushed straight to home entertainment in Australia, but critics were united on one thing — that Mann is the shining light in it.

Mann says she was not aware of Mark Hogancamp’s story before Zemeckis explained it, after which she went home and watched the critically-acclaimed documentary Marwencol which inspired the movie.

Mann with her daughters Maude and Iris Apatow and Paul Rudd in This Is 40.

“The themes in the movie are what attracted me, as well as working with Steve and Robert Zemeckis,” she says.

“But I love the idea of trying to open people’s eyes to different types of people and shed some light on some of the difficult topics.”

It was also an interesting movie to film.

“It’s motion-capture, so you are dressed in these very unflattering grey polyester suits and a little helmet with sensors all over your body,” she says. “The technology is so advanced that it animates automatically — so we could be doing a scene and watching the machine turning it into animation instantly, it’s all happening in the moment. It’s really cool,” she says.

Nicol the doll, like all of the female figures is a fantasy figure with flame-red hair and an enormous chest. But they’re also gun-slinging heroines, because Hogancamp states, “women are the saviours of the world”.

With Katherine Heigl in a scene from film Knocked Up.

It’s an odd combination of objectifying and reverence. So what did Mann think?

“I can’t really say — some people see the objectifying and others love that women are the saviours of the world. But it’s one man’s story and I can’t really speak on it. It is interesting though,” she says.

Her next movie is drama Motherless Brooklyn, another departure, directed by and
co-starring Ed Norton, along with Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe and Alec Baldwin. Does she have a secret hankering to do something wildly different like a Viking movie?

“That would be interesting,” she laughs. “I used to want to play an assassin, like an Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, but then there’s so much of stuff like that going on in the real world that I don’t need to do that,” she says. “I’d rather focus on putting light into the world.”

Welcome To Marwen is released on home entertainment on Wednesday

Originally published as Leslie Mann’s advice to parents of teenagers: ‘You’ll never win’