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The Aussie tennis champ who trained Oscar-nominee Annette Bening
From the materialistic Carolyn Burnham in 1999 black comedy American Beauty to real-life swimmer Diana Nyad in this year’s Oscar-nominated film Nyad, actress Annette Bening has spent much of her life playing complex, nuanced women.
In the new limited series Apples Never Fall, she plays Joy Delaney, a tennis matriarch whose family’s world is upended after her disappearance. But before the cameras rolled on the new series, there was one unexpected snag: somebody needed to teach the cast how to play elite-level tennis.
Annette Bening in Apples Never Fall.Credit: NBC Universal / Binge
Enter Australian former world No.1 doubles player and 2011 US Open singles champion Sam Stosur, who had to bring the cast’s varying levels of tennis skill up to something which would mimic competition standard. “Sam came on to help, and our cast threw themselves into training because they had to be believable,” executive producer Melanie Marnich says.
That was just the beginning of the transformation for 65-year-old Bening, who says she was drawn to the role because of the complex layers in Moriarty’s storytelling and the way it challenged how older women are portrayed on the screen.
“How we see ourselves is often how we have seen ourselves depicted, and we need to broaden that narrative,” Bening says. “Certainly in life we see women, you know, over 60, 70, 80, living interesting lives, doing all kinds of different things. How much do we see that on the screen? I don’t know. I just find that very interesting.”
In her own experience, Bening says, women are creating new pathways in their lives in a way that was not the case for previous generations of women. “There’s this kind of new chapter of life that has happened, especially for people who’ve had children, but even my buddies who haven’t, they’re doing different, interesting things,” Bening says.
Former world number one doubles player Sam Stosur was tasked with bringing Bening (pictured) and the rest of the cast to a level of tennis skill would mimic competition standard.Credit: Vince Valitutti/Peacock
The rules are also very different for men, Bening adds. “I don’t know if men who are 65 are asked questions about being a mature man,” she says. “Does that happen? Maybe it does happen, I don’t know. Or that there are certain ways that we accept seeing women, that we’re used to seeing them, that isn’t true to life, but it narrows how women are portrayed and seen?”
Things are changing, Bening says, but patriarchy is still “the way of the world”. “So there is a lot of unconscious prejudice ... I see that in the writing [of roles for women]. I’m lucky if I get to play them.”
It is important too, Bening adds, that women are not written simply as strong in reaction to outdated stereotypes, but also written with complexity. “Not just strong characters, that’s a cliche, isn’t it? But a strong, nuanced character who has flaws, who screws up, who does the wrong thing, who is crazy.
“That’s how people are,” Bening says.“People have all these different colours. Strong characters are great, but a strong character that has vulnerability is much more interesting.”
In Apples Never Fall, Bening plays Joy Delaney, a retired tennis champion. With her husband Stan (Sam Neill), the Delaneys enjoyed a long career at the top of the mixed doubles and parlayed that into retirement in Palm Beach.
Tennis dominates the family’s life, though none of the Delaney children – Troy (Jake Lacy), Amy (Alison Brie), Logan (Conor Merrigan-Turner) and Brooke (Essie Randles) – ever matched their parents’ success on the court. Apples never fall, as the title suggests.
Life is a jumble of normalcy, parental disappointment and interpersonal frustration, until Joy goes missing, and the family begins to crumble, with cracks appearing in the seemingly happy facade and long-held secrets beginning to spill into the open.
“Joy has a lot of contradictions,” Bening says. “She’s in a pressure cooker of her own making. In a way, I guess we all are. We make our choices. In her case, in her life with her family, there are certain things she ended up doing that didn’t serve her in the long run.”
Meet the Delaneys in Apples Never Fall: Pooja Shah, Conor Merrigan-Turner, Alison Brie, Jake Lacy, Essie Randles.Credit: Vince Valitutti/Peacock
Moriarty, the pen behind Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, knows how to mine these micro-worlds and their complex hierarchies and power structures well. In this case, the series exchanges the book’s Sydney setting for Palm Beach, Florida.
Bening is currently surfing the wave of Oscar season, nominated for her performance in Nyad, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s film about 60-year-old long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad who, in 2010, resolved to accomplish a 177-kilometre nonstop swim from Cuba to Florida.
Nyad is Bening’s fifth Oscar nomination. She was previously nominated for her performances in The Grifters (1990), American Beauty (1999), Being Julia (2004) and The Kids Are All Right (2010). Bening has a BAFTA and two Golden Globes but thus far an Oscar has eluded her.
“Diana is such an extraordinary woman,” Bening, 65, says. “From when I was very young and I started out in the theatre, I imagined that I would continue to play my age as I went through my life, I don’t know why, but I always thought about that.
“Maybe it’s because I also admired some of the actresses who were older than I was, and I was watching them age, and I was watching them continue to play and to work,” Bening says. “I feel liberated right now, too, because what I’ve been able to do has so far surpassed, in terms of opportunities, what I ever would have imagined.”
With a more-than-four-decade career behind her, with memorable performances like Myra Langtry in The Grifters, Sydney Wade in The American President, Irina Arkadina in The Seagull and even Supreme Intelligence in Captain Marvel, Bening says she feels empowered as an actress because she is free to make choices about what she wants to do.
“When I work, it’s because I just want to be there,” she says. “I love it. I feel lucky. And [Apples Never Fall] was, for me, a joy. We got along so well … Sometimes there’s one person that’s unhappy for whatever reason [but] we didn’t have that,” Bening adds. “We had this ensemble, and we just love being together. It was extraordinary. Life’s too short for me to do stuff that I don’t want to, and I don’t have to.”
Bening is quick to credit Moriarty for being part of a shift in the industry in terms of how women are portrayed on television. “There are more and more opportunities where the stereotypes of women, not only older women, but younger women, are being transformed even since I started in the business,” Bening says. “And it comes from a project like this [thanks to] Liane’s imagination. She writes such juicy stories and juicy parts.
“Then when Melanie Marnich came in and really took it over, that’s what really got me super excited because I could tell she was obsessed and that she had this strong commitment to it and vision of it,” Bening adds. “Once I saw that and everything, I thought, wow, this is just such an opportunity.”
“I had never done something over so many episodes, so as we were working Melanie established this atmosphere where we were all in it together … You could have an idea in the middle of the night, and sometimes that’s not the good idea, but it’s the idea that comes from that idea.”
Apples Never Fall streams on Binge from Thursday, March 14.
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