Toni Collette: My career keeps Getting better
She’s out of this world in the new sci-fi film Mickey 17, but in person Toni Collette is winningly down to earth, says Julia Llewellyn Smith.
The weather in London is freezing, and Toni Collette, who arrived a couple of days previously from sweltering Sydney, peers, aghast, through the windows of the hotel room where we’re meeting, at the leaden sky. ‘It’s so cold! I’ve never done this before but when I got to the hotel it was 8.30am, miserable and rainy. I called my parents to tell them I’d landed. I said, “I love London, but I’m going to bed!” and only got up to have a massage at 5.30pm.’ You learn a lot about Collette, 52, from this conversation. She’s down-to-earth, she loves her mum and dad and – like many women in midlife – after years of family obligations she’s just starting to permit herself some slack. When she was younger, she shied away from people telling her – correctly – she was gorgeous. Has she got better at accepting compliments? ‘I have! I’ve been very good at giving and taking care of other people,’ she says, with her signature throaty chuckle. ‘Now I’m getting very good at receiving care.’
A genuine A-lister, Collette has starred in everything from Muriel’s Wedding back in 1994 (‘That film will never go away. People love her, I love her’), to The Sixth Sense, which won her an Oscar nomination, as well as About a Boy and Little Miss Sunshine, to Knives Out. In person she comes across as slightly hippyish. She’s constantly doing cat-like yoga stretches and appears totally unaffected, swearing constantly. After we meet, when she appears on The One Show, host Vernon Kay apologises to the audience for her ‘potty mouth’ – she said ‘s**t’ – only for her to swear again, mortified. Today, she lives in an upmarket beachside suburb, but she’s very much in touch with her working-class, no-nonsense roots in downat-heel Blacktown, Western Sydney. One of her two brothers, who both have white-collar jobs, still lives there and she visits often. (‘It hasn’t gentrified much.’) Her dad Bob was a lorry driver, her mum Judy worked in customer services. ‘They’re good, grounded people. We “Westies” are considered very uncouth, very daggy,’ Collette says. ‘Do you know what that means?’
I do – it means shabby and a tad uncool. ‘Exactly! Not that that should have anything to do with anything, but in terms of what we are as a family and where I grew up I am like some kind of alien. The trajectory of my life is so magical and bizarre and I’m so f***ing grateful. Not Grammy-speech grateful – honestly grateful because it’s not what my life was.’ We’re here to discuss Collette’s latest role (‘I can’t remember every film I’ve done any more, which is weird because when you’re younger you think you’ll never forget anything’) in Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon Ho, whose black-comedy thriller Parasite swept the 2020 Oscars, with awards including, for him, best director. The new sci-fi film is, as Collette puts it, ‘tonally all over the place, but in the best way. I really wanted to work with Bong. The first time we zoomed I had sweaty pits because I was so nervous.’ Part dystopian horror, part comedy, Mickey 17 is the tale of a mission, led by megalomaniacal failed presidential candidate Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his scheming wife Ylfa (Collette), to colonise an icy distant planet. Mickey, played by Twilight’s Robert Pattinson, is an ‘expendable’ – a worker assigned life-threatening chores because every time he dies he’s replaced by a ‘printout’ replica of his body, with his emotions and memories uploaded on a hard disc.
While Mickey is tackling monsters in sub-zero temperatures, Kenneth and his wife luxuriate in their space-station quarters. Ylfa is ‘a 1950s housewife crossed with a smiling assassin’. As Collette describes her, she is clearly the brains behind the operation. ‘There’s a hyper-femininity to her and she uses that gentle, snake-like presence to manipulate her husband and pull the strings. He just needs a little help. They completely love each other – Bong said, “I want it to feel they’ve either just had sex or are about to jump into bed together.”’ As a fake-tanned billionaire, Kenneth bears a striking resemblance to Donald Trump (his supporters wear red, Maga-style baseball caps). ‘He’s an amalgamation of different characters. I’d rather not give that real-life buffoon any more airtime,’ Collette says with a roll of her eyes. The satire is often dark, but filming in Hertfordshire – you’d never guess from the extraordinary sets – was nonstop giggles. ‘Mark Ruffalo had me crying with laughter daily.’ And what about Pattinson, dismissed by some as a ‘hunk’, but here pulling off an acting masterclass? ‘The guy’s a genius. You can see him as this sweet, daggy young guy he was once and think how weird it must have been for him stepping into heartthrob land. It must be so frustrating for actors who get pigeonholed, when he’s so capable.’
Being pigeonholed is a fate Collette has avoided brilliantly. In person, she’s low-key glam, with long, glossy blonde hair and immaculate make-up, wearing an obviously designer white blazer and black trousers (‘These are borrowed, I’m going to have to give them back’). Yet, on screen, she’s always dodged playing personality-free arm candy for more complex characters. Collette agrees: ‘Those arm-candy parts are where characters go to die. But things are changing a lot. In my industry they talk about older women becoming obsolete and casting younger ones, but my career just gets better. I don’t know how I ended up in this position, but it just keeps on happening.’
