Kate Beckinsale is 'naughty, shameless' in 'Love & Friendship'
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Lady Susan is hardly the first Jane Austen character that Kate Beckinsale has played, but she’s by far the most delectable.
Based on Austen’s novella, the Sundance Film Festival hit Love & Friendship reunites Beckinsale with director Whit Stillman and Chloë Sevigny 17 years after the trio made TheLast Days of Disco.
In the story, snapped up at the festival by Amazon Studios (and in theaters in New York and Los Angeles Friday), the beautiful, widowed Lady Susan artfully ties English society into knots over her affair with a handsome, married lord and attempts to right her perilous finances by scheming to marry off her teenage daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark).
“She’s this rather sort of narcissistic, naughty, bright, manipulative, shameless woman,” says Beckinsale, 42, sipping hot water with lemon. “Everything is so light and entertaining and witty, but the kind of social commentary is really important and on point.”
Lady Susan has one confidante, the American Alicia Johnson (Sevigny), and together they maneuver around sexism baked into 18th-century norms. ("Facts are horrid things," Lady Susan shrugs in one scene, dismissing culpability for a latest scandal.)
“I don’t know obviously the personal reasons why (Austen) wrote this story and then didn’t publish it when she was 20,” says Beckinsale. “But being an extremely intelligent, remotely ambitious woman at that period in history was pretty (lousy). I’m sure she must have been incredibly frustrated.”
After years spent playing Selene, a butt-kicking vampire in the Underworld franchise, a return to Austen was “very much like a comfort zone for me,” says Beckinsale, who began her career starring in 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing and took on the titular Emma for British television in 1996. “The stuff (like Selene) that people tend to associate with me now is still so much more of a stretch.”
Stillman remembers when Beckinsale sent in a "perfect" self-made audition tape for Disco. Her work ethic is “old-time movie star stuff," he says, noting that for Love & Friendship, Beckinsale even went to a dialect coach to tilt her accent back to 18th-century norms.
After years of meticulously combing over her scripts, Beckinsale, who wrapped Underworld: Blood Wars in December, is working on a screenplay she hopes to shoot “at the end of the year,” she says.
Her home life is decidedly more modern. Beckinsale walked in minutes ago while FaceTiming with her 17-year-old daughter, Lily, whom she shares with ex-partner Michael Sheen. "Can you not do 10 yoga classes and five SoulCycles please?" she jokingly chides her daughter. "Can you just do a norm, a regular amount?"
She remains in disbelief over international headlines that sprang from hugging Sarah Silverman, Sheen’s girlfriend, at the film’s premiere. (Beckinsale and husband Len Wiseman separated last year.)
“She’s such a great woman,” Beckinsale says. "For your kids, you want obviously to be the best parent you can possibly be, but it’s really important that — especially girls — have other women in their lives that aren't you that also bring to the table intelligence and wit and balls and all that stuff."