For almost all her life, Heather Graham says, she was a “people pleaser”. It was encouraged in childhood, she says, this obligation to put others’ needs above her own, and it endured even after the 1997 film Boogie Nights had made her a star and she had severed all contact with her “judgmental, authoritarian” parents.
Now 55, Graham was in her 40s before she recognised her self-sabotaging tendencies, and tried to correct course. “I realised, no, actually I can just ask myself, ‘What do I want?’ and make myself happy,” she says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “I wish I could have had this when I was 20 or 15. If I wasn’t trying to please other people, what would I have done?” It affected her romantic life and sometimes her work. “There were moments where I feel like I could have stood up for myself more,” she says.
That revelation helped inspire her new movie, Chosen Family, which she wrote and directed. It is, she says, essentially about what happens when a people pleaser says no. “I wanted to take some things in my life that I had found hard and painful and turn it into comedy.”
Graham plays Ann, a child-free yoga teacher struggling with her manipulative, dysfunctional family, who embarks on a relationship with a divorced father. There are obvious parallels with her creator – Graham is a yoga fan, has a dysfunctional family (at least in her view), and has been in relationships with men who have children. Was it cathartic to write? “It was, because I think having a sense of humour about yourself and your life, it helps to not take things too seriously.”
In the film, Ann’s family, especially her religious father, are disapproving of her relationships and expect her to look after her younger sister Clio (played by Julia Stiles), who has a drug addiction. Graham hasn’t spoken to her own family for about 30 years. “I think I felt, as a younger person, that I couldn’t really set boundaries with them that they would respect, so I wanted to explore that in the movie.”
Other emotions also get an airing. Ann seems sad that she never had children, though Graham has always seemed like a great advert for the happily child-free woman. “I think I’ve had moments where I wondered: what would it have been like if I had a kid? I guess I would say 80% of the time I feel glad I don’t have kids, and I feel free and really good about it, and maybe 20% of the time I wonder what would it be like. You just have to appreciate the life you have.”
She admires women who buck society’s expectations. “I do think it’s awesome now that more women are expressing their desire to not have kids.” Again, she says, it is almost people pleasing on a big scale. “The culture says: ‘You need to have kids.’ But why? If you’re not being a people pleaser, what do you really want?”
It took Graham a long time to work out what she wanted. Her father worked for the FBI and her mother was a teacher who became a poet and writer of children’s books; Graham’s younger sister is also now an actor and director. The family lived in Agoura Hills, in the Santa Monica mountains north of Los Angeles, and Graham says she was shy and nerdy, but could come out of herself when dressing up and in school plays. As a teenager, she would go to auditions in LA for popular teenage girl roles, “like a beautiful cheerleader – and I was not a cheerleader. I felt like I was acting out my fantasy: I wish I was the girl at school that the boys liked.” She got work quickly – at 17, she was in her first big film role, the 1988 teen comedy License to Drive.
At about the same time, she was offered a role in the black comedy Heathers. “My parents vetoed it.” Graham moved out, and it was the beginning of the end of her relationship with them. “I kind of became my own person and discovered: ‘What do I like? What do I want when I’m not under this very judgmental, authoritarian, parental, patriarchal structure? What do I want to do? What do I think of this?’”
In her mid-20s, Graham decided to cut contact with her parents and sister. By then, her career had taken off, with roles in Drugstore Cowboy and Six Degrees of Separation, and as a recurring character in Twin Peaks. “My father’s really religious, and they were, especially my father, very critical of everything I was doing.” To her parents, she says, Hollywood seemed like a pit of sin, and they didn’t approve of the roles – usually the sexy love interest – that Graham was getting. “It didn’t feel like a healthy dynamic. I stopped talking to them and, I have to say, that was a huge relief. I felt like, at that moment, my life opened up with a freedom. I didn’t need to please them.”
As a child, she says: “I feel like I wasn’t brought up to have a deep sense of self-esteem, and I think as I detached from my family, I built my own sense of self-esteem. Sort of like a detective, I went through my past and looked at how I developed certain ways of thinking that weren’t the healthiest, and basically just went on a journey to be happier.”
Over the years, did they try to contact her? “There was an effort made, but it was always very judgmental like: ‘Let me give you the number of the priest and you can go to confession.’ I just think we’re really different. They have a lot of great qualities – it’s just not a healthy dynamic for me.”
By the early 2000s, when Graham was in her early 30s, she had built a successful career, including an acclaimed role as Rollergirl, a pornographic actor in Boogie Nights, as the girlfriend of the main character in Swingers and as sexy CIA agent Felicity Shagwell in the Austin Powers sequel. Did she feel objectified? “On one hand, it was fun, because I grew up feeling nerdy and like I wasn’t the attractive girl at school. I felt flattered; I felt like I was playing a character, like I was pretending to be this attractive actress. Underneath it all, I really felt like this nerdy girl.”
But she also found it frustrating to be continually cast as the love interest. “I related to the awkward romantic comedy heroines more than to the glam characters. Sometimes, I felt like I wasn’t being seen for my intelligence or other qualities.”
Around that time, the film producer Harvey Weinstein invited Graham to his office, and, showing her a pile of scripts, essentially offered her the chance to pick a film to star in. “And then he said something like: ‘My wife and I have an arrangement, and when I’m out of town, I can do whatever I want.’” The implication was clear, and then he tried to hug her.
Graham tried to manage it. “In that moment, I wasn’t like: ‘Fuck off.’ I just felt like, oh my God, I don’t know how to handle this situation. How do I get out of this without completely alienating him?”
Some time later, Weinstein invited her to dinner and Graham asked a friend, another actor, to come. Her friend cancelled at the last minute. Weinstein, Graham says, called and asked her to meet him in his hotel room instead, claiming that her friend was already there (an obvious lie, Graham having just spoken to her). “I was like, I can’t do this. And then he never worked with me again.”
There were other instances, with other men. “There were moments where I do feel like I was being hit on, and moments where I thought people were being inappropriate. It was not happening in every job and, at some moments, I would have more power, like if my career was going really well. I would say most people were not like that. But there’s definitely some creepy people there.”
She watched the #MeToo movement unfold with a sense of justice restored, and wrote about her own experience with Weinstein (who is now being retried in New York for rape – which he denies – after his 2020 conviction was overturned). “It felt so exciting to see this powerful guy not get away with it,” says Graham. “Because, from my whole career, people would be like: ‘Just don’t put yourself in that situation, otherwise it’s your fault.’ There was victim shaming, like: ‘You shouldn’t have gone to his hotel room.’”
If the situation has improved for women in the entertainment industry in terms of sexual harassment, there is still a way to go in terms of equality. It was a struggle for Graham to get her latest film made. “Most movies are financed based on a male actor attaching themselves,” she says with a smile, “and if it’s not a male-driven story – if the guy’s not this hero, like killing all these people and saving everyone’s lives – it’s sometimes harder to get men to attach. Every independent movie is like: ‘Get the most famous actor you can for no money. And I hope it’s a man.’ If it’s a woman, you need two.” She gives a frustrated laugh.
Getting Stiles on board as Ann’s sister, “along with me being in it, got the movie greenlit, so I’m very grateful to her for supporting me and believing in me”.
Graham has worked with so many great male directors: Gus Van Sant, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch. Did she ever wonder where the women were? “It’s awesome to work with great male directors,” she says. “But most stories are told from a male point of view so, as a woman, you usually end up being some kind of supporting character. Women’s stories weren’t being told with the same kind of excitement and money and support, and that made me think, well, this affects how women grow up, and how women think about themselves … I think it’s so important that there’s more and more female film-makers now.”
She tries to be positive, she says (perhaps thanks to three decades of transcendental meditation, to which Lynch introduced her). “I try not to latch on to defeatist ways of thinking, and believe that the system is always changing.” She feels the same about the state of US politics. “I think it’s really stressful,” she says. “Of course, I’d love to see a woman president. I hope we survive it. I try to just detach from drama and focus on what’s good.”
What about roles for older women in notoriously youth-obsessed Hollywood? Recently, she says, she was cast in two parts that were originally written for women in their 30s. “I think there’s a beauty that a woman can have as she gets older that’s like a powerful, sexy beauty. Like, how do you still feel good and sexy about yourself at any age, and just embrace that? Because it really doesn’t matter what other people think – it’s how you feel about yourself. If you feel that you’re hot, you feel hot. And I do feel hot.” She laughs again.
Neither Graham nor her Chosen Family character, Ann, are averse to putting bikini photos up on Instagram. I wonder if that’s about seeking validation from others (she looks incredible), but Graham says that’s the wrong way to look at it. “I think I’m just enjoying my sexuality as a woman.”
Recovering from being a people pleaser has clearly brought her more contentment. “Before, I was more: ‘What do other people think?’ Now I’m just like, fuck it.”
• Chosen Family is on digital platforms
