In portraying the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad in the Netflix biopic Nyad, Annette Bening makes a believable, detailed portrait out of an unbelievable, frankly bananas story. In 1978, when she was 28, Nyad attempted to swim from Cuba to Florida, a 54-hour-plus journey through waters riddled with jellyfish, the sting of which was so strong it was like being electrocuted. She was forced to abort, having completed 76 miles, only some of them in a straight line.
Thirty-two years later, Nyad started training for a second attempt. While sports psychologists note that mental resilience is a bigger factor than physical strength in long-distance swimming, it was still, objectively, a ridiculous idea. She was bus-pass age – and the jellyfish hadn’t gone anywhere.
Yet Bening’s magnetic performance in Nyad makes you feel as if we should all have a go. She makes obsessive determination, limitless physical stamina and a maverick refusal to listen to reason seem like such natural elements of the post-menopausal condition that I found myself thinking: “Maybe I should take up parkour.”
“That was inspirational,” I tell her over a video call (she is on the Gold Coast in Australia, filming a TV adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel Apples Never Fall). She gives a self-deprecating smile. Her fringe stands high off her forehead, as it has done since her 1988 film debut in the likable yet dumb John Hughes comedy The Great Outdoors. Her glasses accent her studious, thoughtful manner.
“I have to say, I really see it among women – that determination, that sense of challenge,” she says. “Maybe that’s unfair of me.” Unfair to whom, I think, until I realise she means men. “Maybe it’s because a lot of us – not everyone – have had children. A certain amount of our brain power and our creative power, life’s attention, goes to that. So when our kids become adults, we’re free, we have a new chapter of life.”
Bening, 65, has four children with Warren Beatty, to whom she has been married since 1992. Her daughters and sons, in their 20s or 30s, are actors or writers. The eldest, Stephen Ira, is transgender. With the pressures of social media and various unlovely aspects of the modern world, she still worries about them, but it’s different now that they are adults. “Maybe a few draws on your attention peel away,” she says. “And maybe you have better access to your intuitive powers.”
She took the role of Nyad because it was “such a great story”, but she hadn’t thought through what playing the swimmer would mean – the “oh, it’s me in the water; oh, I’m in a bathing suit; oh, I’ve got to really pull off the swimming”, she says. It took a year of training, with the Olympian Rada Owen. Bening reckons she is a better swimmer now than when she shot the film, because she has fallen in love with the sport. “What I’ve come to understand about Diana, what I admire, is not only the fact that she swam 54 hours; it was that she found the ability to think enough of herself to say: ‘I have the right to say I’m going to do this thing.’ I think that is what a lot of us struggle with.”
Nyad has written a number of books about her career, which the film picks through judiciously. “She had a coach who abused her when she was a kid,” says Bening. “We didn’t want to make the movie about that, but it is part of who she is. And what happened to her as a teenager, with this coach, did inform her swimming and it did inform her 20s. Just like all of us, right? All these things that we’ve gone through, they inform us in the present.”
Bening is keen to underline that the film amps up a spikiness in Nyad’s character. Nyad is delightful, says Bening. In her on-screen portrayal, however, she is often a pain in everyone’s neck, especially Jodie Foster’s (Foster plays her ex-girlfriend and best friend). “When women have complexity, when women are difficult, our metric for being able to accept them is so different,” she says. “It’s like politicians: there’s always this sense that they have to be likable. There’s a quality that a woman has to have that’s non-threatening and pleasing. Either that, or they have to be very conservative. Like Thatcher. We can accept a woman if she’s very conservative, but the idea of a liberal woman is much scarier.”
It’s interesting to map this observation on to Bening’s career. Thinking of her most distinctive earlier roles – in The Grifters in 1990, or American Beauty in 1999 – she comes alive in a space where charm is a mask and winsomeness – a ready laugh, beautiful teeth – has its own agenda. In Nyad, she isn’t winsome at all; it seems to mark a new adventure for her professionally. Or maybe it feels like a departure because “it’s been so long since I was in acting school that I can’t remember what they taught me”. Her modesty would be annoying if it didn’t always land after a remark about women and modesty; it comes off as a joke that you can decide for yourself whether or not to be in on.
Bening grew up in San Diego, the youngest of four, to lifelong Republicans. Her dad died just a couple of months ago at 97: her mother is 94 and says she won’t be voting for Trump again. “My dad was the kind of guy who said: ‘Well, you know, Nixon was just surrounded by bad people.’”
Bening is politically attuned. She is as likely to mention a British politician as an American one and I don’t think this is out of courtesy to a British journalist. She worries about the Republicans. “Those challenging Trump, the more moderate voices who were going to run in the Republican party, they are really falling by the wayside. It’s just these very extreme people gaining more momentum, which I find very disheartening. The party is sort of falling apart; they are eating themselves.”
Her upbringing wasn’t remotely showbizzy: “I wasn’t around the theatre, I wasn’t around actors; certainly, I’d never met an actor. My parents and my family were always very supportive. But it was high school and then community college, and then state college. My steps were very modest.” She spent 10 years on the stage, first in Colorado, then with the San Diego repertory theatre, then in New York. “I wasn’t really aware of the world around me. I wasn’t aware of politics, I wasn’t aware of a lot of contemporary culture. I just had my head down in rehearsal rooms.”
She was 30 by the time she filmed her breakthrough role in The Grifters, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. But she had made the switch from stage to screen two years before. “I didn’t know the first thing. But I did know how to act. It felt very funny to speak very quietly, very funny not to fill a room with your voice. They would always say: ‘You’re going to be too big and too loud – and, by the way, you also put on 10lb.’” That was what they said about the camera – that it made you look heavier. It’s in these piquant details that you remember how fat-phobic the 90s were.
Her first film, The Great Outdoors, with Dan Aykroyd and John Candy, has superfans now, who appreciate its surreal buoyancy, but it didn’t do well at the time. “I don’t even remember it having a premiere,” Bening says. “I was just so happy and amazed that I got the job. When nothing happened, it didn’t occur to me that something should have happened.”
Then came Valmont, a textbook box office tragedy, released in 1989. It came after the stunning success of Dangerous Liaisons and was a dramatisation of the same story. I prefer Bening’s performance to that of Glenn Close – there is a lot more humour in it – but the first film blew the second out of the water. “Miloš [Forman, the director of Valmont] was so classy in the way he handled it, but I think it was devastating for him. But I had no experience of a film having a life, so I was just: ‘Oh, I guess this is just going to disappear,’ and it wasn’t a huge loss to me.”
Bening had auditioned for Dangerous Liaisons, too. “I was up for the woman who gets the letter written on her ass … It was a weird time,” she says. It was indeed: the sexual politics were wild. I remember at the time hearing a joke that two men could have sex with Uma Thurman at the same time and never meet; it was considered a really funny and not at all dehumanising way of calling her tall. If you watch Dangerous Liaisons with teenagers now, they find it horrifying that something so rapey, for want of a better word, could get such critical acclaim.
We muse for a second about how things have changed, culturally and in the definition of acceptable behaviour on set. “I don’t have a lot of horror stories or anything,” says Bening. “I always felt I was treated pretty respectfully, maybe because I wasn’t a kid when I finally got into the showbusiness part of it.”
She met Beatty on the set of Bugsy and spent the first 10 years of the marriage being asked how she had managed to tame the “samurai of sex”. Times may have changed, Bening says, but not always for the better. “There’s been a great rise in nuanced characters,” she says. Dramas couldn’t get away with the paper-thin female leads that were commonplace when she started working in film. “We’re moving away from the female stereotypes that we all struggled with for so long. But then there’s been this weird backlash; there’s a beauty standard for young women that I think is really pretty tough. I don’t envy young women growing up now.”
I am surprised to hear this, as standards seem to me to have been stringent throughout her career. It’s often remarked that she has not had cosmetic surgery, since it makes her unusual among her peers. She acknowledges the pressure to remain eternally young: “I remember, maybe when I was 35, people talking about how I was ageing. Even in your 30s, there were those articles. Now, when I hear people worrying about it at 50, I think: what?”
But she says such criticism skimmed off her because of her theatre background: “Being on the stage is very liberating. You’re not ever thinking about how you look; you don’t have to. If anything, it’s better for your performance if your mind is off that because then you can imagine being someone who’s very different to you. So being confronted with how you look, and how you look when you act, how your face responds when you’re having a certain reaction – it never occurred to me to deal with that until I had to watch myself.”
That was bracing. “I was hypercritical of myself. That’s usually why people don’t watch themselves – having to be confronted with your self-criticism. But then I began to see I could learn something. Now, I genuinely have mixed feelings. Sometimes I think if I had a chance to do it again, I could do it better. Usually, simpler.”
The production of Apples Never Fall was disrupted by the writers’ and actors’ strikes, which she describes as inevitable. “Every time there’s been a big technological change in the business, there’s been a strike. So it’s not completely unusual. But this time it was devastating. We had to do it and I completely supported the strike. But, economically, it was really hard on the people in the business and all the ancillary businesses that feed into it.”
Her focus isn’t on Hollywood and the possibilities of AI; it’s all on the exploitation of the little guy and “the other strikes that have gone on in our country. There’s been a certain amount of people standing up and refusing to accept it. It was too bad that the directors didn’t support the writers and the actors, but that’s not unusual.”
Her tone – a little jaded about individuals, a little hopeful about the collective, a trace of seen-it-before, but still alert and thoughtful – makes me think that you have to be extremely patient to survive as an actor for nearly 40 years. “There have been moments I have felt that I had been around quite a bit, that maybe I could think of a better way of doing something, logistically or creatively. But I like doing what I do. I like being in that position of being an actor. So I manage to speak up in a diplomatic way.”
Nyad is on Netflix now
• This article was amended on 12 December 2023 to correct the spelling of Miloš Forman’s surname.
