Greta Gerwig didn't think White Noise would get made: 'It felt like fantasy baseball'

Greta Gerwig hasn't taken an on-screen acting role since 2016's 20th Century Women, having spent the last few years behind the camera directing 2017's Lady Bird, 2019's Little Women, and the upcoming Barbie. So when her fellow director and real-life partner Noah Baumbach started to talk about adapting Don DeLillo's satirical, college campus-set White Noise in early 2020, why did she volunteer to portray the lead female role of a secrets-keeping homemaker named Babette? Gerwig tells EW that her decision was fueled partly by the realization that she knew how to play the role, and partly by the conviction that she wouldn't actually have to do so.

"I had a sense of what she was meant to look like," she says. "I saw her hair, her acrylic nails, her wardrobe. I just could visualize all of it, and I wanted very much to play her. Then, I think, because we were in the height of lockdown when he was writing it, and starting to dream about this, nothing felt real, so the prospect of doing this was all imaginary in a way. When I said, 'Ah, I'll play Babette,' it was almost like a fantasy baseball thing. Like, sure, it's me, in this world that doesn't exist. I can't even leave the apartment. [Laughs] I might as well not play Babette too! And then it became real."

Wilson Webb/Netflix Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig in 'White Noise'

It certainly did. Nearly three years on, Baumbach's White Noise is now playing in theaters with a cast led by Gerwig and Adam Driver, who portrays Babette's husband, Jack, a professor of Hitler studies who, with Babette and their children, have their lives interrupted by an "airborne toxic event." Gerwig and Baumbach are longtime friends and collaborators of Driver, who has also appeared in several Baumbach-directed titles, including Frances Ha and Marriage Story.

"I've known Adam since I was about 21- or 22-years-old," says Gerwig. "I was friends with someone who was in his first professional play. I've always thought he was extraordinary and talented and we cast him, Noah and I, in the film Frances Ha, before he became himself. [Laughs]. Yeah, he's extraordinary. He's a deeply committed actor, and he's deeply serious about what he does, and there's nothing more pleasurable to work with than someone who's all-in all the time, and that's Adam."

Wilson Webb/Netflix 'White Noise'

Gerwig's interest in DeLillo's novel long predated her relationship with Baumbach.

"I had read the book when I was around 19 and I thought it was unbelievably wonderful," she says. "I think I underlined two things on every single page and I kept writing 'Ha!' in the margins, because it was so funny, and also I had just got to college, and it was my first real experience with academia, and how much it makes fun of academia was so great. I think I had remembered exact passages from it because I loved it so much."

When Baumbach started to think about adapting the novel, he asked Gerwig to crack open the book again.

"It had been 15 years since I read it, more," she says. "Then I started reading it, and I have to say I almost had the same experience, I said: This is incredible still and it feels about right now. But it was really when Noah started showing me the pages that he was writing that I said, Oh, he's figured out how to make it into not just a movie but one of his movies."

Gerwig, Driver, and Baumbach shot the film in Ohio with a supporting cast that included Don Cheadle, Jodie Turner-Smith, and André Benjamin.

"We shot around different areas but mostly college towns," she says. "It was like living in our own crazy miniature circus for months. It was really extraordinary in that way. A lot of the same background artists worked all the time, so you'd see the same people again and again. They were all really wonderful and very committed and Jess Gonchor, who designed the sets, was just outrageously brilliant. And Ann Roth, who designed the costumes, would costume these incredible groups of people, you couldn't believe how many specific extras. I remember, one day, we went into the boy-scout barracks, where they have to evacuate, and there was an entire wedding party of background artists, there was a bride and all the bridesmaids that were sitting on a cot. I was like, well, that's genius. It was like this live theater experience, recreating all these scenes, and because it was in Ohio, it felt very sort of sacred and removed."

White Noise is screening in select theaters and on Netflix Dec. 30.

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