Contemplating the Universe With Sissy Spacek
Ten minutes into my interview with the legendary actress Sissy Spacek, something terrible happens. It’s my stupid dog. She’s howling her head off in the other room. She, an 8-year-old-mutt who has never been in a single film let alone won three Golden Globes and an Oscar, is interrupting THE Sissy Spacek. Carrie. Badlands. Coalminer’s Daughter. Sissy freaking Spacek. Spacek, who stars as Irene York in the recently released Amazon Prime series Night Sky, abruptly stops talking. I'm embarrassed, but, much to my surprise, she’s smiling, beaming practically. “I’m sorry,” Spacek says, “I heard barking and am just wondering what kind of dog you have.”
I mumble something about her being a beagle mix—“Oh I love beagles!” Spacek says, as she throws her head back and clasps her hands together in joy. “She can’t help but howl. It’s in her blood.” Spacek then lets out a howl of her own, joining my dog in the ruckus. This, I realize, is Sissy Spacek in her purest form: joyful, kind, and down-to-earth.
The 72-year-old actress left Los Angeles long ago and together with her husband of 50 years, Jack Fisk, raised two kids in Virginia. A self-described introvert who “spends a lot of time with her family,” Spacek has nevertheless had the kind of Hollywood career most actresses dream of: varied, influential, and critically-acclaimed. She’s played a psychokinetic teenager, a murderous home-wrecker, a haunting matriarch, and about two hundred other idiosyncratic characters, always returning home to her farm after a film wrapped. In her latest project, Night Sky, Spacek drew on her intentionally humble life, her family, and her own happy marriage for inspiration for Irene York, an elderly woman who is grieving the loss of her son alongside her loving husband, Franklin.
Ahead of the show's premiere Esquire spoke to Spacek about love, life, loss, and the universe. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Esquire: How are you?
Sissy Spacek: I'm good. I just had a cup of green tea with honey, and I went from falling asleep in my soup to … I’m kind of wild now.
You’ve got the healthiest version of the zoomies.
I'm full of caffeine, and I'm feeling good.
You've been in lots of films and TV shows that have complicated families at the heart of their stories. When it comes to these types of projects, what makes you say yes?
Well, an interesting character that I feel like I can bring something to. The director's always important and the writing. Really, I love writer-directors. It's like you've got everything right there in one package.
I just rewatched the 1977 film you did with Robert Altman, Three Women.
Oh my God. What a guy. We really hit it off. He's so relaxed. Oftentimes they’d give us an outline for a scene, and he'd tell us what he wanted us to do. We would do it, and I'd say, "Bob, that didn't work. It didn't feel real. It didn't feel truthful." He said, "Once you do it, it becomes reality. It's a part of reality. So you can't do it wrong." He's the one who started mic'ing actors all the time so you could talk whenever you wanted to and it would get picked up along with other ambient noise because everybody was mic'd. That was new. He did that. No one did that before.
He sounds so evolved and zany, kinda like John Cage.
Yes! He's so funny, and he's so relaxed, and he was so childish. I forget that he's gone. He loved to work with the same people over and over again, so it was like a troop. It was so great. I loved him. Everybody who's ever worked with him loved him.
Back to what makes you say yes to a role. You also said it comes down to the character. What did you feel like you could bring to Irene?
It was the relationship between Franklin and Irene that really pulled me in. One of the things I recognized in her was she had this long term relationship with her husband. I've had that with my husband. 50 years. It's crazy. It goes so fast.
It's heartening that you related to her marriage. Love is real!
My husband is such a wonderful artist. He's phenomenal, and I learned so much from him about the artist’s life, and about work, and what it involves, and how much you have to give. You have to give everything up and be focused when you’re working. We've shared that.
But anyway, I recognized in Irene that when you've been married that long, sometimes you want to bop them on the head. You want to strangle them. That's just part of the long term relationship. You go through so many things that it just deepens and deepens and deepens. The fact that they'd lost a child to suicide, and she's very regretful and guilty about how she responded to him, and what part she may have played in his decision to go ahead with taking his own life.
I wondered what her life would’ve been like had she not lost their son. She probably would’ve been content living in this little town, knowing all of her students. She'd run into them on the street. But everything changed for her after she lost their son and found, at the same time, this thing in their backyard. Franklin though, everything is easy for him. He's a practical guy. She was more tortured. She was waiting for a sign for what it all meant.
Do you think Irene is a good partner to Franklin?
I think she could probably be better. For the last 20 years she's been orbiting around herself. She's been consumed by her search for what this thing in her backyard means. Franklin, he watches the ball games, he's got his friends, he plays pool, he's a contented guy. Irene is searching out in the sky, and I’m thinking “Irene, maybe it's not out there, maybe it's in your heart. Maybe you've been fooled. Maybe you're going in the wrong direction. Maybe you need to look inside yourself." It's a natural thing to want to know what's going on in the universe and what it all means. That's where she's at, but she evolves.
Do you think she ends up at peace?
I do, because she just has to! I had a friend that in her younger years went off on a ship searching for the lost continent of Atlantis. She went on all these trips and would be gone months at a time, and they never found it. I asked her, "What about your children?" She said, "Oh they were home. They were being taken care of." Okay, well, maybe what we're supposed to do is the mundane things? Maybe it's the things that we do right here on Earth, like taking care of our babies, taking care of whoever, you know? Just living life here, instead of out there. These are questions that I've pondered.
A lot of your work has been about people embarking on spiritual quests or seeking answers to questions about the universe. The Straight Story for instance. Why do you think that is?
It’s wanting to understand. My brothers and I would go out in the backyard at night when we were really little, and we'd lay on blankets, and look up at the stars. I remember our parents said, "Now think about infinity." They explained what infinity was. Try to comprehend what infinity is. I'm still contemplating infinity now. We'd be crazy to think that there wasn't other life in this universe. Just yesterday I read that they've taken soil from the moon and grown plants in it. The universe is infinite, but I guess I feel like the heavens ... You know heaven is in here too. Talk to anybody that meditates and they'll say, "It's all in here, it's not out there." We continue to have epiphanies when we're older. I'm 72, and I'm still realizing things and going, "Oh, I get it." It’s such a wonderful, wonderful thing to live in the world, to get to live in the world.
That's a nice way to think about it.
I learned that from my husband. One day he was working with somebody and they said, "Oh, we have to do that scene today." And he said, "No, we get to do it." We're so lucky to be here. If we could just protect the planet!
You don't seem very depressed, not that you should be. I’m just wondering how you stay so upbeat.
I'm not depressed. I have grandchildren now. One and two. It’s the greatest thing that I've experienced. I'm very content. I think happiness is overrated. I think contentment is what we need and just to be. I'm kind of an introvert. I spend a lot of time with my family and then work every so often.
In the Bedroom from 2001 also deals with the death of a son. Ruth, the mother in that film, reacts very differently than Irene does to the loss. Compare them for me.
Ruth was wound up really tight, and it was hard for her to deal with the loss. The worst tragedy a parent can experience is the loss of the child. Ruth didn't have the same kind of relationship with her husband, although it was a wonderful relationship, that Irene has with Franklin. The loss almost tore them apart. People grieve differently, but I think that there was something steely about Ruth after that happened. She couldn't find a way to get beyond it and convinced her husband to do the unthinkable. Ruth, I think, is searching to understand and have some illumination about the human experience. Being a human is not easy. It is fraught with loss and grief and hope and love and oftentimes some of the things we love are torn away from us. Mothers have a weird connection with their children that is kind of surprising. You love them more than you love yourself.
We see a lot of tragic storytelling about parents losing children and suicide and all these things. I appreciated that Night Sky offers a different take on what life after tragedy could look like.
I’m glad. I think it’s because Franklin loves Irene so much. It allows her to get better and better.
You and J.K. Simmons, who plays Franklin, have great chemistry. What do you owe that to?
We’ve both been in long-term relationships, still are, and that's what we drew from. We adore our spouses. He's been in a 30-year relationship. I've been in a 50-year relationship. J.K. is the bee’s knees. He’s always deep. He's close to his children, he adores his wife, he loves his career. He's just a happy guy.
I'm in my second year of marriage. Do you have any advice?
This is an important question. Just pick your battles.
Do you believe in God? What do you think is in the stars and in the sky?
I like to keep it simple. I think God is love. I think that's what God is, and that's the most powerful thing I've ever felt in my life. It's hard to forget. It's so simple.
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