As her nightmarish turn as orange-wigged child-catcher Aunt Gladys takes her to Oscars night, the actor talks about surviving ‘brutal’ Hollywood, the fury that almost drove her from the US – and still being homeless after the wildfires
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t’s a full-time gig being an Oscar nominee, what with the luncheons and fittings, the interviews and photocalls. It’s a wonder anyone ever gets any actual work done. “I’m tired,” says Amy Madigan, grinning crookedly on a video call. It’s noon in Los Angeles but the living room curtains behind her are shut tight. I worry she may have just pulled an all-nighter.
The last time Madigan was nominated was in 1985. She played Gene Hackman’s brittle daughter in a blue-collar drama called Twice in a Lifetime (the title now feels apt). Awards season, she points out, was shorter and sweeter back then. “Now it’s a big unruly beast. ‘We want to speak to Amy!’ I’ve been doing this since November. Do you not think people are sick of talking about us and seeing our faces? Haven’t you people seen enough?”
Madigan is now 75, which makes her the plucky veteran in this year’s best supporting actress race; the sentimental outsider, although there’s nothing remotely cosy about her. She is shortlisted for her role in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a gripping small-town horror movie that plays out in segments, like a set of witness statements. Madigan crops up – first teasingly, then electrifyingly – as the nightmarish Aunt Gladys, the scariest child-catcher this side of Robert Helpmann in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Feeding off the young and conjuring adults into zombies, Gladys has round specs, clownish makeup and a brutal orange wig – and Cregger’s film has her tottering around town talking 19 to the dozen. The woman is laughable and pitiable right up until the moment when she’s not.
