Interview: Deirdre O’Connell on How Dana H. Landed Her a Role in Ari Aster’s Eddington

Since winning a Tony a few years ago for her stunning performance in Dana H., beloved New York stage actor Deirdre O’Connell has gotten to be part of some pretty huge projects.

Just yesterday, she earned an Emmy nomination for playing the Dementia-inflicted Francis Cobb in HBO’s The Penguin. This week also sees the release of Ari Aster’s new film Eddington, in which O’Connell plays a woman who falls under the spell of a charlatan during the 2020 Covid lockdowns. She stars opposite Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler.

O’Connell says that her casting was a direct result of Aster seeing Dana H., and while their working styles were completely different, once they figured each other out, there was an unbeatable simpatico that resulted in cinema magic.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Eddington is a real trip. It took me back to a period I thought I had emotionally closed off.
Didn’t it? There were little details that shocked me. Things I had forgotten about, or things that would seem bizarre if it was set just an hour and a half before the pandemic. It was as if Ari Aster had been preparing to make a movie about the pandemic his whole life.

How did you get involved?
He had seen Dana H. and he wanted to figure out some way to work with me. I didn’t know him at all. I don’t know if he was writing it for me, but I know that he tracked me down pretty early in the process. My memory is that it was exotic; like, he was in Japan or something like that, and I was in my apartment, and we had a great hour-and-a-half conversation, with him being all jet-lagged.

Tell me about reading the script for the first time and what your reaction was.
I thought it was like a puzzle. You can’t know anything before you know it, because then when you find it out, the shoe drops in exactly the right way. The first time you read it, you’re very aware of what you don’t know, and what you find out shifts your perspective. It’s hard to be innocent again.

Watching him build it so that it did exactly what he had written was painstaking. He very much made the movie he set out to make, so what I read was very much what you see.

I think I had the same reaction watching it that you had. It feels uncanny in how it brings up the memory of the pandemic. The memory of the feeling of the pandemic, more than anything.

It’s sort of provocative in the way that it humanizes people like your character, Dawn, who find themselves in rabbit holes and taken in by charismatic charlatans.
Absolutely. He did say more than one time that he knows everyone can take for granted, when they set out to watch a movie like this, how they’re going to feel about each character. There’s gonna be the villains and there’s gonna be the good guys and there’s gonna be the right way to think about what happened and the wrong way to think about what happened. He really wanted to stir that up, only because he didn’t want anyone to feel dismissed by the movie. He wanted anyone who had gone through any kind of radicalism during that time to see themselves understood, as opposed to used as a trope.

And to just make it black and white is a shortcut.
Yeah. It’s pretty easy to do. We all know what we all went through. And we have not taken seriously, to our detriment, what people went through.

What is he like as a director for you as an actor?
There isn’t anything that he hasn’t thought through, digested, spit out, tried again. He does a lot of rewriting on his feet, and he does a lot of rewriting in the middle of the night. It’s very challenging, because he will just be like “I rethought this, so I’m gonna ask you to switch.” And I’m like, “I will kill you.” But then you just make yourself do it. You sit down and you go, “If he can work hard enough to rewrite this entire thing, I’m gonna work hard enough to redo this entire thing.” And you go for it.

Personally, it took Ari and I a while to learn how to work together. And it got very specific. He is so sure of how he wants the scene to function. He gets in there with you very quickly. After one take, he’s all over everything you just did. It can be really disconcerting at first, because usually when somebody’s doing that, it’s because you’re doing everything wrong, so it makes you very insecure. It’s only when you realize that he does everything like that that you calm down a bit.

How so?
I mean, the first scene that I shot was the first scene I’m in, and I think we did 27 takes of that first shot. I was dying because the only time I’d ever seen anybody do that is when somebody is so bad, they can’t get a take out of them. It took me a while to believe that he just likes to do 27 takes, especially if he’s not sure of what it is.

We talked a lot about how I just needed to have…If he’s going to do 27 takes, I need three at the beginning that are just me finding my way, and then he can come in and start to mess. Because then I would feel like at least I got to show him what I would do if I was relaxed and feeling good.

That’s so interesting.
We began to share the process more. Because I was like “Ari, you’re the man here. I want you to have exactly what you want. But to get a really good performance, you gotta give me a soft landing into your notes and rewrites.” His notes and rewrites were always great, but it took us a second, and it was slightly terrifying. It was painstaking. But once I knew his plan and I got those three takes, then it became really, really fun. We’re all just neurotic, terrified souls, finding a way to give each other the time we need.

Do you see the connecting line between Dana and Dawn that Ari must have drawn in his head?
I wonder if there had been another play that I was in that would have done the same thing, but I don’t know that he would have necessarily gone to another play. I mean, he did go to the Caryl Churchill plays because we were already friends, but I don’t know that he would have had Dawn in his pocket from watching the Caryl Churchill plays or not.

I feel like Ari Aster and Caryl Churchill would be a match made in some kind of weird heaven.
They both make you do your own intellectual work. They’re not gonna spoon feed it to you and they’re not gonna be simplistic. And I appreciate it. Every time you’re like “Oh, I know a fun way to kick this,” the writing won’t let you. The writing makes you stay in the world of this person. It’s so pleasurable to be involved with something like that.