“So I took it home and I read it,” Britton said, sitting on the edge of
the couch in her living room 18 years later. “I was blown away. I loved
the script, the role — I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is incredible.’
And I walked into my brand-new agent’s office the next day, and I put
the script down on his desk, and I was like, ‘I have two words for you:
Jerry Maguire.’ ” Britton giggled, but for only a moment, because the
story was just beginning. She nailed the audition. Crowe told her she
had shown him just what the character should be. A few months after
that, she was flown to New York to do a reading with Tom Cruise.
The success of “The Brothers McMullen” notwithstanding, Britton was at
this point not far removed from her days teaching aerobics and going on
open-call auditions in New York. Now she started hearing that she was
poised for stardom. She did a table read with the rest of the cast, and
it was looking like a lock. The day she finally did a screen test with
Cruise, Britton said, she heard that “they just want to screen-test one
other actress.” Britton laughed, this time a little more darkly. Of
course it was Renée Zellweger, an actress so tiny and tousled that she
looked newly hatched, who walked away with the part.
“It was heartbreak,” Britton said. A decade came and went, a crucial
decade in the life of an actress. Britton played some secondary roles on
television, including an ensemble part on the sitcom “Spin City” and
smaller recurring ones on “The West Wing” and “24.” And then, 10 years
after “Jerry Maguire” had its premiere without her, she was offered a
part on a new network series, “Friday Night Lights.” Britton thought the
part, a football coach’s wife, was most likely a nondescript role that
would take her nowhere; she had played the same small role in the film
of the same name. But her mother had just died, and she opted to skip
the grueling auditions of pilot season to work with producers she knew
and liked. She signed on.
“Friday Night Lights” turned Britton into something of an icon, a
40-something sex symbol and role model at the center of a critically
acclaimed show (albeit one that was never a ratings smash). These days,
the Internet is crowded with blog posts celebrating her exemplary
television marriage, her maternal wisdom, the sheer amazingness of her
hair. Britton, now 45, seemed to have emerged in her prime, redefining,
in the process, what an actress’s prime exactly is. “Jerry Maguire” may
have been the best thing that never happened to her.
Britton, sipping a glass of water with mint leaves, was watching her
son, Eyob, a 2-year-old she adopted from Ethiopia in 2011, as he romped
with the two family dogs, each of which was easily double his size. On
her day off, Britton had clipped up her famous hair (the subject of not
only its own admiring tumblr but also Twitter hashtags like
#conniebrittonshair). She was dressed in leggings and a V-neck sweater,
makeup-free, in tortoiseshell glasses and scuffed black boots; later,
when she went out for the evening, she threw on a parka.
Moving to Nashville with her son was not an easy decision for Britton,
especially because it meant signing a seven-year contract. “You make a
decision based on a pilot you have read, that has not been shot,” she
said. Britton was in the process of developing a project with the
director David O. Russell when Callie Khouri, the screenwriter most
famous for “Thelma and Louise,” approached her about playing Rayna
Jaymes. Khouri told Britton she could not think of a single other
actress she would even consider for the role.
For Britton, almost any career move felt like a potential step down from
“Friday Night Lights.” Through her character on that show, Britton had
developed the kind of devoted following that only a talented but
slightly underexposed star can. “When I grow up, I want to be Tami
Taylor” is the title of one post on a site about pop culture. A writer
for The Hairpin spied Britton in a coffee shop and promptly posted a
list of things she could have said to her. Among them: “Please lend me
the key to being a woman and I’ll run across the street and make a few
copies because I know I’ll lose it over the weekend.”
“Connie leads with her brains, not her beauty,” says Jeff Reiner, who
directed her in “Friday Night Lights.” “I think that’s one reason women
find her so appealing.”
With her clinging wrap dresses, she also drew considerable male
attention. In its “100 Hottest Women of the 21st Century,” GQ magazine
wrote, “Britton’s Tami Taylor — she of the kind heart and the set jaw,
the oversize sunglasses and the auburn hair floating wispily in the hard
Texas glare — was so obviously finer in every way than the undeveloped
bimbos who surrounded her.”
In the first episode, she played a stay-at-home mom pining for a bigger
house; by the third season, she was the school principal — her husband’s
boss. Britton said she was “rabid” about holding the producers to their
promise that her character would do more than just cheer on her husband
from the bleachers. “Connie doesn’t lie dormant very well,” Reiner
says. “You have to give her something to do. She was inspiring, and
sometimes she could be a pain.”
The show ended after five years, and walking away from the role turned
out to be wrenching for Britton. “I’m still just in denial and having an
identity crisis,” Britton told her friend Chelsea Handler on her talk
show, shortly after shooting the last episode. “ ’Cause who am I, if I’m
not Tami Taylor?” Britton gave an elaborate shrug.
“I really wasn’t kidding in that moment,” Britton says now. “I felt a
sense of responsibility to that character.” She and her co-star, Kyle
Chandler, had long conversations about how they would help each other
make choices, moving forward, that reflected the values that earned
them such fan loyalty on the show. “But you have to go somewhere,”
Britton said.
Where she went: Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story,” a gory surrealist
drama in which her character slashes her husband’s arm with a chef’s
knife and has sex with an incubus dressed in a rubber suit. The show
might not have embodied the values of Tami Taylor, but “it was perfect,”
Britton said of her one season there. “It really helped me shake out
any sense of preciousness about the Tami mystique.”
Comparatively speaking, “Nashville” was a safer choice. Even so, Britton
worried about the format, which might or might not rise above the level
of a soap; plus, she was a new mother carrying a new show and was
expected to play a country-music legend when she was not even sure how
to hold a mike.
“The thing about taking risks is, if it’s really a risk, you really can
fail,” Britton said. “It’s only a pretend risk if you really can’t
fail.” The next morning, Britton had been dressed and styled
and generally transformed for the part of Rayna Jaymes. Her black tank
sparkled, her eyelids glimmered and her red hair, around her shoulders,
was doing the usual shining and flowing. That day she was shooting a
scene in which Jaymes, reeling from bad news about her marriage,
performs before an arena crowd. Britton, in five-inch heels, strutted,
in character, on a narrow stage, only to trip on a piece of track that
someone had laid down for a camera and nearly fall five feet off the
platform. She let out an odd, loud noise — the vocal equivalent of
someone’s hand smashing a bunch of piano keys — then righted herself and
gasped a nervous laugh; the extras laughed back. Rattled, Britton
walked off the set, headed to a drafty hallway that served as backstage
and cried.
A few minutes later, the director, Eric Stoltz (the same Eric Stoltz who
starred in “Mask” and “Pulp Fiction”), wandered backstage, trying to
determine what was holding up the shot. He found Britton, an old friend,
still weepy from her close call. Britton was expecting some sympathy,
but Stoltz saw something he thought he could use. Let’s do it again, he
told her. Britton fixed on him a look her fans know well: wide-eyed,
wary disbelief.
“She was fighting back tears, which was more interesting,” Stoltz said after he got the scene he wanted.
Britton’s take: “Sometimes my favorite directors are the ones I literally want to punch in the nose.”
Later that day, she crossed paths with Khouri at the craft services
table and delivered the story of the accident with high drama, for
Khouri’s amusement. “I have two questions,” Khouri said. “One, did you
get the shot? Two, are you O.K.?” The women laughed, a little loopy from
the long hours. “Connie is only about 50 percent as earnest as Tami
Taylor,” Khouri said. It seemed as if that insight came as something of a
relief.
It is Khouri whom Britton approaches when she feels as if the show is
falling into network traps that seem to her unacceptably unnatural. She
draws the line, for example, at act-outs, those scenes before the
commercial in which someone typically storms out of a conversation or
out of a restaurant three minutes after being seated. “It’s when you end
on a big moment before commercial break,” Khouri said. “You could play
‘Dum dah dum dum’ to any of them, if you wanted to. Connie won’t do any
of them.” On the show, all around her, villains are narrowing their eyes
and romantic rivals are throwing punches, and Britton keeps delivering
her usual, specific, understated performance, as if she had wandered off
the set of some acclaimed cable series.
Khouri hired Britton without hearing her sing, even though Britton had
not sung for an audience since she did regional theater in her early
20s. Khouri’s husband, the music producer T Bone Burnett, was confident
they could make it work. “All girls can sing,” he said.
“I figured, Look, she’s going to go on national television, she’s not
going to make a total fool of herself,” he told me later. “She must
think she can handle it.” Working closely with a voice coach and
Burnett, Britton developed what Burnett considers a strong, storytelling
voice, more like a Lucinda Williams than a Carrie Underwood. Britton
still gets nervous singing in public, but some of the more intimate
musical numbers are more compelling for the vulnerability Britton brings
to them.
“She has a huge advantage going on television, because she just
translates incredibly well in that medium, and that’s a gift — you can’t
teach that,” Burnett says. “Some performers, like Dylan — when he was
onstage back in the old days when we were young, you couldn’t take your
eyes off him. Every move he made, you thought, Why is he doing that?
She’s like that on camera — intriguing.” Britton spent the first three episodes of “Nashville”
worried she made a terrible, career-altering mistake. She was
particularly concerned about the way her character was being positioned —
Connie Britton, playing an “aging country-music star,” a phrase she
started seeing in countless blog posts and articles about the show.
“Honestly, it was a problem for me,” Britton said. Earlier we stopped by
the Bluebird Cafe, a fixture on the show, to hear some music; now we
were in the car in her garage. It was just after Eyob’s bedtime, and she
was afraid that if she opened the door to go inside, the dogs would
bark and wake him. Britton started speaking quietly, but her voice rose
in spite of herself. “I was like, the minute I’ve been referenced in
writing as aging, I’m done,” she said. “I was furious about that.” She
was also concerned about the plot, which early on had Jaymes on a
downhill slide, losing ground to a young, blond crossover star played by
Hayden Panettiere. That Britton of all people would be asked to play a
character whose life seemed to fall apart at 40 struck her as almost
perverse. “That’s not even who I represent as an actor,” she said,
sitting back in her seat. “My life started being awesome five years
ago.”
The actors on a show like “Nashville” — even one with a producer’s
credit, like Britton — have only so much leeway for push-back, but
Britton consistently dug in during the early episodes. No, she told the
director of the pilot, she would rather not stare at her face in the
mirror and pull it back aggressively to see what she would look like
with a face-lift. She was uncomfortable with what that bit of direction
implied about the character’s self-doubt. In the final take, which
follows bad news from Rayna’s managers about her most recent record
release, Britton does stare at herself in the mirror, and she does
massage her face; but the scene registers emotions — fatigue, confusion —
as opposed to the simulation of plastic surgery, a more interesting
moment, as well as one she found less insulting. (Even still, Jaymes’s
husband, noticing her looking at her face, tells her, “If you get
plastic surgery, I’ll divorce you.”)
Khouri, a writer who could never be accused of shying away from strong
female characters, felt that Rayna, who happens to be 40, needed to have
some setbacks early on. “Rocky wouldn’t have been Rocky if he’d started
out heavyweight champion of the world,” she said. “We didn’t want it to
be Rayna Jaymes, country superhero.”
But Britton analyzes those setbacks for subtext. In a scene in an early
episode, in which Jaymes takes a long walk with an old flame, Britton
deliberately resisted some lines in which her character expressed fears
about being old. “Just drawing on my own experience, I never — I never —
personally reference myself as old. I don’t think of myself as old, but
I certainly would not say that to a man,” Britton said. It starts to
become obvious, as Britton talks, how much of her own Southern
upbringing (she was raised in a close-knit family in small-town
Virginia) feeds into the characters she creates. “I might have a
conversation with some girlfriends — what are we doing about the lines
around our eyes — but to a man? There are certain things — it would just
be demystifying and disempowering,” she said.
Britton, who was briefly married right out of college, is single now,
but she is usually dating someone. “In my experience of watching Connie
Britton’s dating life, it has not been Connie getting beaten out by
25-year-old girls, let’s leave it at that,” says the producer Sarah
Aubrey, a friend. If Britton bristles at characterizations of a
40-year-old woman as losing her appeal, it’s because she thinks those
assumptions are off-base. “Because frankly I’ve had a different
experience, as a single woman,” she said. “Younger men and all that.”
It’s not that she has a particular pattern of dating younger men, she
clarified. “Let’s put it this way: The older you get, the easier it is
to date younger men.” She laughed. “There are more of them.” Over the course of a 15-hour day on set, emotions ran
high and low, and Britton seemed to cycle through all of them — elation,
entertainment, boredom, disappointment. When the filming broke for
lunch earlier than she had calculated, she took out her phone, then
realized it was too late to see if her son’s nanny could bring him to
the set. “That was a rookie mistake,” she muttered, throwing the phone
back in her bag. The afternoon loomed longer
Britton was also preoccupied with some dramatic scenes that she would
have to pull off later that day: there would be sobbing, and there would
be kissing. And she was not sure how she would get there, especially if
she was exhausted (they ended up shooting until midnight). “I was
thinking, I don’t know how I’m going to do it — I don’t know, how does
Daniel Day-Lewis do it? He probably knows exactly what he’s going to
do.”
Maybe there’s something particularly becoming about success that happens
later in life: Britton seems just insecure enough to agonize over her
work, still new enough to fame that she wears it lightly, having gone so
long without it.
The afternoon before this year’s
Golden Globes,
Britton invited her closest friends, as well as their sons and
daughters, over to her Los Angeles home. Britton, who was nominated for
Best TV Drama Actress for “Nashville,” tried on couture while the little
girls, some of whom wore their own princess dresses, ate pizza, played
with Eyob and weighed in on which sparkly gown Britton should choose.
“All the moms were screaming, ‘Don’t touch the dress!’ ” says Aubrey,
who brought her 9-year-old daughter. “It was like a children’s birthday
party over there.”
Eventually the car pulled up, and Britton headed out; she didn’t win
this year. But her alter ego is flying high. Rayna Jaymes has enjoyed
the strenuous affections of no fewer than three men. And she is once
again every bit as popular as her younger rival, who, if anything, seems
to be revealing a certain admiration for the way Jaymes has led her
career. Needless to say, Britton is much happier with the direction of
the show and how it is treating its “aging” star.
“All it took to get on track,” Britton told me, “was a lot of time and fight.”
