Original-Cin Q&A: Tilda Cobham-Hervey on Embodying Feminist Icon Helen Reddy in New Biopic
By Bonnie Laufer
Australian-American singer Helen Reddy, known for her feminist empowerment anthems and activism during the 1970s, has her own biopic, I Am Woman. The movie is directed by Unjoo Moon and arrived on-demand on September 11. (Original-Cin reviews the film closer to release. Watch this space!)
Tilda Cobham-Hervey portrays Reddy, who starts out as a struggling artist in New York during the mid-60, balancing her career with her own family life. Despite finding a friend and confidante in rock journalist Lillian Roxon (Danielle Macdonald) Reddy has a hard time impressing the male executives at major labels.
Backed by her manager and husband Jeff Wald (Evan Peters), Reddy manages to score a recording contract and push her message through a string of early-70s hits, including 1971’s “I Am Woman,” before the pressures of fame take over.
Read our review of I Am Woman
Helen Reddy gave the film two thumbs up and was fully supportive of the biopic from the beginning. Her granddaughter even sings the movie’s theme song over the credits.
Our own Bonnie Laufer caught up with Cobham-Hervey at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival to chat about all things Helen Reddy. Hear them roar!
Original-Cin: Let's talk about how daunting this had to have been for you. Not just being a female and a fan but also being Australian. There were just so many connections for you playing the great Helen Reddy.
Tilda Cobham-Hervey: There are heaps of connections. We had a very similar upbringing. I grew up in the Circus and I have parents who are both in the Arts. My mom's a dancer and my dad's Alliance a director so very much both grew up on the road. Helen had parents who were Vaudeville parents and we both moved to America for other opportunities. Daunting? Yes, very much.
Tilda Cobham-Hervey as the unsinkable Helen Reddy.
I think I was really lucky at the time when I got the call saying that I'd got the role. I was in the middle of directing my first short film with twelve 12-year-old girls and I think if I'd had too long to think about I might have been too terrified to say yes.
I'm very glad I didn't say no. At the risk of sounding really corny this experience and learning about her life has deeply changed me. She's such an extraordinary woman and getting to delve into who she was and that time period and learn about what came before and be able to be a part of honoring her and was really inspiring and an empowering experience.
OC: She was such a tenacious and strong woman. She came to New York on a whim thinking that she's won this big recording contract. She's got a young daughter with her yet she just was so persistent and would not take no for an answer. Not a lot of people would do that especially in the 70s.
TC-H: I agree and I think a woman at that time particularly, we've come a long way from there and I think we still have a long way to go but she was still a woman of her time and things that she was doing at that time were revolutionary. It was really amazing the things that she was standing up for. She's such an authentic person and she really knew what she wanted and she's a very spiritual person. She always talked about how she always knew she was going to be a star.
I think the thing that I really love about Helen is she has so much hope. She's so good at being positive and she has this incredible belief and it's intoxicating. It's beautiful to watch. She's so settled within herself and that's why she was such a joy.
OC: You didn't grow up with her music but how familiar were you with her legacy and how hard was it for you to learn the songs and get her mannerisms just right? I have to tell you, I was singing along to every song and I shocked myself because I remembered the lyrics to every one! That’s impactful!
TC-H: They are really good songs. I still sing them now. My family's not very happy about it (laughs). It was a massive process getting ready for this role. It's such an honor to be able to get to play a woman like Helen and celebrate her life and I took that very seriously and it was a big challenge. As much as there's a lot of similarities between us there's a lot of real differences. The first thing I really sort of tackled was her physicality is very different to mine, her speech even though she's Australian she had a very particular voice and a very particular speech pattern.
I just read everything I could. I could tell you every interview she did verbatim of all her recorded interviews. I just fell in love with her so it started off I guess has mimicry and from that point moved into how it fit within my body and it was really important to find those hooks that made me feel like her. There were things like her shoulders are really particular and how she held herself.
Finding the rhythms of her voice and then her performances, I just watched endlessly. I worked with a movement coach for a few sessions and that was really helpful in terms of trying to find how those things fit within me. The hard thing with her is she's actually quite still as a performer, but she tells a story every time she sings and that's what I think is so beautiful about her performances. It's like watching a stage show like a theater production, each song is a story. Maybe that's why you remember the words so well.
OC: I had forgotten that when she had won her Grammy Award in 1973, beating out Barbra Streisand. That is no easy feat!
TC-H: It was an amazing group of women she was up against. Pretty spectacular, because when you look back at the time when she first started pitching “I Am Woman'' to people she had to go into a room of men, and they all went it's man hating. Then she talked to other men and they would say, I hate that song but my wife loves it. It was only after doing like 19 spots on TV that women started requesting it on the radio and that's how it became popular. It took a long time for that song, after the initial recording, to actually get out in the world.”
OC: Evan Peters who plays her husband/manager Jeff Wald was excellent in the role. There were a lot of highs and lows in their relationship and marriage, quite the roller coaster ride for Helen. What was it like for the two of you establishing your chemistry and having it change so drastically?
TC-H: Evan is just an extraordinary performer. I learned so much from watching him and he just became Jeff Wald within a scene. We just really got to play and that's what's so beautiful. He really invites that sense of spontaneity. We had both done a lot of research separately and the first task we were asked to do when we first met since we didn't get rehearsal time together was to sit down and introduce ourselves in character. What was great about that is we got to tell what we wanted to or keep we wanted to do secret.
So that was a really lovely way to learn about each other. There wasn’t a huge amount of information about Jeff and actually in Helen’s book she refers to him as husband number two. It was lovely to just meet him in character and because I'd done so much work on who Helen was.
It was also hearing stories about their relationship. Yes, they had a complicated relationship, but it was also so full of passion. Everyone talks about the incredible attraction they had for each other and they were a team. They were people that came from nothing and they were so ambitious and together they achieved extraordinary things and there's something so beautiful in that. I think they had a very playful relationship. Someone told me your story that they often drove separately to dinner so that they could race each other home. It was stories like that that really helped discover what that relationship was.
OC: I loved her relationship with music writer and best friend Lillian Roxon played beautifully by Danielle Macdonald. Lillian was a trailblazer in her own right being a rock journalist at that time.
TC-H: Danielle is so good, I really had to get over my huge girl crush before we started working together. I saw her in Patty Cakes and fell in love with her! I think that our relationship really mirrored the early stages of Helen and Lillian’s relationship. I was in total awe of her. I had to really try and find a way to calm myself down before we got to set. She's an extraordinary performer and Lillian is such an important character in the film and just an amazing human in real life. I think what I find really beautiful about that relationship in the film is that Lillian is an amalgamation of all the strong women in Helen's life, but that sense of Sisterhood really felt like it was a love story between her and Lillian as much as it is between her and Jeff. It's so strong and I think most relationships are. They can be so intense.
OC: What are we going to see you tackle next?
TC-H: I'm not sure. What I find amazing about having done this film is I feel like Helen is my Lillian Roxon. She's really given me a voice and made me go back and start really thinking about what stories I want to tell and what stories I want to tell about the female experience. It's made me start writing again, and I've sort of been working on adapting a novel at the moment just been really fun. I'm really interested in creating some more of my own work, but I'm also really interested in just working with other amazing artists and being a part of a creative process from the beginning to the end. Just working with artists, I admire and get to play more with more talented people who I can learn from.