Annette Bening and Joseph Cross carve indelible portraits in Running With Scissors.
By Brandon Voss
Gay best-selling author Augusten Burroughs did not intend to option the film rights to his 2002 memoir, Running With Scissors, out of fear that its adapter would turn his tumultuous upbringing into something camp. A Mommie Dearest-esque fate isn't so hard to imagine considering the hysterically disturbing childhood he documented: Following her divorce from his alcoholic father, a teenaged Augusten's bipolar, Valium-addled, newly lesbian mother left him in the carelessness of her unorthodox shrink's wildly eccentric family — whose house makes Grey Gardens look like The Golden Girls.
Augusten eventually placed his life story in the hands of out director and screenwriter Ryan Murphy, who never saw the memoir as campy; instead, he recognized it as a weighty, albeit comical, account of the author's dysfunctional childhood. Murphy then tapped the incomparable Annette Bening and gracefully maturing actor Joseph Cross to play the queer and quirky mother and son.
Now a fan of his current hit series Nip/Tuck, Bening was unfamiliar with Murphy's work when he successfully wooed her for the role of Deirdre. "I felt that there was a mission he was on, something that he had to figure out, somewhere that he had to get to by doing the film," she says.
Though Bening did consult the author’s input on his mother, she's quick to clarify that her character is not an impersonation: "It's my interpretation of Ryan's interpretation of Augusten's interpretation," she says with a chuckle. Cross, whom Murphy tapped to play Augusten, adds, "Yeah, it's not a Capote type of thing." Well, perhaps a bit like Capote as Scissors is packed with Oscar-caliber performances; in fact, early buzz suggests that this will be the thrice-nominated Bening's year to grab the gold.
Unlike Deirdre, a mediocre poet with delusions of grandeur, the Kansas-born Mrs. Warren Beatty says she has never felt that level of career frustration or the hunger for mainstream fame. "I wasn't ever out there in my twenties trying to get movie parts," explains Bening, who moved to New York at 28, soon scored a Tony nod for the off-Broadway transfer Coastal Disturbances, and landed her first film, The Great Outdoors, at the age of 29. "I wasn't someone who grew up watching movies, thinking, Oh, I want to be like Ingrid Bergman or Liv Ullmann. I was very intimidated by that world. Now I feel very at home on a set."
Bening's late-blooming film resumé certainly differs from that of 20-year-old Cross, best known for a stint on As the World Turns and as Jerri Blank's jerky stepbrother in the Strangers With Candy film. Though he recognizes few similarities to his Scissors character, Cross identified with Augusten's loneliness. "I had just gone to college and I had just broken up with the girl that I was dating at the time, so it was a very lonely place for me at that point," he explains. In addition to the anecdotes that the real Augusten shared during a brief on-set visit, Murphy helped Cross get into the queer mindset. "Ryan had always known, in the same way that Augusten had, that he was gay from a very young age, so he was able to tell me about his first experiences and what that was like."
In a time when older, more established actors such as Heath Ledger are still referred to as "brave" for accepting gay roles, Cross just doesn't see the big deal. "For me, sexuality isn't necessarily the defining factor of a character," he says. "We live in this weird, heteronormative world where if a character's gay, we expect that that's the main thing about him, and that's just not the way that people are. I see characters the way that I see people, and I don't see sexuality first when I meet a person. It doesn't matter all that much to me."
Having grown up around gays on various film sets, Cross was surprised to find himself nervous while filming a sex scene between his character and Bookman, a 30-something schizophrenic played by Joseph Fiennes. "I had been pretty confident that I would be okay," Cross says, "but when we first rehearsed it, it was just me, Joe, and Ryan in a room, and that just felt strangely intimate and terribly uncomfortable. Joe was like, 'Just talk with me about it,' so we were able to hash it all out. But once the crew comes on set, everything becomes so technical that you don't think about it at all."
Bening also found playing Deirdre, who experiences a midlife lesbian awakening at the height of her illness, extremely challenging. "Because she's ill and because she makes so many mistakes as a mother, I felt such a responsibility to make her story as clear as possible." Likewise, Cross adds, "I wanted to do a good job so badly for the film — to do Augusten justice, to do Ryan's work justice, and to rise to the level of all these tremendous actors that I've always had so much respect for."
Aside from Bening, who reteams with Murphy on next year's Dirty Tricks, Cross is referring to seasoned co-stars such as Alec Baldwin, Jill Clayburgh, Brian Cox, and Gwyneth Paltrow. "These people are iconic to me," continues Cross, who swears he encountered no Hollywood egos. "I grew up watching their movies, dozens of magazines with Gwyneth on the cover have come to my house, so it's a strange transition to go from that to working with them. You're sort of intimidated at first, but then you start seeing them as other people with the same job as you who have just been really successful."
Cross, who has another film, Flags of Our Fathers, opening this fall, appears on the verge of his own big career breakthrough. "A lot of people ask me if I'm scared, if I'm intimidated by it," he says, "but I'm not really because the hard work is done. All I want is to be able to work with really great directors and actors that I admire, doing material that's going to inspire and challenge me. If this gives me the opportunity to do that, then I'll be tremendously happy."
It's no wonder Bening says that onscreen son Cross, whom she calls "inspiring," needed no motherly guidance on set. "But as a mother watching the film," she admits, "I just wanted to jump out of my seat and save him! His character is the only sane person in the midst of all this insanity, and I wanted to protect this child who wasn't protected. I actually found it really painful to watch. But then, that's what makes the film so good."
HX, October 2006.