Judy Greer isn’t the best friend you think she is. “People see me and they’re like, ‘God, you’re the best friend!’ And I’m like dude, I haven’t been a best friend in so long. Jennifer and I talk about it all the time.”
Jennifer, by the way, is the actress Jennifer Garner. And Greer is, despite a wildly impressive career working with everyone from Clint Eastwood to Richard Linklater, and in everything from Marvel blockbusters to Oscar winners like Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, still that actor who you know you know, but aren’t always quite sure where you know her from.
At one point this felt like such a big deal for Greer that she even wrote a book about it: I Don’t Know What You Know Me From: My Life as a Co-star (2014). And despite everything she has done since, for some she will always be best known for the slew of Noughties romcoms where she made her mark as the best comedy side kick in the business, from The Wedding Planner to 27 Dresses to What Women Want to 13 Going on 30 (in which she played Garner’s bitchy best friend and fellow magazine editor Lucy).
“I mean it’s a classic. I miss those kinds of movies and would star in them again if they were still making them,” she tells me when I meet her over video call. “Although I couldn’t be the best friend anymore. I’d have to be, like, someone’s boss, or weird neighbour.”
Greer, 50, is in person a bubbly, effervescent delight, prone to self-deprecation and mischievous, slightly sweary comedy. There’s a tech issue early in the interview, and she jokes that a member of her new team will have to get fired. “When you get more famous in Hollywood, two things happen. One is that you get more f***ed-up hair. It gets worked on so much it gets damaged. The other is that you can blame other people for sh*t.” She grins widely from behind big yellow spectacles, sitting in a book-filled bedroom at her home in Los Angeles. Her hair is in a ponytail, but it looks absolutely not f***ed up. “Well, I’ve been wearing a wig at work lately.” She grins again.
Her latest role couldn’t be further from Greer’s Noughties persona. In The Dead of Winter, Emma Thompson plays a woman grieving her recently deceased husband by ice-fishing in the snow-clad mountains and isolated lakes of Minnesota, when she comes across a kidnapped girl and tries to save her.
Greer plays the kidnapper, an irascible monster known as “Purple Lady” because of the purple jacket she wears, with even more of a vicious streak than her unsure husband, but whose urgency and addiction to fentanyl lollipops suggests her motivations may be complicated.
Greer plays her with a compassion that never gives way to sentimentality, and an expression that dances between bloody single-mindedness and exhaustion. As in many of her roles, she’s the co-star not the star, but it’s an intense and brilliant performance, especially impressive opposite Thompson, who is at her megastar best here, with a perfect Fargo-esque accent.
“In so many movies, we see this beautiful, vulnerable side of the bad guy, right?” says Greer. “With Purple Lady, we’re not getting to see her at her most vulnerable; we’re seeing her at her worst. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have that other side.”
The shoot was long: sunrise to sundown over a month in freezing Finland. “I actually have no memory of being cold. They gave us this weird little heat box between shoots, and then the shoots themselves were very active. I remember things being very wet and slippery though.”
She was “nervous and excited” to work with Thompson. “I think she’s probably the greatest actor I could ever… I mean she was like, she is like, Number One, and you don’t know what to expect. You think maybe to be that good you just have to stay in character all the time. But luckily Emma didn’t. She was very much Emma in between takes. And the moment I got to the hotel in Finland she was like” – Greer puts on a British accent – “‘Oh hello, come for dinner with us,’ and we were off to the races.”
Greer practised her own Minnesotan drawl with her mother-in-law who is from there, but she is herself originally from Michigan, which is not so far away. “Minnesota-lite”, as she calls it. She grew up in Detroit, with two very Catholic parents. Her mum had previously been a nun but was kicked out of the convent for “wild behaviour”. “I mean, wild in the context of a convent. Female friendships were an issue. She became very close with some of the women she met in the convent, women by the way she’s still friends with to this day, but the Mother Superior felt [this] was taking away her devotion to God.”
Greer was a very shy child. “I had a few friends who I felt very safe with – we’d read in the corner of class – but I wasn’t super comfortable in bigger situations. I didn’t really want to be the centre of attention.” When she started ballet, she enjoyed being in front of people and “not having to work out what to say”, and then it was a hop, skip and a pirouette to acting.
At senior school, she fell in with the theatre crowd and found that making jokes was a good way to get invited to parties. “I learnt at a young age that […] if you can’t be pretty or popular, you can be funny and people will probably want you around.” Greer also persuaded her parents to let her quit Catholic mass on Sundays and go to the presbyterian church instead (“the boys were cute”), somewhere her parents actually followed her years later.
“There were a lot of rules [in the Catholic church]. I remember being confused about why I had to talk to God through this other person.” Is she religious now? “I don’t want to be like ‘I’m spiritual but not religious.’ I’ve always hated it when people say that. But yeah, also at my age now, I understand it.”
After high school, Greer went to The Theatre School at DePaul University, and after graduation moved to LA, where years of bad auditions and rejections eventually led to her feature film debut in the 1998 horror movie Stricken. She has returned to horror several times, in the 2018 Halloween remake alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, and in the 2013 remake of Stephen King’s Carrie alongside Chloë Grace Moretz. (She appears in another King film this year, The Long Walk.)
After the romcom golden era drew to a close, her parts varied more and meatier roles came along. She has been in multiple blockbuster franchises: Jurassic World, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, as well as so many popular sitcoms it’s hard to keep count: Arrested Development, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory. Does she have a favourite?
Tactfully, she answers that her favourite roles are “women my age, who really do something”, an answer that nicely relates to The Dead of Winter, of course. But middle-aged women are something Greer does care a lot about. A few years back, she co-founded Wile, a naturopathic supplement business for perimenopausal women (she has since sold the business). “It was a time in my life when I was being told that I should go on antidepressants. I had insomnia, night sweats, I was getting in a bad mood and having a harder time getting out of it. I was talking to doctors and not being taken seriously.”
I wonder if Hollywood is at all accommodating of perimenopause at a time when more women are talking openly about it. “It’s getting better.” She pauses, thinks, turns serious. “Well, there’s a lot of talk about how accommodating they are, and then… they’re not. I don’t feel like Hollywood is in general accommodating to anything that is not… financially lucrative right now. And, erm, I think that there is still a lot of fear about ageing in the business.”
In 2011, Greer married Dean E Johnsen, an executive producer on the talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, and became stepmother to his two children from his previous marriage. “We did talk about [having our kids] for the first couple of years.” she says. “But ultimately I decided not to. My step-kids are really awesome and I went from like, nothing, to a very full life of parenting and activities.” (The children were nine and 12 when Greer and Johnsen married and spent equal amounts of time between households).
“I was working too, and I just thought, ‘Maybe I’m good.’” The blended family are so close that for her 50th birthday, Greer, her husband and the children got matching tattoos of record players while on holiday in Dublin.
Greer hopes that things have changed a bit since she wrote her book about always being the bridesmaid, never the bride, professionally speaking. “In 2014, I felt like I flew under the radar about 100 per cent; now it’s more like 50 per cent.” But she has retained, she adds, a very thick skin – so much so that when she, a lifelong bookworm, and a friend recently wrote a novel and had it rejected by publishers, she was OK. “Look, people always talk like rejection only happens to creatives, but putting yourself out there for anything is hard. Even if you’re, like, an accountant, and you present something to your boss and they’re like, ‘Nope, that’s not what we’re doing’ – that’s hard!”
A knack for finding unlikely parallels between accountancy and celebrity is one of those things that makes Greer immensely fun company. She can certainly do those meatier roles, but if there ever is a great romcom revival, I’d happily see her as the best friend again. Or ideally, this time, the star.
The Dead of Winter is in cinemas from 26 September
