Maria Bello always tells her 10-year-old son, Jack, "I'm a different kind of mommy," she said, laughing. "Trying to explain why I'm not a soccer mom, why I'm off to Haiti again, why I smoke. I think he's getting it." She was smoking as she said it, illegally, nestled on the windowsill of a Toronto hotel room, exhaling the evidence out the window.
Bello, 44, is a rule breaker, a speak-outer, a fast talker, a lean-inner. She likes a raucous laugh between takes while making serious dramas, and she never brings her characters' turbulent emotions home with her. "Nah. I don't work like that," she said, in her trademark husky voice. "It's always a creative, artistic endeavour, so it's exciting, as opposed to depressing."
Good thing, because playing many of her characters would keep lesser women up at night - among them, an alcohol-industry lobbyist in Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking (2005), a corporate hatchet woman in The Company Men (2010) and a wife whose husband's past catches up with her in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005). This fall, she'll face down a carjacker in the upcoming film Abduction and take on a sexist New York Police Department in the U.S. version of the TV series Prime Suspect, airing on Global and NBC. She plays Jane Timoney, the role that revitalized Helen Mirren's career (as Jane Tennyson).
The film that brought Bello to this hotel sill, Beautiful Boy, is her darkest yet. (It opened in select Canadian cities on Friday.) She and Michael Sheen ( Frost/Nixon) play parents rocked by the news that their 18-year-old son committed a mass shooting at his university, then killed himself. (In one of those weird movie coincidences, a film with a similar plot, We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, was a deserved Palme d'or nominee at the Cannes Film Festival and is due out in September.)
"I find that I always choose movies - or movies come to me - with issues that I'm trying to explore or bring into my life," Bello said. "With this script - listen, everybody I know who has a teenager right now is going through hell. Their kids aren't talking to them, or they're screaming at them, or on drugs, or they don't know where the kid is at night. I'm trying not to think about that, but my son's teenage years are coming. How do you know if something is normal teenage screwed-up behaviour, or worse?"
Bello, Sheen and their writer-director, Shawn Ku (making his feature directorial debut), took care working out the parents' contrasting arcs, so they were never in the same place emotionally at the same time: She starts out full of feeling, then withdraws into denial and anger, while he's the opposite. "It was a great acting exercise, especially with a brilliant actor like Michael," Bello said. "To be able to ask him every minute, 'What do you think of this approach? Where are you emotionally, where am I?' We and the crew basically did the movie for free, because everyone loved the story so much."
She especially loved that it doesn't offer a tidy answer to why tragedies happen. "As if there could ever be a reason," she said, then continued in a mock-earnest voice, " 'What does it mean? What is your film trying to say?' Oh, please."
Bello's never been afraid of the dark. She grew up in Norristown, Pa., with two brothers, a sister, a father who was a construction worker and a mother who was a teacher and school nurse. "My mom always said, 'You were the most intense kid,'" Bello said. "I was always trying to figure things out. About myself, about the world. Really emotional, sensitive. I grew up in a complicated household, where emotions were on the surface."
Complicated, how? At first, Bello tried to demur: "No, I don't want to say." But she could only stand not-saying for about a second. "Okay, but only because it's such a taboo subject, I will say that mental illness was a factor. It was always such a shameful thing. Thank God there are drugs for it now. But a lot of addiction and stuff in my family comes out of mental illness. To grow up in that was interesting."
It turned Bello into a doer. She majored in political science at Villanova University near Philadelphia, and remains active in a number of causes. She spends about a week per month in Haiti working with Artists for Peace and Justice and the activist/doctor/priest Rick Frechette, who built a free pediatric hospital, three orphanages and 32 street schools in Cité Soleil, "in the scariest slums of the Western Hemisphere," Bello said. "Which has been incredible and inspiring and painful."
She's also done work in Darfur for eight years (she has a tattoo of Africa on her hip), and for 20 years, has promoted international women's rights. Last fall, she helped 17 female Haitian political candidates - "all these woman are fierce," she growled proudly - film campaign ads, "because, if you read the studies, if women hold the purse strings, more money is spent on kids' health and education. Rwanda, for example, which has the highest percentage of women in parliament in Africa, has one of the fastest-growing economies. It's incredible. I think the world will shift because of women in power."
Back home in Venice Beach, Calif., Bello concentrates on work and co-parenthood. (She and Jack's father, TV executive Dan McDermott, split up several years ago.) "Sometimes when I've made a mistake with Jack, I think, 'Oh dear God, he's going to be in therapy for the rest of his life,'" she said. "It's the hardest job in the world, to do the right thing all the time, or know what that even is. I'm finding that the only thing I can do is fully be myself. Whoever I am, wherever I'm at. And teach him that's the most important thing for him as well: Be yourself. Walk your path, nobody else's."
As evidence, she proffers an iPhone picture of Jack's new haircut, which he designed himself: Shaved into his towhead are three stripes and his soccer number, 5. "He loves it," Bello said, grinning. "He walks around differently." Everybody in his school wants one like it.
"I feel like my gift as an actor is also to fully be myself," Bello continued. "People want to connect, they want to share themselves, they want to be themselves. I'm expressing all the stuff that most people feel but would never express, because it's too big. But I can. So I do. Hopefully, I help other people to feel. And hopefully with Beautiful Boy, I feel for them what they never have to feel."
Johanna Schneller