At 66, with more than a dozen movie projects in various stages of pre- or post-production, Susan Sarandon’s career is showing no signs of slowing down. So what if, instead of playing the starring role herself, many of her most recent assignments happen to be the mother or wife of the main character? “As long as I keep having fun,” she said during a recent telephone interview from New York, “that’s the main thing.”
First-time director Nicholas Jarecki’s thriller “Arbitrage” casts Richard Gere as a seemingly successful financial consultant and happily married family man whose professional and personal lives unravel as a result of his poor judgment. Sarandon plays his dutiful wife — although there is considerably more to the role than first meets the eye.
Q: What attracted you to this project? There’s a big payoff for your character late in the film, but it seemed like a rather thankless role leading up to that.
A: Yeah, the last couple of scenes were really fun to play. Would I have done it otherwise? Maybe not. In one respect, we've all probably seen some aspects of this story before. What made it unusual is that we rarely ever see what happens to the family as the walls start closing in on the financial tightrope act the main character is walking. I liked getting that glimpse into the price his family pays. When Nick [Jarecki] got in touch with me, I was most impressed with his passion for the story. It was something he'd been dreaming about making for a long time. Ultimately for me, it depended on who he got to play the husband, so when it turned out to be Richard, I knew it was definitely something we could bring a lot of our own personal history to.
Q: Does that personal history with Gere extend beyond the fact that the two of you had previously worked together [on “Shall We Dance”]?
A: Yes. We have tons of friends in common, and both of us got to New York and started our careers around the same time. We actually used to share a bedroom wall because my first apartment backed up to his on the top of a roof. Even though we didn't necessarily hang out together all the time, I was there when he discovered Buddhism, and we put in a lot of time together during the early years of the AIDS crisis. We're very comfortable together, which was something we could bring to our married life in this film.
Q: The older you get and the longer you’ve been at this, does it keep getting harder to find challenging roles that aren’t like other things you’ve already played before?
A: Sure, but more and more women are finding and producing their own projects now. To me, every story is some kind of a love story — whether it's between a nun and a murderer ["Dead Man Walking"], a lawyer and a kid ["The Client"], two women ["Thelma & Louise"] or whatever — and I guess it's a little harder to keep finding that once you get past a certain age. The other thing is that I'm not quite as desperate as I used to be about working constantly. Now that my kids are older and I'm freer to travel and do other things, I no longer feel like I have to work.
Q: Does the fact that you’ll be working with a first-time director like Nicholas Jarecki ever factor into your decision-making process?
A: I've worked with a lot of first-timers and, as often as not, they usually work out just fine. "Bull Durham" was made by a first-time director. So were "Igby Goes Down" and "Robot & Frank." All of those were great experiences. Like I said before, Nick had been dreaming about this for so long, and sometimes that eagerness and enthusiasm can make up for what a director might lack in experience.
