Uma Thurman: “I’m not afraid of passing time”

She treats many things in life with clear irony: to generally accepted opinions and her own predilections, twists of fate and her gifts – glory and beauty. Meeting with Uma Thurman, a star who always maintains a human distance between himself and his fame.

She made her debut at 17, rose to fame at 20, and is known to everyone today as one of Hollywood’s brightest, most distinctive and highly regarded stars. Uma Thurman gives the impression of a person who knows perfectly well what he wants from life and what he does not accept in it. She has her own view on many things, and she is ready to defend it without hesitation. Thurman is direct, but does not believe in her irresistibility at all: it seems that she is sincerely indifferent to the power that her appearance gives her over others. She was not always desired, and Uma Thurman remembers this …

When the silhouette of the 36-year-old star appeared in the doorway of her home in Hyde Park, the traditionally “millionaire” suburb of New York, the question somehow sounded in my head: “What happened to her spaceship?” Based on the common film ideas about how exactly an alien should look like, then Thurman certainly looks like her: height – 183 cm, incredible blueness and eye shape (it seems almost without pupils), unthinkable limb length, fantastic clarity of features … Chain cosmic associations continue beyond the threshold: the house is spacious, creating a feeling of weightlessness, in the interior – discreet hi-tech, light colors, unobtrusive lighting. However, the alien star somehow says in a very earthly way that she sent the nanny to walk with the children (her daughter Maya is 8 years old, her son Roan is 4), the assistant “for housekeeping and answering phone calls” was released, and “ There are no men in this house at all. While I settle into the living room on a sofa of galactic size, the hostess rustles and crunches something in the kitchen. And enters the room … with a rather voluminous bowl of potato chips. Welcome to Earth!

Briefly and clearly

If you were offered to make a film based on a biblical story, which one would you choose?

Eve and the Serpent. The acquisition of knowledge.

And who would you play in this movie?

Snake.

With what profession would you compare the profession of an actor?

Cooks. We also cook – from our experience, observations, imagination.

Do you find any advantages in being a woman?

Our main advantage is that we are always present at the birth of our children!

What is the biggest motivation for you at work?

When they believe in me – the director, the studio, dad and mom.

What is your advice to those in crisis?

Don’t listen to anyone’s advice.

What can be your biggest disappointment?

Know your future.

Psychologies: The viewer associates your appearance more with oriental gymnastics and dietary nutrition than with chips … Maybe they were somehow specially made for Uma Thurman?

Uma Thurman: Especially for Uma Thurman, only her children were born. (Laughs) The rest is in the public domain. I just love salty. And hydrogenated fats.

But they say about you that you are incredibly picky and eat only in gourmet restaurants.

U.T.: For me, it’s this kind of vacation: I can’t stop thinking about work and start relaxing until I sing something gourmet – it’s so ugly that it quickly brings me back to reality! And the fact that they consider me an absolute gourmet is a clear prejudice against me.

What other prejudices do you think exist about you?

U.T.: High. Blue eyes. Blonde hair. That’s it: Nordic blonde, ice maiden. So I’m arctic cold, pushing people away, shocking with lack of sympathy! (Laughs.) These are clichés, clichés. But many give in to them. The world is very stamped. It’s like … like Hitler’s mustache: if you had to make a film about his childhood, I think he would have walked there with a mustache even at the age of five!

Is your sensitivity to stereotypes, to products of the mass unconscious, from the family? Your parents are Buddhists, leftist intellectuals, psychedelic experimenters…

U.T.: Maybe. But… Somehow it turns out that I often oppose something. Although in general I am non-confrontational and really quite introverted. I fought my parents too. In our family – you are right, anti-bourgeois anti-Americanists – the rebellious character was rather encouraged. And in order to completely piss off my parents, I had to become … a completely ordinary American teenager. At the age of 12, in defiance of them, I signed up for a cheerleading squad for a Massachusetts football team. Well, all these sticks with tassels and pom-poms, slogans, chants, dances with jumps, stockings, short skirts to the delight of sexists … Father was furious. And my mother (of course, she was a model, but then she became a psychotherapist) once said: “I gave my children the main thing – life. The rest they will have to deal with on their own.”

So, have you ever wanted to be like everyone else?

U.T.: Naturally! I most of all wanted to be like everyone else! We were all very much in the family “not like everyone else.” And dad, who in his youth was a Tibetan monk, and therefore, it happened that His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself looked into our light, – and mom, and I, and brothers. With our exotic names…

Are you worried about your name?

U.T.: Because of “Uma Karuna” and so on? Well, they teased me… I was teased for my name, for being lanky and for being blond. But I had three brothers, all with amazing names – Ganden, Dechen and Mipham. And the brothers in their youth were far from the parental Buddhist aversion to violence. Could and … nakostyat. But still, I spent the first 14 years of my life in the belief that I was terrible and my appearance was terrible. The nose is terribly long. Some of my mother’s colleagues even advised me to have plastic surgery. Yes, and height … It’s not very pleasant, you know, to be 12 meters tall at XNUMX years old! Because of the name and height, I felt completely atypical, and this is a very uncomfortable feeling. The internal image of a person, the way he sees himself, develops quite early, I think, earlier than it would be necessary. In particular, this is why people then resort to psychotherapy. In a word, until now, hearing about myself that I am allegedly beautiful, I do not fully believe this. Maybe I just don’t like the fact that I’m being judged.

And what good things did you take with you from your childhood, youth?

U.T.: In fairness, it must be said that up to 12 years it was quite cloudless. Amherst, a city of five colleges and university professors, is a good place for a child to grow up in. I remember the first concert I went to with my parents. I was six years old, and there was Indian music, a calm musician with a sad sitar, a beautiful dancer, sweet smoke … Pretty soon I fell asleep in my chair. The smell of smoking sticks, the foreign sound of the sitar, the soft, warm armchair… It’s always with me. As an image of special children’s security. She came from her parents. And from brothers… On the one hand, it’s good to have brothers, but on the other hand, it’s bad to be a girl among three boys. You yourself become in a sense a boy. Ideas about the differences between the sexes are blurred … And then the “rebellious youth” began: my 12, 13, 14 years were … brutal. Three years of continuous confrontation with the world. At 15 I went to New York, and here the main task was to learn to feel more or less comfortable among people. In general, I learned: I lived normally in a pizzeria, where I washed dishes, and then in locker rooms, and on the catwalk – this is already in the modeling business. Although I did not like it … very much.

Why?

U.T.: Everything is aimed at one thing: “Buy more! Would you like more? I will make you 10 years younger and everyone will turn to you!” Selling more is the goal of malls, supermarkets, boutiques and other outlets. But, if I wanted to be a salesperson, I would have become one. And it would be much more honest than defile on the catwalk with an important air.

How did you feel when, after several completely inconspicuous projects, you starred in two epochal films – “Baron Munchausen” and “Dangerous Liaisons” – and literally overnight became a sex symbol?

U.T.: Are you laughing? Where have you seen female sex symbols with size 42 feet?!

Many will disagree with your self-assessment…

U.T.: “Sometimes low self-esteem is just realism,” said the hero of one film. Joke. Probably, the matter is different: I come from a dynasty, so to speak, of noteworthy beauties. Mom was a model – and not without success. Grandmother was considered one of the most beautiful women of her time, portrayed in the form of a nude sculpture, and she still stands in the small Swedish port town of Trelleborg. After all, my mother, when she was 17, came to New York from Sweden … So there was never much trepidation of physical beauty in our family. As well as special attention to everything physical in general, because my parents are true Buddhists. In general, I do not consider physical data a serious characteristic of a person. More importantly, how he disposes of them.

You have been married twice and divorced both times. Did this experience disappoint you?

U.T.: I liked one thought in Woody Allen’s Manhattan: happiness is not living with one perfect partner, but a chain of relationships that are meaningful to you. Which, in general, can end, and not be happy, and not have a happy ending. Moreover, people change in the course of life, and what you knew about your loved one yesterday can already become false knowledge today. I remember saying earlier that it is better to deal with someone who deceives you than with someone who does not flush the toilet. Now I think otherwise.

Let it not go down?

U.T.: It’s just not about him, it’s about you. If you communicate the degree of the high principle of every little thing … and you yourself become petty.

Do you think there is a way to keep a feeling like love?

U.T.: And to be honest, I don’t think that love passes. Maybe that’s what I would like – that she would someday have her end. But it’s not. It doesn’t matter how I feel today for those with whom I broke up. All the same, with some part of myself, I still love everyone I once loved. It seems to me that sometimes it is not we who separate ourselves – life “parts” us. My ex-husband Ethan (Ethan Hawke, actor and writer, second husband of Uma Thurman. – Approx. ed.) once said as a criticism: “You want to be a complete, good, even perfect mother and at the same time remain a good, complete actress “… You know, some men find it difficult to live with a woman who is really busy with her work. And I was then terribly busy: Tarantino was selflessly waiting for me to give birth to Roan in order to shoot Kill Bill; then Roan was born, and I began to bring myself back to normal – it was stupid to appear in a project of this magnitude in the form of a sort of fat-ass samurai … Then the shooting began. In fact, I was away from home for almost a year… As a result, Kill Bill put too much pressure on our marriage. That’s what I mean when I say that life “separates” us. But as long as we are alive, she never completely separates. Even if we are divorced, we still remain a family. Because Ethan is a father to our children, and I am a mother and the children consider us their dad and mom. The two of us are no longer husband and wife, but the four of us are still a family.

In general, is the presence of a man in your life important to you?

U.T.: I don’t think a man is a necessity. But I never had anything against… a life partner. Another question is that I do not expect help from a partner, solving my problems. I solve my own problems. But this combination – love and good company – is important for life.

In your views on relationships between people, did you borrow something from Buddhism?

U.T.: Buddhism in general had a very serious impact on my vision of the world, on what I am. But by and large, I like all religions – not entirely, but each in part. That is, in some part of it. Now I am attracted to such a teaching as Kabbalah. But also … at a distance.

And what guides you in raising children?

U.T.: You know… Let’s put it this way: I’m just a working single mother. With all the sorrows and delights that children bring with them. In the morning today, for example, I woke up with terrible sensations in my stomach – I obviously picked up some bacteria from my son, he suffered the same all day yesterday … But this is life, reality: both a sense of responsibility, and bacteria, and the fact that for children, the father is important, and your opinion is not required here at all – that’s all that matters. Mothers often want to sacrifice something for the sake of their children, unconsciously, by the nature of motherhood. I also want this. For the past three years, I have refused to read scripts unless they were filming in New York. I did not want to leave the children or rip them off. But now it became clear to me that a balance is needed here: on the one hand, to give yourself away, on the other hand, to keep something else for yourself. And here’s how to find it … I’m afraid I’m not ready to be an expert here …

What is this age – 36 years?

U.T.: Good age. Cosy. You see the world more clearly. From 20 to 30, I was a continuous bundle of anxiety, neuroses, expectations and introspection. Am I doing the right thing? Should I do this, or is this better? Am I good enough for this? And now… There is something wonderful about being in tune with yourself. You become less limited and more…alive. Yes, in harmony with yourself you begin to live a full life. Because you see: everything in the world has another side. Without seeing the other side of the Moon, we suspected that there, secretly from us, in the darkness, something sinister was happening. Then devices appeared that removed it, and it turned out that there was nothing terrible there. By the age of 36, I had such a device for personal use. Through him I look at life. And now I know for sure that everything in it is relative. The experience is comforting. And it brings only time, age. That’s why I’m not afraid of passing time, I like that it goes.

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