She makes a concerted effort not to treat herself like a precious movie star in the hopes that you won’t, either. That irreverence is McDormand’s most endearing trait: On the day we met, she ducked into a liquor store to satisfy her craving for Fritos - “You know they’re gooood, right?” she teased - and before we sat together on a concrete wall by the coastline, McDormand clambered on top of it and used the length of her splayed body to measure a pandemic-appropriate distance between us. (In Hollywood, this mild noncompliance is tantamount to a declaration of war.) McDormand is highly skeptical of any ceremony where actors are done up like glamorous gladiators, and when her husband, the filmmaker Joel Coen, was once asked to produce the Oscars alongside his brother, Ethan, McDormand suggested they set the telecast at Coney Island, which would have forced Hollywood glitterati to mingle with the freak show. Since she rarely grants interviews, most people only see the real McDormand blazing an iconoclastic streak through televised awards shows, where she is barefaced instead of Botoxed and once wore her own jean jacket in lieu of borrowed couture. You can tell right away what they like and don’t like, who they would be friendly with and who they can’t stand. Whether it’s kindhearted Marge from “ Fargo,” tetchy Olive from “ Olive Kitteridge,” or bohemian Jane in “ Laurel Canyon,” McDormand specializes in playing women with worldviews. This is the tricky thing about how persuasively McDormand embodies her characters: You think you know her because you’re certain you know them. Instead, he reached Frances McDormand, a 63-year-old woman who chats up everybody she comes across in her small town, doesn’t like to think of herself as famous, and has won two Oscars. Maybe the fan had hoped to speak with righteous Mildred, who harangues priests and cops and hurls fire bombs in the pursuit of justice.
Though she hung up right away, McDormand now wondered what she might have asked him: “OK, what part were you watching? The scene where I threw the Molotov cocktail at the police station?”
“It was the first creepy call I’ve gotten in 16 years here,” she told me. When the caller told her he was watching “ Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the 2017 movie in which she plays an avenging mother named Mildred, McDormand realized she was on the phone with a fan who had tracked down her unlisted landline. Still, someone had managed.Įarlier that day, the phone rang at McDormand’s house, and while she didn’t recognize the man on the other end, he certainly knew who she was. She told me this as we ambled down the main street of the small coastal town where she lives, a modest, hidden place so far from Hollywood that studio searchlights would have a hard time finding it. It was a February day so overcast that noon looked like dusk, and Frances McDormand felt a little rattled.