Ann Dowd had a secret to share. It happened near the end of 2019, in Sun Valley, Idaho, at a moment of unexpected personal confession. She’d joined writer-director Fran Kranz and costars Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney, and Jason Isaacs for rehearsals on their film Mass, which follows two sets of parents gathering years after a school shooting irrevocably changed their lives. Kranz wanted to bring the group together by having everyone share stories—reveal their most naked, vulnerable selves. “Without me having to do anything, Ann started opening up to us and broke the ice, and shared herself so fully,” Kranz says now. “It changed us, the five of us. She just changed us.”
There are two things, I’ve learned, that Ann Dowd does incredibly well. The first is talk; the second, as is more rarely the case, is listen. She makes this clear as we ease into our conversation, tucked inside the lobby of a Downtown L.A. hotel on the eve of the Emmys. One question in, the 65-year-old Dowd holds back tears, reflecting not just on the making of Mass, but on feelings of parenthood and loss and guilt and fear in her own life. She shows her heart. Then she tells me a secret—one I won’t print in this story—that gets at the core of how deep Mass and her character, Linda, lived inside of her, and on a larger scale, of what acting ultimately means to her. It’s all a function of Dowd’s singular capacity for empathy—for opening herself up before taking in the words and experiences of others, whether a costar, a director, a fictional grieving mother, or in today’s case, a journalist.
“She is a very open, empathetic person, and that is her super power,” says Craig Zobel, who directed Dowd to critical acclaim in the 2012 indie Compliance. “Mass is the type of film that allows you to see one of my favorite parts of her acting, which is how good she is at listening—how giving a scene partner she is.”
You could also say that Mass is the type of film that Dowd has long deserved. Not because she’s lacked for great roles of late—since her mid-career breakout in Compliance, she’s been an Emmy-winning force on The Handmaid’s Tale and a scene-stealer in everything from The Leftovers to Hereditary—but because it’s a true cinematic showcase of her gifts, arriving at a time when enough of us are finally aware of them. The campaign for Dowd’s first Oscar nomination is revving up for a movie that finds her merely sitting, going back and forth between talking and listening, for virtually the entire running time. She has words and she has silences to tell her story, and little else. Just as she’d like it. No wonder this might be the one.
For a woman nearing four decades in the business, Dowd only recently realized the kind of actor she wanted to be. Originally on the pre-med track, she left it as a young student for what she really loved, and went into acting with the studious commitment of a doctor. “You didn’t go home on vacation; you stayed and studied and studied,” she says of her pre-med life. “I approached [acting] the same way: ‘Know this character, read the text, then I will know her. If it takes suffering, then you bet I will, and I’m going to study and study and I’m going to know those lines.’ It was all push. That’s misery.” When she got her first series-regular role in 1997’s short-lived Nothing Sacred, and after she gave birth to the second of her three children, Emily, Dowd was living in Los Angeles and lost “a ton” of weight: “I was thin as a rail, and I couldn’t get a role to save my life.”
She learned, over time, to let some of that pressure go—to not carry her characters’ pain, but rather let them in organically. “For the character, you have to be careful where you pick from,” she says. “I don’t believe you have to suffer.” Each role shows her something new about being a person in the world: “An actor comes to know a character…. It’s that conversation: Tell me about you and I’ll tell you about me and we’ll go slowly. I’ve been doing it long enough to know when I am pushing or trying to take control.”
For much of her screen career in the ’90s and 2000s, she’d found steady work in meaty projects—as Tom Hanks’s sister in Philadelphia, Busy Philipps’s mother in Freaks and Geeks—but had to grind, as most character actors do, without much notoriety (or money). Then came a tiny movie called Compliance. Working with a budget just over $250,000, Zobel cast Dowd as a fast-food restaurant manager named Sandra in the audition room, right after she read for the part. She was paid $100 per day over a 16-day shoot, for a tricky role at the center of a queasy story, in which a man posing as a police officer accuses one of Sandra’s employees of stealing. He convinces Sandra to hold the employee for questioning, violate her rights, and gradually descend deeper into moral darkness. It’s a character burning with a quiet, imposing intensity, the kind that Dowd has come to claim as a signature—developed out of years of working on her craft, but one that few outside of some theater circles had been aware of.
“We would sometimes shoot these big long speeches eight to 12 times…because she was so open to direction,” says Zobel, Emmy-nominated for helming this year’s Mare of Easttown. “A lot of the performance in the film was built from a combination of her different, versatile takes on the situation.”
Raves for Dowd erupted out of a Sundance premiere; critics called for an Oscar nomination to follow. But this was a small movie without the cash for a campaign; distributor Magnolia Pictures declined to even send screeners to guilds or the Academy. Dowd and her husband, Lawrence Arancio, spent $13,000—financed between credit cards and loans from friends—to get the film into voters’ hands themselves: a true DIY campaign. Dowd wound up winning the National Board of Review’s best-supporting-actress prize, a key precursor, and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.
“The thought of doing that campaign at first felt foolish—I mean, not arrogant, you know, but hey, I was raised Catholic,” Dowd says now. But she believed in the work and knew awards attention would be significant for her career. “I was so proud of her for doing that,” Zobel says. “There was so clearly a feeling that she deserved it.”
Dowd remembers showing up at the 2013 National Board of Review Awards, preparing to make a speech at an intimate affair and instead finding herself being feted at one of Oscars season’s biggest, glitziest kickoff events. “This won’t work,” she’d flatly told her director and publicist at the event. They convinced her to stay, that she belonged. “I had no attachment to winning, because I didn’t think I ever would,” Dowd says. “It was like a party. It was going to Disneyland.”
Dowd did not receive an Oscar nomination, but her trajectory in Hollywood clearly changed following Compliance, even if the film didn’t crack $1 million at the box office. Says Zobel, “She walked away from that with everyone knowing she was a force to reckon with.”
Compliance’s Sandra was only the start of Dowd’s brilliantly antiheroic creations. She plays them with a menace bone-deep in its realism, and grounded in a peculiar, off-kilter humanity. For her most infamous villain, The Handmaid’s Tale’s Aunt Lydia, people regularly ask Dowd how she gets into such a nasty headspace. Years of work on exactly that sort of practice explain her skill there. “At first, I wouldn’t want to tell the truth about it, which is, ‘I can’t get there fast enough,’” she says with a gleeful smile. “We don’t carry the consequences home.”
When she won the 2017 Emmy for drama-supporting-actress, Dowd noticed a kind of shift. It’d been a few years since Compliance and things were, for lack of a better word, happening. The Leftovers brought her a new level of critical attention; Handmaid’s got her onto the biggest stage in TV. “I started to get attached to the winning,” she says. “I realized, wait a minute, hon. Let’s go back a little bit here. Let’s keep the focus on the work. Don’t do it.” She confronted bubbling feelings of envy. And she still fights them. (The Emmys were the next day, remember?) “Let go of the attachment,” she reminds herself mid-conversation. “Joy is in the work.”
Such attention is, of course, the occasion for this interview—for what may come of her harrowing performance in Mass. Her work in the film both represents everything she has learned and brought to her acting, and challenges those skills and strategies as never before.
In Linda, she embodies a woman living in profound grief, and also some degree of terror. She had a hard time with it. “I can’t even talk about it,” Dowd says through sniffles. Her eyes wander around the hotel. “When will I ever remember Kleenex?”
Kranz, a veteran actor of stage (The Death of a Salesman on Broadway) and screen (Dollhouse) making his directorial debut on Mass, offers an outsider’s perspective on Dowd’s experience. “She’s not a method actor, but there’s something else going on,” he says. “I don't know if it’s Ann possessing Linda or Linda possessing Ann, but there is this open channel between her and the character that flows so freely. It is something to see. Because of who this character was, it was often overwhelming and almost concerning to be around. I’d have my sound mixer look at me and say, ‘Should we record?’ It almost felt wrong: You saw this woman weeping inconsolably. Honestly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Sure enough, Dowd tells me, “The thing that really, really stunned me about this experience was how much [Linda] took possession of me, rather than me of her.” Dowd made sounds during filming that she’d never made in her whole life. She was “knocked out” during the shoot, a feeling that still comes back. “It’s like, What the fuck is going on?” Dowd says with a teary laugh. “It happens when I start to talk about it.”
Linda has a wrenching monologue to close the film, one that puts her uniquely complex standing in the drama into sharp context. The scene needed to be shot before anything else, however, since the rest of the cast’s scenes were set in a single room and time was tight. Barely a day into production, Dowd filmed take after devastating take. “Linda is asking us and these characters and the audience, really, to comprehend the incomprehensible,” Kranz says of the monologue. “What Ann was putting herself through—witnessing it, it was really stunning and remarkable.”
The script kept Dowd centered, as did a “generosity” in Linda that she’d never before experienced through a character: “She just let me know, ‘You’ve got it,’” Dowd says. There was joy and laughter on the Mass set as well; industry veterans who didn’t really know each other bonded tightly. Dowd recreates for me a prank that Reed Birney, who stars as her ex-husband, would play on her. Such intimacy helped inform the raw feeling they summoned for the camera.
This all comes back to that first rehearsal, to the trust they established, to Dowd’s confession to the group—which, today, she has decided to keep private. “I’ll never forget it,” she says of that moment of sharing. “The need to speak to these people that I never met—why would I do that?” She mentions age and experience as possible answers, and she’s right in a way—she’s grown, after all—yet one senses she does this every time she’s onscreen too, for everyone watching and listening. For more people she doesn’t know. Here’s someone who’s learned how to tell and accept the hard truth, in art and in life, like there’s no difference. Maybe there isn’t. Dowd’s work in Mass is plenty convincing, at least: She talks, and you’ll believe.
Mass premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and will be released in select theaters in October 8. The movie will also screen at the BFI London Film Festival next month. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
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