Jessica Lange talks 'Mother Play,' Hollywood and why she nearly 'walked away from it all'

NEW YORK — Jessica Lange has a type.

Over the course of her nearly five-decade career, the stage and screen legend has memorably embodied drug-addled matriarchs (“A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”), volatile housewives (“Blue Sky”) and destitute Southern belles (“A Streetcar Named Desire”). Not to mention, a literal witch ("American Horror Story: Coven").

"They're all survivors in some way," Lange says on a recent afternoon, tucked by a window and sipping a Coke in a bustling hotel lobby near Washington Square Park. “I like playing characters who are on the edge emotionally; women who have a tremendous strength, but are also teetering walking that tightrope.”  

The same could be said of her latest two roles: In HBO film “The Great Lillian Hall,” premiering May 31 (8 p.m. EST/PST), she affectingly inhabits a lauded Broadway diva who’s diagnosed with dementia in the throes of rehearsal. And in her Tony Award-nominated “Mother Play,” now playing at the Hayes Theater through June 16, Lange brings prickly pathos to Phyllis, the ferocious mother of two gay children (Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons).

Lange, 75, had been searching for her next Broadway vehicle ever since winning a best actress Tony for “Long Day’s Journey” in 2016. “I'd go through the repertoire of parts I could still play, now that I’m at this advanced age, and I could never come up with anything I really had a passion for doing,” she explains.

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That changed when she read Paula Vogel’s “Mother Play,” which is inspired by the playwright’s tumultuous upbringing and her brother’s death from AIDS. Lange had never originated a new character onstage, and was struck by the emotional complexity of Vogel’s script. Set over 50 years, the drama charts Phyllis’ journey as an eccentric, hard-drinking mom who constantly uproots her family. It ends with her as a lonely old women, having rejected her kids for being queer.

“You wonder sometimes what the trade-off is? Why would you shut out your children knowingly?” Lange says. “Hopefully families are more accepting now.”

Phyllis’ isolation comes to the fore in one haunting, roughly 10-minute sequence, as she wanders her now-empty home and makes a sad, microwaved dinner. Lange was elated to do the wordless scene, known as “the Phyllis Ballet”: Before she was an actress, she dropped out of college and trained as a mime in Paris in the early 1970s.

"It was one of the most thrilling times in my life," Lange says with a grin. “It's the only time I've ever consciously used that in a performance."

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In “Lillian Hall,” Lange portrays another woman confronting mortality and her shortcomings as a parent. Weeks away from mounting a Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” Lillian begins to experience tremors and sudden memory loss. She’s given a grim prognosis, but refuses to disclose her dementia to her loyal assistant (Kathy Bates) and daughter (Lily Rabe), who has always played second fiddle to Lillian’s career.

“I’m very fortunate that I haven’t experienced any of that kind of dementia in my family,” says Lange, who consulted with doctors on the nuances of how Lillian might move and speak. Plus, "I'll never get to do ‘The Cherry Orchard,’ so this was my opportunity to dip into the Chekhov pond.”

The project reunites the actress with Bates and Rabe after Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story.” Lange starred in four seasons of the long-running FX series, earning an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her delicious, scenery-chewing turns. She has not watched the latest iteration with Kim Kardashian. (“No, no,” she says with a wave. “I haven’t followed it at all.”) But she looks back with particular fondness on “Freak Show,” her favorite of the show’s anthology stories.

“That was kind of magical,” Lange says. “Over the years, it was really like a repertory theater company: Kathy Bates, Sarah Paulson, Angela Bassett, Evan Peters. You had a history together; it felt like a family.”

Along with HBO movie “Grey Gardens,” “American Horror Story” helped to reinvigorate Lange’s career after a self-described “dry spell” in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, she was more intent on raising her three children, from exes Mikhail Baryshnikov and Sam Shepard.

“My heart wasn’t in it,” Lange recalls of working during that period. “The roles weren’t that interesting. I made a lot of mistakes saying ‘yes’ to things I shouldn’t have bothered with. That just happens at a certain age, especially for women in Hollywood. There’s always that thing in the back of an actor’s mind: ‘I should work, I should work.’ But I wish I hadn’t, because it was a waste of my time.”

She declines to name any specific projects she regrets, but speaks warmly of her earlier successes with 1982’s “Frances” and “Tootsie,” which she considers “a flawless film.” She received double Oscar nominations for the movies, winning best supporting actress for “Tootsie.”

In that moment, “I felt like, ‘OK, now I can start. Now I can get going,’” recalls Lange, who took a three-year hiatus after the poor critical reception to 1976's "King Kong," her big-screen debut. “I was not prepared (for that). I almost walked away from it all. I was like, ‘I can’t live this way: to be a public figure, and to be constantly critiqued and judged. I don’t want anything to do with it.’”

Lange received a total of six Oscar nods in a 12-year span, winning her second for “Blue Sky” in 1995. She has long been considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation. ("She's astonishing," says her "Feud" co-star Tom Hollander. "I would just watch her thinking, 'This is how it's done.'") But lately, she's felt slightly disillusioned with Hollywood: Unlike many of her peers, she’s never been offered the superhero movies du jour, nor would she be interested.

“I don’t think any films are of the caliber of what they were in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” Lange says. “The films that I came up on, those were great stories and we had great storytellers telling them. I don’t see a lot of that now,” save for European dramas “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest.” “Could those films be made here? I don’t know. The film industry isn’t in great shape.”

Despite recent headlines that she's planning to retire, the Minnesota native hasn’t totally sworn off acting as long as the parts “are interesting enough.” She shot a film version of “Long Day’s Journey,” which she hopes will be released later this year. And in early 2025, she’s excited to star in a film adaptation of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” But she gets the most joy from nature and her grandkids. And she's ready to take a well-deserved breather after “Mother Play,” which she’s found “tremendously exhausting” to perform eight times a week.

“I don’t have that drive you do when you’re young,” Lange says. “It’s still thrilling when I get onstage, but I also think, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could just sit up in the woods in my cabin? Maybe do some traveling?’” For now, “I’m looking forward to taking a really long, long, long time off.”