A longtime holiday wish of mine will be granted this month when I finally get to see one of my favorite actors perform in person. As part of her “Spending Christmas” tour, Alicia Witt will be putting on a holiday concert at Evanston SPACE, featuring tunes from her wonderful album, “I Think I’m Spending Christmas With You.” Witt’s musical talent was apparent from an early age, when her mastery of the piano led David Lynch to have her perform a show-stopping number over the end credits of “Twin Peaks”’ second season premiere. She went on to have numerous memorable roles in film and television, recently delivering Oscar-caliber work as deeply troubled mothers in Osgood Perkins’ hugely successful thriller “Longlegs” and Wendy McColm’s criminally under-seen indie “Fuzzy Head.” In all three screenings I attended of “Longlegs,” a scene involving Witt elicited audible gasps from the audience, a testament to her mesmerizing performance.
At the end of a punishing year that began with the death of Lynch during the devastating California wildfires, people seem to be more in need of holiday cheer than ever. For over a decade, viewers have found solace in Witt’s popular Christmas movies for the Hallmark Channel, which are as far removed from a picture like “Longlegs” as one could imagine. There is a great amount of wit—no pun intended—as well as poignance in the lyrics on her holiday album, such as in its concluding number, the amusingly inevitable “December 26th.” I know that when I attend Witt’s concert, I’ll be wearing my “Longlegs” T-shirt under my festive attire as a tribute to her remarkable versatility. Just before Thanksgiving, Witt generously took the time to speak with me over the phone for Cinema Femme about her fascinating career, the origins of my favorite song on her album and her upcoming film that she can’t wait to see.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, Alicia!
I want to thank you as well! I’m aware that you’ve said some really kind things about my work in the press for previous movies, and I thank you for that.
I’ve been an admirer of your work ever since I grew up watching “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” where you were cast as a student struggling to play the very instrument I had in grade school, the clarinet. In what ways did the film’s portrayal of music education resonate with you?
It resonated with me not only as a musician but also because my dad was a public schoolteacher. At the time that I made “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” he was getting ready to retire, and I felt honored to get to tell a story about a teacher, first and foremost. It was also so much fun to get to learn a skill like the clarinet for that movie. I played the piano, of course, but I realized that I was going to have to work pretty hard to seem like I was a clarinet player. Upon arriving for the shoot, I proudly showed off my clarinet skills. Then it was pointed out to me that, obviously, my character is supposed to be really bad at playing the clarinet. So I had to learn how to sound like I couldn’t play the instrument so that it would only be in the final scene where she finally got it.
According to Scott Ryan’s recent book, Always Music in the Air: The Sounds of Twin Peaks, you composed the song in the first episode of Season Two, where you provide the piano accompaniment for the reading of the “It Was Laura” poem. What was the creative environment David Lynch established for you as a young person on “Dune” and “Twin Peaks?”
Working with him for the first time on “Dune” felt like fate. It was so magical. I was seven years old and had never been on a film set. Having grown up in Massachusetts, where I was surrounded by people who certainly were not in the entertainment business in any way, it just hadn’t occurred to me that grown-ups could even do that for a living. On the set of “Dune,” I was surrounded by venerable actors who had spent their lives playing characters, and we all got to be in the company of David. He treated actors with the greatest reverence and knew exactly how to nurture their performances on the set.
He made you feel like it was your sacred duty to deliver exactly what he wanted to craft his vision with. David made me want to spend my life doing it, and each time I worked with him subsequently, which was four times in total, I felt such a sense of familiarity with him. He always felt like a family member, like an uncle, as familiar to me as anyone was. We stayed in touch and I feel as though he is, if anything, even more present in my life right now in spirit form. As someone else mentioned at his memorial, it feels like he’s directing from the other side.
Wow. I love that.
Yeah, he’s powerful. He’s kind of doing energetic cartwheels, in a way.
I’ve spoken with both writer Barry Gifford and actor Crispin Glover about your “Hotel Room” episode, “Blackout,” where you deliver what I believe is one of the greatest performances ever directed by Lynch. Barry told me, “Alicia just looked like a little girl—then I saw her perform, and she was brilliant.”
I was 17 when I shot that episode, and I rehearsed it over and over with Crispin. We gathered together and we ran those lines as if we were doing a play because, really, we filmed it almost like a play. We showed up knowing the entire thing, and we filmed it in huge, long chunks. I think each of the takes we did was at least ten minutes long. Preparation-wise, I know I worked with a dialect coach to try and sound like I was from the Oklahoma region in the 1930s. However, when working with David, you might have an idea of what you’re going to do before you show up, but he will craft it in the moment. All you have to do is surrender and let him guide you while trusting him fully. Every actor I’ve ever talked to or witnessed who was in David’s presence on a set did just that. You couldn’t help but do that. You get your ego out of the way and whatever you planned to do goes out the window because you’re just in the moment, flying.
Working with him on “Twin Peaks: The Return” was certainly like that because we literally didn’t know what was happening in the scene we were filming. I asked him and he said, “I’m not going to tell you.” [laughs] I literally felt like I was having an out-of-body experience while filming my scene in the forest with Caleb Landry Jones. When I initially spoke with Oz Perkins about being cast as Ruth in his film, “Longlegs,” he told me that it was my performance in that scene from “Twin Peaks: The Return” that showed him I could channel Ruth. I never auditioned for “Longlegs.” It was my performance in “The Return” that got me the role. I did have the chance to tell David that about a year before he died. I told him that I had to thank him for that, and he was very proud to hear it.
I was an early champion of Oz as a filmmaker and was quoted on the case of his debut feature, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter.” Back in 2018, I spoke with him about “Twin Peaks: The Return,” and he marveled at what an artist like Lynch was capable of doing when given the permission. Is there any through line you would make between him and Lynch as artists?
Absolutely, without question. On the set of “Longlegs,” I told Oz that I felt very much like he was the most similar director to David that I had worked with. He reminded me of him a great deal in the way that he treated actors, and the magic spell that he cast over his set. Like David, he gives you the sense that you are being trusted to help co-create something very sacred. He was also very collaborative, which was different from David. At least in the roles I had with David, I didn’t communicate too much with him about it before showing up onset.
With Oz being such a major part of “Longlegs,” we were in constant contact from the time he cast me in the role to right through filming. I would text him my thoughts about upcoming scenes—I’d ask him questions and he’d ask me questions—and by the time we got to the set, it was like we had a shorthand with each other, which was very helpful. I was so immersed in Ruth that it was nice to not have to get out of the immersion and put into my brain what I was about to do. Instead, I would show up knowing what Oz and I had already discussed and be malleable within that. Oz filmed Ruth’s final scene over two days, and as the camera moved around the room, it just so happened that my coverage was the last. He had already experienced all of the different versions of what I was trying out with Ruth, but the camera hadn’t been on me because he was focusing on the other performances.
We had devoted a lot of time in our discussions to all the things that might be swirling around Ruth as she’s in this moment. So what he did was he had me do the entire thing six times, which for such a long scene is a lot. He gave me a different direction for each of the six takes, and they were so opposed to each other. It was lightning-fast because the camera didn’t have to move. I felt like he had put me under the spotlight as he said, “Alright, it’s go-time. Play one where you’re celebrating. Play one where you’re terrified. Play one where you’re just in the depths of mourning. Play one where you’re furious that your daughter is fucking up the whole thing. Play one with reverence, as if what’s happening is a sacred procedure and you can’t wait for the good part to happen.” It was one after another after another. I went through all of the emotions of Ruth. Then he said, “Okay, we’re done,” and everybody applauded! [laughs] It was so cool.
Ruth was such a complex soul, and weirdly, there were a lot of times where I didn’t feel like I even knew what was going on when I was playing her. I just had to get out of the way and let her take over. This is why I still haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to see the movie. It felt like a spirit was coming through me. My voice wasn’t my own and my body wasn’t my own. I loved the experience of it, it was cathartic, but I don’t want to experience it from the outside.
You also played an unforgettable mother in Wendy McColm’s “Fuzzy Head.” In our interactions on Instagram, you had likened Wendy to Lynch, and I did note similarities in how they go about crafting a dreamscape. I imagine that is another role you would prefer not to revisit because it is so raw and harrowing.
You are absolutely right, that is one that I did not watch. I hadn’t at the time, and I will not watch it because it is so dark, so I can’t speak to what the film itself ended up being like. I’ve heard Lynch comparisons as well as other things, but the script, in particular, reminded me a great deal of Lynch’s scripts.
Frank Oz executive produced the film, and I’m almost certain that I saw you in the audience for the filmed version of his and Derek DelGaudio’s singular stage show, “In & Of Itself.”
Yep, that was me! That show was absolutely unlike anything I had ever seen. [laughs] But I didn’t realize that they were going to make a film of it. That was so cool that my experience got to be a part of the show.
It strikes me as such a generous thing for artists to create work that would be too painful for themselves to experience. Or do you believe that is, in essence, the role of an artist?
I think it is absolutely our job to just plain be present, especially when you are taking part in something that someone else is directing and has written and all of that. There is so much that is out of our control. All we can really control is giving a hundred percent of ourselves and doing the work in advance so that we can be fully present. Hopefully you have teammates and a director that you feel like you can have that safe space with to just fly. But that being said, watching myself onscreen is not my favorite thing to do, as a lot of other actors will say.
On the other hand, the movie that I just finished filming in Toronto, Todd Berger’s “The Big Kill,” I can’t wait to see. It was so much fun. I’m a big part of it, but I got to be a part of an amazing ensemble with all these other awesome performers. One of them, Pete Holmes, is a brilliant comedian, and is definitely one of the funniest people I have ever acted with. We did so many different versions of certain scenes, and I can’t even imagine what they’re going to do with them in the edit. There was a lot of improv and I loved that. Doing comedy on film is one thing that I have wanted to do more of and it felt like such a gift.
To what extent did your song, “Christmas Will Never End,” from the Hallmark movie, “Christmas Tree Lane,” inspire your holiday album, “I Think I’m Spending Christmas with You”?
It was exactly that! First of all, I love Christmas. I have always loved Christmas, and as fate would have it, in addition to all of these darker and more horror-themed films I’ve had in my acting career, I’ve also been in a total of ten really beautiful Christmas movies. A number of them have included my original Christmas songs, some of which I wrote especially for the movie. In the case of “Christmas Tree Lane,” I wrote the story for it and produced it, so I wrote “Christmas Will Never End” especially for the movie. The other song that I sang in the film, “Why Christmas,” had already existed prior to the movie. So I just ended up with all of these Christmas songs, including “I’m Not Ready for Christmas,” which was used by the then-CEO of Hallmark as the theme song to a movie of mine. He then asked if he could name the movie after the song.
It felt like all these signs were saying to me, “C’mon, make a Christmas record.” The more that I have gotten into the world of music, which now fills up a good half of my life, I’ve had many tours with my album releases. But people started consistently asking me, “When are you going to put out a Christmas album?”, so I decided now was the time. For my album, which was released last year, I wrote nine more original songs, including a new version of “Christmas Will Never End” with my amazing band. Then I covered three classics and we spent a week at the Sound Emporium in Nashville with the band. We recorded all of the songs live, the way they used to record albums, in order to have that classic 1950s kind of Christmas energy.
My personal favorite track on the album is “Soap Suds Snow,” which seems to slyly reference your work in the Hallmark movies. How did that overall track, with its evocative music, come about?
Thank you! I appreciate that you took the time to listen so closely to the whole record. I’ve had that experience where soap, potato flakes and even mashed potatoes are used to create the fake snow for these movies. But the inspiration for the song came about randomly. I was in the process of scheduling a session with my friend Jay Knowles, whom I wrote “Soap Suds Snow” with. We were texting back and forth a few nights before we were due to write. I looked out the window, and there were these massive, almost cartoonish snowflakes falling. I sent him a video of it and was like, “This looks like soap suds snow! What the heck?” They really were two-inch wide clumps falling from the sky only for that instant.
Maybe it was fate, because Jay said in his response back, “Let’s write a song called ‘Soap Suds Snow.’” I thought he was kidding, and I didn’t get it. I was like, “Um okay, you have a good night!” [laughs] But sure enough, when he showed up for our session, he brought up the idea again. I said, “Well, what do you have in mind?”, and he told me his idea. As for the music, I had written a different song with a similar vibe that I knew I was never going to do anything with. It was kind of like a song exercise I was doing, so we mashed his concept with my music, and then we were off to the races. We ended up writing that song in about an hour and a half. It felt like it wrote itself really quickly, so we had extra time to just hang out and chit-chat.
I’m so looking forward to finally seeing you perform in person at your concert scheduled in Evanston.
There’s something so special about being on the road and bringing Christmas to people at live shows. You see people smiling, joyful and dressed in their finest festive attire. I do these meet and greet receptions before the show where I can visit with a limited number of people, take photos and sign Christmas vinyl, CDs, movies, posters, whatever they might have. Then I get to just sit there at the piano and entertain them for an hour and a half. My band is coming out for a fair number of these shows, including the Evanston SPACE. I’ll be there with my full band as well as the wonderful Alice Wallace, who will be opening for me. She is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter, but she’s actually from Chicago, so she’ll be doing a little hometown show right before the holidays!
Alicia Witt will be performing at Evanston SPACE, 1243 Chicago Ave., on Wednesday, December 17th, at 7pm. For tickets to this and all of the concerts on her “Spending Christmas with Alicia Witt” tour, click here.
