Sally Field on ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ and Why She Isn’t Done Yet

In some ways I have to remind myself that I’ve accomplished anything. I feel like there’s still stuff to do. I still haven’t crossed the finish line.”

Sally Field opens up about playing Tova in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, based on the bestselling book—a story about loneliness, loss and an unlikely bond with an octopus.

Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.

What I was thinking about while watching Remarkably Bright Creatures is that you’ve made a career out of creating unique women, women that normally don’t get movies made about them. And I think Tova is one of them. What was it about Tova that made you want to do this so badly?

When I first saw the project, it was in galleys, so who knew what was going to happen with the book, which became this phenomenon. I only read two chapters, and I knew I wanted to do it. And it didn’t necessarily have to do with Tova. I examined Tova later. It had to do with the relationship between an older woman who is very isolated and alone, and loneliness, loss, and her really profound connection that grows with a creature. In this case, a giant Pacific octopus. One of the magical things about the book is that Marcellus, the octopus, is the narrator. He sees things from his glass world, and he narrates the whole piece. In the film, that’s beautifully done by Alfred Molina.

We don’t see women like this a lot on screen. We don’t see these stories, women of this age telling these stories. I love that you’re the one telling this story. Do you feel that?

It has always been hard for me to find roles that I wanted to do, even in supposedly the prime of my motion picture career. It’s hard to find really complicated stories about complicated women that aren’t some sort of romance or other. So as I’ve gotten older, it’s certainly gotten nothing but harder. It takes a lot of time and effort to find a project that you want to do, and for me, one that talks about older women and what it is to be older. Whether you’re male or female, you’re facing loss as an older person. How do you move on? Where do you live? If you’re alone, what now? Since the pandemic, I have a deep connection with a creature that I never had before. My children had dogs, big goldens, and they would wait at the door for when the boys came home. They could have cared less about me. So I never had a dog. Then, weirdly, in 2019, I’d been working a lot, and I wanted to go home. I was in D.C., I’d done something at the Kennedy Center, and after Christmas I was sort of stuck. I weirdly went online one night in my hotel room, looking at websites of people who raised these little dogs, and I randomly reached out to this woman. I said, “I know you’ve promised the litters way in advance, I’m sure there isn’t any available.” And she said “Yes, they’d been promised long before the litter was born.” But she said one of the people had decided they didn’t want the dog, because these are Cavapoos and they’re usually multicolored—white and brown and black—and this one little dog was all black and nobody wanted him. And I said, “I want him.” And then I thought, oh God, what have I done? I travel, I can’t possibly have a dog. He was just born, I had to wait eight weeks. So it was the end of February by then, something like that, and I went out to Bakersfield [California] and got this little dog. He was eight weeks old, weighed six pounds. Came back to my house in Pacific Palisades and three weeks later we were in shutdown. The pandemic. None of us really saw the extent of it coming. My kids and grandkids would drive by individually and wave, because I was an older person and everybody was desperately afraid. There were no vaccines, no remedy. It was sort of like, oh God.

And the dog was probably the best thing.

He was my everything, and he changed me. He changed me because I have a really close connection with a creature now. And I realized that human beings have always had this connection with creatures, whether they work the farms or they entertain us or they keep us company, whether they’re birds or fish or dogs or cats or all sorts of things.

You see that in the film. And speaking of connections, you see how Tova is able, through her connection with this octopus, to have a deeper connection with a human, this young man played by Lewis Pullman. I saw you on the West End in All My Sons with Lewis’ dad, Bill Pullman, so I love that Lewis is in this. What was it like establishing that rapport with Lewis? Is he anything like his dad?

He is like his dad in that he is brilliantly talented and versatile, like his dad. They’re just actors. They don’t fuss with anything else. From the moment he walked in the room and we started improvising, it was barely even a hello. We just became, and he informed me, and I informed him, and that was the beginning of what you eventually see on screen. So much of what you see is just Lewis and I improvising.

In order to do that, there has to be this emotional connection between you. It was beautiful to watch, seeing both of you slowly open up over the course of the film.

Thank you. That is Lewis. Certainly, things he would do in a scene I could not have seen coming. And so it allows me to just react right then and there.

There’s a social media trend right now called vocal stems, basically comforting sounds or phrases from pop culture that when we hear them, we can’t say them any other way. And as I’ve talked to people about this interview, you have come up over and over. “Drink the juice,” from Steel Magnolias. People can’t say it any other way. I even quote your Boniva commercial. There are so many things you’ve done that have had an impact on popular culture in a way that has changed how we do and say things. How does that feel?

It’s hard for me to answer that because I don’t feel that kind of impact at all. In some ways I have to remind myself that I’ve accomplished anything. I feel like there’s still stuff to do. I still haven’t crossed the finish line. There’s something else I have to get to, something that’s always slightly out of your grasp. “All that you reach should exceed your grasp, or what’s a heaven for.” [Referencing Robert Browning’s 1855 poem ‘Andrea del Sarto.’]

How does that influence the performances you continue to give? How does it impact how you work as an actor at this point in your career?

I don’t know, but I presume that the minute you start buying into yourself, or what people think you should be feeling about yourself, you lose the ability to just be a person. I became a celebrity of sorts when I was 17 years old, and I’ve been some varying form of celebrity, big or small or in between, for my entire existence. I think that has informed a lot of my personality. I have a kind of blinders on. I don’t know that I would be any different otherwise. Maybe I would be more social, but I’m so not social. Shocking. I’m very much a hermit. I don’t want to be around people, but I go out and live my life. I just look like a normal old woman. I wear my Dodger cap down, my braids and sweatpants, and walk my dog. I have taught myself not to look in people’s faces.

Really?

Yeah. There are certain tools you use to hide.

But are you still observing while you do that?

Yes, I’m aware of it. And it’s good that I’m aware of it, and it doesn’t take hold of me. Something will happen as I’m walking, say in New York, for instance. I’ll hear something in a crowd of people and my instinct will be to look up and see what they’re talking about, look at their faces. But my instinct says, don’t do it. And so I’ve sort of spent my life with this voice inside my head that says, don’t look up, don’t look there. You have a feeling early on as a celebrity that you’re sort of kicked out of the human race. You no longer belong to the club. You’re somewhere else.

I hope this means something to you: Fans look at you, and we see our lives. You are the film soundtrack of our lives in a lot of ways. And when we see you continuing to work like this, we’re taken back to that moment we saw that performance, or when you won those two Oscars. That must feel special.

I’m not really aware of it. I’m very close to, luckily, my three sons, my five grandchildren and my two magnificent daughters-in-law. They inform me. I’m just Grammy or Mom. They could care less half the time, it’s more like, “When do we eat?” But they do inform me. This film did come to me in galleys before it was published, like I say, brought to me by this new company, Night Owl, Brian Unkeless and Peter Craig. And Peter Craig happens to be my oldest son, who is also a magnificent writer. This was the first film out of their production company. He wasn’t able to visit the set a lot in Vancouver, because he was shooting something else he’d written and was showrunning in Philly at the time. But the few times he did come, one of them will be something I hold in my heart forever. We were shooting the last scene, or one of the last scenes—one of the most, if not the most, important scenes in the film—which is on the pier with Marcellus. I won’t say what happens. But it was pouring rain in Vancouver, about 32 degrees, and it’s highly emotional. So I’m walking along, holding onto this emotion, doing this work, really cold but not showing it. I couldn’t even go get warm between takes because it was too far away. Finally we wrapped that portion. I could go up the ramp and sit in the car where it was warm. And down the ramp came my son Peter, dripping wet, running to wrap his arms around me. I will hold that memory forever.

That makes it worth it. I’ll end on this. It’s really not a question, it’s more of an apology. An entire generation saw you as the villain in Mrs. Doubtfire. Now that I’m an adult, I realize it was actually very strange for the ex-husband in the film to put on a disguise and invade your home. So, I want to apologize for ever thinking you were the villain. You were actually the hero.

We wanted to show a divorce that isn’t all about enemies. Relationships don’t always last forever. And too bad this one [interview] won’t, but we’ll see each other again.

I hope so. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you so much.