Deragh Campbell (left), and her mother Jackie Maxwell, at the Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto on Sept 4.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Growing up, actress Deragh Campbell recalls a youth stacked knee-high in the arts.
The dinner table was crowded with hungry playwrights, the shelves stacked with books, her weekends consumed with wandering behind curtains and prying open dressing-room doors. Which is what happens when your father, Benedict Campbell, is one of the most acclaimed Canadian stage actors of his generation and your mother, Jackie Maxwell, is the country’s leading stage director, a game-changer who has bent such institutions as the National Arts Centre and the Shaw Festival to her innovative visions.
Yet it was never assumed that Deragh or her younger sibling, Lou, would go on to live a life devoted to the arts. Just the opposite.
“We weren’t at all going, “You have to be in theatre” – in fact, we never talked about it in a career kind of way,” recalls Maxwell. “Even when Deragh called me and told me that she was going to be in a movie, I was like, ‘What?’”
That movie, Matthew Porterfield’s 2013 drama I Used to Be Darker, would lead Campbell along the path to becoming one of the most captivating screen performers of her generation, her raw and stirring work starring in Kazik Radwanski’s 2019′s Anne at 13,000 ft. and a series of acclaimed Sofia Bohdanowicz shorts. And now, Campbell’s career will receive a huge push at this week’s Toronto International Film Festival, where her two new films, Radwanski’s romantic dramedy Matt and Mara and Bohdanowicz’s psychological drama Measures for a Funeral, will screen.
At the same time, Maxwell is directing two of the most eagerly anticipated stage productions of the fall: the Canadian premieres of Annie Baker’s Infinite Life, at Toronto’s Coal Mine Theatre starting next week, and My Name is Lucy Barton, Rona Munro’s adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s novel, at Canadian Stage’s Bluma Appel Theatre in October. Meanwhile, Lou is touring their acclaimed solo show PRUDE, across the country.
Ahead of the family’s momentous season, Maxwell and Campbell sat down with The Globe and Mail at the Coal Mine to discuss – mostly with each other – their mother-daughter dominance of contemporary Canadian culture.
Let’s start with the roots of the family dynamic. Jackie, was arts the bedrock of raising children?
Jackie Maxwell: It was omnipresent. Ben and I moved around a lot at the beginning. We were a theatre family – you guys would run around, no doubt quite dangerously, in theatres. It was just given that when we went to the theatre, they would go backstage and see the actors, the costumes.
Deragh Campbell: When I think about my childhood, it’s almost like shows are chapters. I was eight when my grandfather was directing my father in Oedipus Rex at Stratford.
Maxwell: It was a big deal taking you and Lou to Oedipus, and then seeing your father come out blinded, his two shattered daughters at his side. I’ll never forget you looking up at me like, “Whaaaat?” I thought, oh god, I overshot this.
Campbell: I associate Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies with my childhood, six through 10. And then being a teenager and it aligning with modern theatre when we moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake: Chekhov and Ibsen and Williams. That’s when I started thinking I wanted to be a writer. It was those plays – the drama of conversation, the in-depth emotional journey of people speaking to each other.
Maxwell: I was doing Saint Joan, and you kept saying it’s about a teenager, someone people don’t listen to. We were talking about it so much – and I had to write program notes, which I always find tiresome – that I said to you, okay, I’ll pay you to write the notes. And you did, at 14.
Campbell: There was no kids table. We’d hear you guys talking about the work and the process. But besides theatre, the real inheritance that made my life was just reading. That was always a part of our lives.
Maxwell: You were probably a way-too-early reader of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees. It’s funny, because I’ve always been pretty plot-driven. Deragh lives close to Type bookstore, and she heads straight for the section with the sign “Plot-less Fiction.” The notion of how you tell a story, we still talk about that together. Working on the Annie Baker play now, for example, the big part of my job is how to make sure we’re honouring the way she is telling this story, which in her case is through an extraordinary use of silence, pauses. We’ve always had a lot of conversations about why this play or why that play.
Campbell: We also both famously, with movies and plays and also books, like it pretty dark. I remember The Plough and the Stars – it has to be pure devastation by the end.
Maxwell: One of my more popular shows at the Shaw.
What are some of the more brutal pieces of art you’ve made each other watch?
Maxwell: You conned me into it not too long ago, this German comedy ...
Campbell: Toni Erdmann? That’s a comedy that ultimately results in the impossibility of connection and the inevitability of alienation.
It’s Germany’s most popular contemporary comedy ...
Maxwell: Exactly, a thigh-slapper!
Campbell: I didn’t really discover movies until I was cast in Matthew’s film in my twenties. But watching films on my own, the tools I was using felt very much like the ones I had acquired through watching and talking about plays. But I had never talked about being an actor when growing up.
What flipped that switch?
Campbell: I was doing creative writing at Concordia, and what I ended up liking about the programming was workshopping other people’s work. In our house, there would always be meetings with the production team, actors coming home after a hard day of rehearsal, talking through everything. There is a magic thing that happens with collaborators, when you actually have to reckon with whatever it is you’re creating.
At this point in both of your careers, do you find yourselves drawing inspiration from one another?
Maxwell: Apart from weeping the minute that Deragh’s films start, I find it fascinating, having the pre-conservations about a project as much as the post-conversations. With Kaz’s movies, they always take so long. I found it revivifying that you can tell a story like that and you didn’t have to sit in a room with a big fat script. You can build a story through these different storytelling modes.
Campbell: One of the things I respect about what both Kaz and Sofia do is that they invent their own process. Similarly, how you’ve been talking about the Annie Baker play – we’re talking about what gets us excited about the process of making it. But we’re also trying to talk about what we’re excited about, like getting you to see Matthew Rankin’s new film at TIFF, Universal Language. It isn’t completely about your own work, but the work that you’re seeing, and sharing it.
Maxwell: And what could be better than that?
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Editor’s note: (Sept. 6, 2024): This article has been updated to correct the title of the play The Plough and the Stars.