Source : the age
Brooke Shields can’t play funny because she is too pretty. So say some male network executives with whom she locked horns over her new murder-mystery, You’re Killing Me. In the series, by Mother of the Bride writer Robin Bernheim, Shields plays crime-romance novelist Allison Chandler, the bane of the local detective (Tom Cavanagh) in a cosy fishing village in Maine, the kind where nothing much happens – except a worrying number of homicides. Allison is funny, clumsy, sensitive and smart. But, according to the network higher-ups – despite Suddenly Susan, Lipstick Jungle and a legendary guest spot on Friends – Brooke Shields couldn’t be all those things at once.
“As an executive producer I’m privy to the comments from our bosses,” she says on a Zoom call from her home, an hour outside of New York City. Her expressive hands embellishing her words, Shields radiates warmth and passion. “A lot of it is still stuck in the old times. It’s like, ‘oh, no, she can’t be clumsy because she’s pretty’. And the more modern way of looking at this is: she’s all of that. She can be sexy and she can be faulted and that’s fine because she’s earned it. At 61 you earn all of your flaws and your experience. And it makes you so much more interesting. It was important for me to play a character like that to show the multifaceted nature of women.”
Strong, complex female leads are as old as storytelling itself, she says. Just look at Homer’s Odyssey, now a box-office hit.
“Anne Hathaway’s character [Penelope] and Calypso [Charlize Theron] – these are unbelievably strong women,” says Shields. “This is since the dawn of time … Women have been the forebears of strength before we even know. It’s why we have the children. I think that’s starting to become more part of the zeitgeist and not as threatening.”
The disconnect between Hollywood’s feminine ideal and the female experience is a topic she explored in her memoir Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Ageing as a Woman.
“You look at Irene Dunne movies and Lucille Ball, who was a beauty queen,” says Shields. “You look at true female comedy back in that day. Even the Marilyn Monroes. They were brilliantly funny and used their looks as a vehicle. So that by the time they had more dramatic moments, your heart was breaking, because they threw you off balance.”
Much of the comedy in You’re Killing Me stems from the generation gap between Shields’ character and cocky true-crime podcaster Andrea Walker (Amalia Williamson from Canadian romance drama Sullivan’s Crossing), with whom Allison is forced to collaborate to solve the murder of a fellow writer. The Gen X-Gen Z misfires yield hilariously awkward verbal slapstick to match the physical theatre.
“A woman of this age needs this young person in her life,” says Shields. “She can teach this young person and she can learn from her, too. And together, they’re stronger.”
She needed look no further for dramatic motivation than her relationships with her daughters, Rowan and Grier, with her filmmaker husband, Chris Henchy.
“A lot of [inspiration] came from my trying to set up my phone with Apple Pay, and my daughters being like, ‘Oh my god, Mum! Here!’ Or I’ll be saying to them, ‘Are you on the polly?’ And they’re like, ‘It’s not polly, it’s molly [the street name for party drug MDMA], and no!’ They make fun of me all the time. And so I went to Robin [Bernheim] and said, ‘We’ve got to put this stuff in there’.”
Retaining the dignity of the characters amid the rivalry was “a fine line”.
“If you’re the one being made fun of, you get more leeway. And it’s never mean. My older daughter [Rowan] has all this TikTok stuff that she does, and most of it is her making fun of me. I’ll learn the dance or whatever it is. I don’t understand what they’re saying. But it’s funny and I don’t take offence.”
After Rowan was born in 2003, Shields suffered postpartum depression, the subject of her memoir Down Came the Rain, and an infamous clash with Scientologist Tom Cruise, who criticised her use of antidepressants. In June this year, Rowan made her reality-television debut, joining the cast of Bravo network’s Next Gen NYC, which follows young professionals making their way in the Big Apple. Her mother wasn’t happy.
“I was horrified. But she held her own,” says Shields. “I got a message from [the show’s host] Andy Cohen that said she maintained her integrity and she is the grounding force. I said to her, ‘Don’t be the one throwing up. Hold the hair back of the person throwing up. Do not succumb to being mean. That’s not going to get ratings. I don’t want to hear that from you because that’s not who you are.’ So she stayed pretty steady.”
Shields barely recognises the industry in which she got her break in 1978 in the film Pretty Baby, and then shot to stardom in 1980 with The Blue Lagoon, before becoming a Calvin Klein model and Time Magazine’s Face of the ’80s.
“I’ve had to hire people to help me with social media. I hate it,” she says. “I’m not good at it. My younger daughter was modelling for a while, and she had a contract, and she had to do all of her own photography. I was like, ‘You’re working for Tommy Hilfiger. How are you doing your own photography?’ She’s like, ‘That’s the way it is, Mum’. And I mean, the word ‘influencer’ – what does it mean? And [fame] is so short-lived but that’s where the money is going. Someone has this many followers or this many TikToks and they pay them numbers that they would never get paid for a hard job. How do you battle that?”
As president since 2024 of the Actors’ Equity Association, Shields is lobbying the US government for better wages and working conditions for performers, particularly those employed by Disney’s theme parks and the Trey Parker/Matt Stone-owned restaurant Casa Bonita.
“The battles we’re fighting right now are heartbreaking,” she says. “You’re watching people work so hard and they’re not compensated. They’re not protected. They weren’t part of the union prior and they want to organise now. We’re going up against this massive industry and this conglomeration that doesn’t care about the people that are busting their asses for them.
“At Casa Bonita you’ve got cliff divers and there’s no safety. The idea that ‘the show must go on’ is not fair. I’ve had so many injuries myself from being on Broadway – taping up my knees and continuing to go on. Actors are considered disposable, and the amount they work, and the money they generate, it’s amazing. And that’s male and female.”
In Washington, DC, where “everyone wants a selfie”, she has heard shockingly dismissive statements about her craft.
“If you’re a plumber, you don’t have to pay taxes on your plunger, right? Well, under [former US president] Reagan, if actors had to pay for anything to do with their field – tap shoes, headshots, singing lessons – they didn’t have to pay taxes on them,” she says. “And then, in 2017, that miraculously just went away. We obviously know why, and so that’s another thing that I’m fighting for. I’ve had people in DC say, ‘Oh, wait, so you want funding so someone can follow a hobby?’”
Her experience at the age of 18, appearing in Bob Hope’s variety show for US troops in Beirut, was an early lesson in the value of entertainment. “Those 20 minutes of gags, monologues and songs for all these fresh-faced young people who were staying on the USS Guam – that was all we could give them. And it meant the world to them. We’re talking about entertainment as a form of escape and medicine, in a way. I’m not overstating it.”
Her new show, she says, “is a little escape … It’s just entertainment. It’s not too heavy.”
But she hopes You’re Killing Me plays a part in challenging those pervading perceptions about women that she has faced throughout her lifelong career. “Attractive females can also be smart and not afraid to be flawed. I’m OK with not being pristine and perfect.”
You’re Killing Me is now streaming on Stan (which is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead).
