From Stage to Scream

By Jess Cagle

Emily Watson is not the kind of actress you expect to see in a serial-killer movie. Ever since her Oscar-nominated performance in 1996's Breaking the Waves--as a beautiful young religious fanatic who talks to God while having sex with strangers--she's had critics scrambling for words like luminous. Yet her charms have never been employed for big-budget Hollywood movies, despite an illustrious resume that includes 1998's Hilary and Jackie (for which she received a second Oscar nomination) and a juicy bit in last year's Gosford Park as a rough-edged servant who drops her knickers for the master of the house.

"When the question of a big Hollywood movie would come along," says Watson, "they'd occasionally go, 'Who?' Others would go, 'Over our dead body.'" The 35-year-old actress, who has a throaty laugh several octaves below her normal speaking voice, says she was known around studios as "that mad, bad, dangerous girl who takes her clothes off and weeps a lot." But now Hollywood is taking a chance on that girl. In Red Dragon, Watson gives a heart-breaking performance as Reba, a young blind woman who seduces Ralph Fiennes' titular madman so thoroughly that he thinks twice about biting off her fingers. Director Brett Ratner offered her the role because he was impressed with her work in Breaking the Waves. But Watson also felt that Red Dragon was just mad, bad and dangerous enough for her. "If you're going to do it," she says, "this is the way to go, isn't it? In a Hannibal Lecter movie."

In October, Watson will fall for another oddball, Adam Sandler, in Punch-Drunk Love, a seriously twisted romantic comedy designed to give Sandler the artistic credibility that has so far eluded him. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights and Magnolia), the movie stars Sandler as a lonely, disturbed bachelor and Watson as the apparently pulled-together woman who falls deeply, inexplicably in love with him. Though Watson and Sandler are as unlikely a pair as you will find onscreen this year, Anderson wrote the movie with them in mind. "Emily and I got together for lunch," says Anderson, "and at the time we were both scratching for something else to do. In our case, that meant something with no crying and no dying. When I told her I wanted to do something with Adam Sandler, she lit up."

While preparing for her Red Dragon role, Watson hung out with a blind woman. For Punch-Drunk Love, she familiarized herself with her co-star's work. "I sat down and watched the Adam Sandler oeuvre," says Watson. "It's quite a delicious thought. I'm in London watching Big Daddy and all that, and Adam's in Los Angeles watching Breaking the Waves. I do enjoy him on film. I just think he's got something that's so lovable."

Next up, Watson will produce a film she co-wrote with her husband, screenwriter Jack Waters. At the moment, she's back home in London, appearing in the Donmar Warehouse productions of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. "After Red Dragon, the biggest, most Hollywood-est movie I've ever been in, this opportunity came up," she says. "To be able to play Viola and Sonya in the same breath--it's good." Best of all, she doesn't have to share a dressing room with a cannibal. --By Jess Cagle