In White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s latest film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel of the same name, professor of “Hitler Studies” Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his family are thrown into a spiral of uncertainty after a chemical spill releases a toxic cloud over their bucolic academic town. It seems almost fate, then, that Baumbach started working on the project at the dawn of a global pandemic. “He started writing it in earnest when we were in lockdown in New York,” Greta Gerwig, Baumbach’s partner and longtime collaborator, tells Krista Smith in a new episode of the podcast Skip Intro.
Gerwig plays Jack’s wife, Babette, who, underneath an effervescent 1980s mom exterior, is hiding a dark secret. “I loved Babette,” she says. “I had an instant picture of her in my mind. I knew exactly what I wanted her to look like: her hair, the glasses, the way she dressed, everything.”
In the film, Baumbach plays with cinematic tropes, revisiting multiple genres from disaster films to sci-fi movies. Babette, Gerwig says, plays with the conventions around the kinds of mothers we’ve long seen on-screen. “Babette fell into the iconography of, like, you know, ’80s film mom. And that was like a really fun thing. The smoke show that she’s got going is the thing that’s hiding everything that’s very strange about her.”
Gerwig agreed to take on the role early on, while secretly never believing she’d actually have to do it. “It seemed so apocalyptic, what was happening,” she remembers. “He said, ‘Well, who should play Babette?’ And I said, ‘Me.’ But I think I really only said it because everything felt unlikely. It felt unlikely that we’d ever even leave the apartment again with ease. In a way, it was like, ‘As long as we’re playing fantasy baseball. Well, yes. I’ll be Babette. And I’ll have Derek Jeter on my team.’”
Instead of the Yankees shortstop, Gerwig got Driver, with whom she’d previously worked on Baumbach’s 2012 film Frances Ha. “Fantasy became reality,” she says. “And then at one point, I met with Adam Driver and Noah. And we all sat together and read the script out loud. And that’s when it was really like, ‘Oh, my God. I think I would really do this.’”
White Noise will stream on Netflix on Dec. 30. For more great celebrity interviews, check out Skip Intro on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
