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Movies & TV

Sarah Silverman goes dark

I’m not the only person who’s noticed that Laney Brooks, Sarah Silverman’s character in I Smile Back, bears a slight resemblance to Geraldine, the unhappy recovering alcoholic she played in Sarah Polley’s 2011 drama Take This Waltz. But that was a supporting role, and I Smile Back puts Silverman front and centre.

Sitting down at the Fairmont Royal York just a few hours before the movie’s TIFF premiere, Silverman acknowledges the connection between the characters, and points out another one: she didn’t expect to play either Geraldine or Laney.

“Neither of those parts were things that I looked for,” she says. “For me the similarities [were] that Sarah Polley could imagine me doing something that I had not already done before – which is so rare, oddly, in this creative world – and Amy Koppelman did the same thing.

“She heard me talking about depression on the radio [when Silverman was promoting her memoir The Bedwetter] and she connected me to Laney in that way. So I got to benefit from two creative people imagining me in a [role] that I hadn’t already done before.”

It must be flattering to be approached that way, I offer.

“Yeah, it was a cool opportunity that I just wasn’t seeking out at all,” she says of I Smile Back. “I couldn’t believe they wanted me. And also it didn’t occur to me it would ever get made, is the truth,” she laughs.

“I was just going ‘Yeah, sure! Uh-huh! I’ll do it!’ she says, eyes popping with affected enthusiasm. “And then it became real, and I was like, ‘What have I done?’ I was so scared. But I comforted myself by saying ‘It’ll still be fun I’ll be sad between action and cut, but we’ll have a good time.’ And I’m so glad I didn’t know otherwise at that point, because I would have tried to chicken out of that. It’s a lot of emotion to carry around.”

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Kathryn Gaitens

Really? I ask. You would have pulled out?

“Probably, knowing me,” she laughs. “I’m not brave. But sometimes being brave is just existing through things, you know?”

She nods to the paint-splattered overalls she’s wearing, which up until this point I had thought were just a funky wardrobe choice.

“My mom died a few weeks ago, and these are her overalls,” she says. (Silverman’s mother, theatrical producer and director Beth Ann O’Hara, died on August 24 at the age of 73.) “She painted many sets in them, and one thing she said to me, she would say, ‘Sometimes all you have to do is be brave, in just existing.’ I think that’s something that would have benefited Laney.”

I Smile Back screens at 6:45 pm Saturday (September 19) at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See more from TIFF here.

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