NEW YORK — Fresh off a much-needed vacation to Egypt, Saffron Burrows is in a chatty mood. Over breakfast at Café Nougatine, she speaks passionately about her devotion to the British National Civil Rights Movement organization; resignedly dismisses her new BlackBerry (“it’s a terrible thing, really”) and bemoans the trendification of her beloved East London neighborhood, all before settling down to the serious business of discussing her latest film, writer and director Mike Binder’s “Reign Over Me.”
But even this conversation is punctuated by frequent bursts of laughter and girlish giggles. And appropriately so, for despite its melancholic subject matter, “Reign Over Me” allows its sad, isolated characters their measured comedic moments. The film brings together the unlikely pairing of Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler as Alan and Charlie, respectively, two former college roommates who have a chance reconnection five years after Charlie has lost his wife and three daughters in 9/11. Alan is a successful dentist, happily married but emotionally stifled; Charlie is so heartbroken that he has reverted to a state of denial and obsessive behavior. And the two form a newfound friendship. Burrows stars as Donna, a potential patient of Alan’s who sexually propositions him in his office and continues to float in and out of his life and Charlie’s throughout the course of the film.
“The first time I read it I was like, ‘Oh. Oh!'” laughs Burrows of her reaction to Donna’s promiscuous behavior. “So I was taken, of course, because who wants to play someone dull or banal or generic? I did start quizzing my dentist about such occurrences, like, ‘Have you ever had any awkward moments?’ He said he hadn’t entirely…but he had a bit of a twinkle in his eye like he knew exactly what I was talking about.”
As we learn early on, Donna’s behavior is a reaction to her own personal trauma, one that causes her to haunt the story like some romantic specter. “Well there’s that little phrase, ‘damaged people damage’ and I think that’s obviously the case with her,” explains Burrows between sips of English Breakfast tea laced with soy milk. “She’s potentially very troublesome because of things that have happened in her life. I see her as such a lost soul, untethered and without a center.”
Related Articles
You May Also Like
The same could not be said for Burrows’ current professional state. The actress, 34, who modeled for a few years before making her film debut opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in “In the Name of the Father,” is perhaps best known to American audiences as Andromache in 2004’s ill-received “Troy.” But of late, Burrows has a slew of indie and big-budget projects that seem poised to confirm her talent beyond her Forties siren-worthy sculpted cheekbones and exaggerated bow pout.
Just this winter, she shot Amy Redford’s directorial debut “The Guitar,” in which she plays Mel Wilder, a woman with terminal cancer, and the tentatively titled “Baker Street” about a famed London bank robbery.
“There’s probably a pairing between Mel Wilder and Donna. They are women who are never looked upon by anyone. They’re never beheld,” muses Burrows. “Very rarely does someone address them and look them in the eye because they’re not shining in any way. They’re all shut down…which is an interesting thing for an actor to look at because we’re so used to being onstage or taken in by an audience.”
In keeping with her precocious upbringing (she became a political activist at age eight, thanks to her socialist parents), Burrows turns toward a diverse selection of sources for creative inspiration. As the Jean Shrimpton-esque figure she plays in “Baker Street,” she invoked Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days”; Donna had her turning to William Yeats’ poem “Second Coming.” As for what quotes future roles might conjure up, chances are they will require equally hefty backgrounds. “I love playing people who are either at the end of something or desperate in some way,” says the actress. “People who are beyond their natural mode of behavior.”