Merritt Wever Would Do Anything to Get Out of This Interview

In Primetime, she puts on a standout performance. In real life, she prefers the shadows.

Primetime is in theaters September 25.

Talking to Merritt Wever, 46, is an adventure in radical honesty. She’s a successful, thoughtful, in-demand actress who seems to be in a state of constant negotiation between the exhibition that comes with her art and her industry and her own impulse to keep some part of herself to herself. “I sometimes wish I could do my work,” she tells me, “without an audience.” When my colleague Kathryn VanArendonk went on a walk in 90-degree weather with her in Prospect Park in 2019 to discuss her work in the Netflix true-crime miniseries Unbelievable, Wever spent much of the interview professedly miserable about having to talk about her own life and craft. This time we’d planned to meet at Rucola, the Italian restaurant where you can regularly spot artsy-chic Boerum Hill folk like Bobby Cannavale and Rose Byrne. When Wever arrives in a simple black dress and Birkenstocks, she tells me she’s already gotten anxious about how the noise of other diners might muddy my recording and suggests we switch over to the wine bar Anaïs a few brownstones down the street, where the vibe may be more quiet. There, the AC is dead, but we find a table outside, and Wever orders a matcha latte — she jokes it’ll make her sound interesting — and announces that she really wishes she’d stuck to her first idea of swimming laps together in a public pool in Sunset Park. “I kept thinking of locations where this wouldn’t have been present,” she gestures toward the phone I’ve been using to record her, “which defeats the whole purpose.”

The tricky thing about Wever’s ambivalence toward being watched is that she is thrilling to see at work. She has built a career marked by performances that are both raw and precise and remarkably alive from moment to moment. A Merritt Wever character can be broadly comic, like her earnest sidekick on Nurse Jackie, or gritty and laconic, like her gun-toting widow on the western Godless or her detective in the true crime Unbelievable; but those characters always seem to lack a membrane between themselves and the world. She’s responsive, surprising — you can watch her awkwardly attempt to slip Adam Driver divorce papers in Marriage Story over and over and discover a new interesting choice each time. In the last two years, she’s won a guest-actress Emmy for her heartbreaking performance on Severance as a woman who falls for the Innie version of her husband and been nominated for another by playing Carrie Coon’s déclassé sister who barges into the starchy world of The Gilded Age. (Wever insists she can’t say whether those characters might return in the future.)

Wever was drawn to her latest role, in A24’s film Primetime, for its darkness. After playing a series of openhearted women, she was interested in someone who “almost willfully wants to deny her own humanity and the humanity of the people around her,” she said in a press conference about the film. She plays a TV news producer — the character, named Andie, is an invention based on real people — behind the 2000s pedophile-hunting series To Catch a Predator alongside Chris Hansen, played by a haunted Robert Pattinson. Andie is a creature of pure ambition and nearly blank morality, a sweatshirt-wearing, 2000s-era daughter of Lady Macbeth and Faye Dunaway in Network, though Wever purposefully didn’t revisit that film to keep her own performance distinct. Wever’s Andie projects her thoughts through the pace at which she constantly chews nicotine gum. Over the course of Primetime, Pattinson’s Hansen goes to Captain Ahab–esque lengths to trap targets and catch them on-camera. Sometimes Andie has qualms, often practical or logistical ones, but she doesn’t abandon ship even as Hansen’s quest for bigger ratings gets more desperate and ethically twisted. “There’s a part of her that doesn’t want to leave this world,” Wever says, “she’s attracted to mess, to nastiness.”

When we talk, Wever has recently returned from a trip to the Venice International Film Festival, where Primetime premiered and plunged itself straight into the fall awards-season race. Pattinson got rave reviews, as did Wever. New York’s Bilge Ebiri called her “astonishingly good,” while Variety’s Jessica Kiang said she “has never not been good in anything” but “is absolutely blistering here.” Both actors have very different processes, but, according to director Lance Oppenheim, they were united in the fact that they both preferred not to rehearse before filming. Onscreen, you see those styles collide. Pattinson throws his version of Hansen into scenes like a rogue squash ball — in one, he suddenly curls up on the floor in pain. Wever rallies back, getting down beside him like a wrestler and shouting for him to get up. But Wever says she’s still getting a sense of her own performance in the finished film. Primetime is Oppenheim’s first narrative feature; he’s known for documentaries, including a tantalizing upcoming project about Elizabeth Holmes with Nathan Fielder. In one scene in Primetime, Hansen and Andie head to a meeting with the head of NBC, Jeff Zucker, who plays himself. It’s a delicious amalgam of fiction and vérité: Zucker announces that he’s going to move their show to prime-time television, the big leagues, to run it against Lost, slapping its name over the flailing Aaron Sorkin drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In real life, To Catch a Predator didn’t actually replace Studio 60, but they were on the air at the same time, and Wever herself had an early career break playing a downtrodden assistant on the series. She remembers flying from New York to L.A. to film episodes, crashing on friends’ couches, and discovering, as the ratings sagged, that the spirit on set was getting increasingly grim. But she also doesn’t know if her own experience of that time matters.

“Lance gets excited about those overlaps, when there’s a bleed of what he considers to be real and not real,” Wever says. “But I see acting as trying to be as real as possible. When I tell people I’m a bad liar, they’re like, ‘Oh, but you act for a living.’ And then I’m like, ‘I work really hard to tell the truth when I’m acting.’” 

More than most films, according to Wever, Primetime’s shape changed radically throughout production and editing. An initial cut of the film ran over three hours; a second one came in around 72 minutes. The final version lies at 110 minutes. “More than anything else I’ve been a part of, I was not positive what we were making when we made it,” Wever says. “I left the experience knowing that I wasn’t going to know what film they chose to make until I saw it, and who the character was too.” She asks what I made of the film and her character, because knowing how people respond to Andie helps her understand who exactly she played. “You don’t have to tell me,” adds Wever. “I’m also just trying not to talk.”

I’d seen Wever with Oppenheim in a Q&A after a Primetime screening before our interview, where the two collegially discussed the “learning curve,” as Wever calls it, of making a film together. “I find that the more chaotic the situation is, the more I can discover little fragments of reality,” Oppenheim told me. She was used to treating the text of a script as scripture; he thought of it as more of a guiding document. “There were times Merritt struggled with that, and she made that very clear to me. But I liked that. I love Merritt, and I want to work with her on everything else I do.” Among the difficulties: three grueling weeks of night shoots to capture the film’s final sequence where Hansen and his crew coordinate with police to nab a target they want to get on-camera. “Lance and I get on really well, but we’re very direct with each other about what was hard” in the process of filming, Wever says. “And I am very glad he’s happy with my performance because that means a lot to me. But it’s my nature to go, ‘Oh, oh, oh, but that’s not … oh …’”

Wever’s characteristic, impulsive honesty and circumspection is something she’s wrestled with throughout her time in Hollywood. One of her most enduring moments as a public figure came not through a performance but when she won her first of three Emmy Awards for her role in Nurse Jackie in 2013. She delivered an 11-word off-the-cuff thank-you that ended with her announcing, “I gotta go, bye.” As we chat over coffee, she follows that same need to be real to a fault. She often mirrors back questions to me as if we are in a normal conversation and she’s not the one being interviewed: So where did you grow up? When have you regretted telling or not telling the truth in a piece of your own writing? At one point I ask why she hasn’t performed onstage for more than a decade — not for lack of trying, as it turns out; she auditioned for a play recently and didn’t book it. What she’d really like, she tells me, is to return to an intimate Off Broadway venue, like the Soho Rep, where she played Sonya in Annie Baker’s translation of Uncle Vanya in 2012. She then interjects, adopting a goofy voice, “I can hear my reps going, ‘Don’t say that! Say that you want to do Broadway!’”

After coffee we walk toward the nearby store Books Are Magic. On a set, Wever has trouble absorbing narrative fiction while trying to immerse herself in a character, but “I am woefully unemployed at the moment, so I’m going back to reading.” She recommends Harriet Clark’s The Hill, a novel about a woman visiting her radical mother in jail — up her alley, she says, because “we share some things”; Wever grew up in the Penn South co-ops in Chelsea with a caseworker single mother who held Communist Party meetings in their apartment. We also discuss Cynthia Ozick, Annie Ernaux, Sarah Polley’s memoir, and Lena Dunham’s Famesick. Wever herself was in Dunham’s 2010 film, Tiny Furniture, and read an excerpt of her memoir aloud for The New Yorker. The book is “a painful read,” she says, though valuable she adds, pointedly, for a journalist like me to understand “what it’s like for the people who are actually making TV, the toll it takes on your body.” Soon we’ve gone over our interview time, but Wever has gotten caught up in thinking about whether critics and artists can ever understand each other and has decided she really needs my take on this too. I do my best to reply honestly — that they only sort of can, because they speak in different ways toward different people — and she seems satisfied. We shake hands before splitting off in different directions. “My favorite part of this has been talking to you like a normal person,” she says, then catches sight of my phone again, “even though that was still going.”