When Annette Bening likes a project, she jumps in. That’s what happened with Netflix’s festival hit “Nyad,” based on the story of 60-ish cranky competitive swimmer Diana Nyad and her refusal to abandon her dream. When she signed on to star in Nyad’s story of swimming 110 miles in open ocean from Cuba to Florida, Bening wasn’t thinking about the details of what playing the title character would entail. She just wanted to play the part.
Over the course of her three-decade career, which has yielded four Oscar nominations, Bening’s dramatic and comedic roles have run the gamut from con artist, Machiavellian schemer, and gangster’s moll to angsty suburban housewife. But she’s never been identified as a physically athletic actress.
“I’ve always been an athletic person in my personal life,” she said over Zoom. “I’m an exercise person since I was 20.” In “Open Range,...
Over the course of her three-decade career, which has yielded four Oscar nominations, Bening’s dramatic and comedic roles have run the gamut from con artist, Machiavellian schemer, and gangster’s moll to angsty suburban housewife. But she’s never been identified as a physically athletic actress.
“I’ve always been an athletic person in my personal life,” she said over Zoom. “I’m an exercise person since I was 20.” In “Open Range,...
- 12/20/2023
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
There’s a story long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad loves to tell about herself — Ok, there are allegedly lots of stories Diana Nyad loves to tell about herself, but for brevity’s sake, we’ll stick with this one — about the provenance of her last name. “Nyad” traces back to “naiad,” a Greek mythological aquatic nymph. You can see why Nyad would be so taken with this coincidence, one allegedly drilled into her ad nauseam by her father, Aristotle Nyad, who we repeatedly meet in flashback during the film, only later to learn — oops! — he was actually her stepfather, thus rendering moot one of the myths Diana built for and about herself.
More thrilling: the myths that ended up being true. Over the course of their lauded documentary filmmaking career, Vasarhelyi and Chin have been consistently compelled by outsized personalities driven to accomplish seemingly insane physical (and thus also mental and emotional) feats of strength,...
More thrilling: the myths that ended up being true. Over the course of their lauded documentary filmmaking career, Vasarhelyi and Chin have been consistently compelled by outsized personalities driven to accomplish seemingly insane physical (and thus also mental and emotional) feats of strength,...
- 10/19/2023
- by Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
“Nyad” tells the true story of athlete Diana Nyad (Annette Bening), who, at the age of 60, decided to attempt swimming the 110 miles between Cuba and Florida — a goal she failed to achieve three decades earlier when she first tried. The journey ended up taking four years and multiple attempts, which created an interesting problem for screenwriter Julia Cox: How does one tell a compelling cinematic story that is by its nature both repetitive and relatively solitary?
“It’s an unusual sort of sports story,” Cox told IndieWire. “It’s naturally kind of episodic, and although there’s a team around her, the event itself is mostly one woman in the water with her support boat.” Cox began with Nyad’s memoir, which she found rich in detail but also overwhelming in terms of the amount of material. “I had to chisel this thing down to a manageable shape, and...
“It’s an unusual sort of sports story,” Cox told IndieWire. “It’s naturally kind of episodic, and although there’s a team around her, the event itself is mostly one woman in the water with her support boat.” Cox began with Nyad’s memoir, which she found rich in detail but also overwhelming in terms of the amount of material. “I had to chisel this thing down to a manageable shape, and...
- 10/18/2023
- by Jim Hemphill
- Indiewire
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