Isabella Rossellini on Conclave, Faith, and Farm Life

You never quite know where Isabella Rossellini might pop up next. Since her beguiling breakout role as a nightclub singer in David Lynch’s masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986), Rossellini has navigated her career with a playful spirit. She’s worked with experimental auteurs ranging from Robert Zemeckis to Denis Villeneuve, appeared in episodes of Friends and Tales From the Crypt, and is responsible for one of the funniest line readings of all time, courtesy of her two-episode arc as Alec Baldwin’s ex-wife on 30 Rock. And that’s without even mentioning Green Porno, a charming series of short films that Rossellini wrote, directed, and starred in for the Sundance Channel, in which she acts out the mating rituals of various insects and animals.

Most recently, Rossellini has enjoyed a streak of scene-stealing supporting turns as the aristocratic mother of Josh O’Connor’s absent lover in La Chimera, the omniscient narrator in Problemista, and a talking shell in A24’s big-screen adaptation of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. She also appeared this fall in Conclave, Edward Berger’s religious potboiler about a cardinal (Ralph Fiennes) who finds himself uncovering various secrets and scandals when he is put in charge of electing a new pope. It’s like an episode of Gossip Girl set at the Vatican, with Rossellini as a knowing nun whose small amount of screen time is intensely effective.

“It almost felt like a silent-film-star performance,” the 72-year-old icon tells Vogue over breakfast. “The Catholic Church is a very patriarchal society, and women often don’t speak, so when I finally do speak towards the end of the film, it feels like a bomb going off.”

Here, Rossellini catches up with Vogue to discuss Conclave, Death Becomes Her opening on Broadway, why Blue Velvet almost ruined her career, and leaving Hollywood behind for a farmhouse on Long Island.

Vogue: What does it take to lure an actress of your stature into a project these days?

Isabella Rossellini: Edward Berger simply sent the script to my agent—which I read and immediately loved. I had seen All Quiet on the Western Front, which is quite a superior film, so I was delighted to work with a director of his caliber. Some of the actors were not cast yet, but there was a rumor that John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci might be doing it, so I called them up and told them I was doing it.

Is it common to speak to the other actors in negotiations for a project when you’re considering a role? Like, “I’ll do it if you do it”?

Sometimes! But you can really only do it with friends, otherwise it feels like an indiscretion. I made a movie with Stanley years ago [1996’s Big Night], and we’ve been friends ever since. I did want to know if they were doing it, partially because their involvement made me wanna do it even more.

Your character, Sister Agnes, is sort of a specter who observes a lot of action from the background of the film. How did you find your take on her?

I have a very silent role—Sister Agnes is almost like a shadow. She’s present all the time, even when you can’t see or hear her. Thankfully, I am very familiar with silent films because this almost felt like a silent-film-star performance. The Catholic Church is a very patriarchal society, and women often don’t speak, so when I finally do speak towards the end of the film, it feels like a bomb going off.

What did Edward communicate to you about what he wanted out of your performance?

Edward was very clear about his intentions. He wanted the scenes with my character to be shot in a very claustrophobic manner. The way he uses the sounds of silence, humming, breathing, and heartbeats are almost as important as the words. On the first day of filming, we shot a sc,ene where the camera was very high and the nuns and cardinals all looked like dots. The nuns were blue dots, and the cardinals were red dots, and just the way we move in the frame tells you everything you need to know about the hierarchy of this place. The red and blue dots never mix because there’s such a distinct separation between sexes.

What about the film appealed to you in terms of what it has to say about faith and doubt?

I go back to that speech that Cardinal Lawrence [Fiennes] gives near the beginning of the film, when he’s talking about the ills of certitude and the importance of embracing uncertainty. Without doubt there wouldn’t be faith. That idea moved me a lot because, all our lives, we’re asked to have certitude when it comes to everything, from who we vote for to who we marry. We teach children to respect certitude, but the fact is that we are humans and the mystery of life is far bigger than our certitude. Many may claim to have the answers, but there are limits. I thought the film was a beautiful illustration of that point. I was familiar with this world because I’m from Rome and I went to nun school.

You’ve said in previous interviews that you grew up with a liberal Catholic education.

My family wasn’t particularly religious except for my grandmother—although she didn’t even go to church! I went to a Catholic school in France run by nuns from third grade all the way through high school. My brother went to another Catholic school run by a Jesuit priest who had the reputation of being very intellectual. In Rome there are the conservative and liberal sectors: There are corrupt priests and ones who are not. It’s particularly conservative in Rome because that’s where the Vatican is, so you participate in political and moral debates connected to the church almost daily. Every Italian newspaper reports on murder, politics, international headlines, and what the pope said.

Given the film came out in the thick of election season, it’s hard not to draw a connection between our current political climate and the dirty politics depicted in the film. Did you have those types of conversations on set?

Yes, we did, but it really was also quite a coincidence. The debates in the church and the film are the same debates that we’re having all over the world. How do you define gender? What is the role of women? Is tradition more important than emancipation? All these debates exist beyond the election. The book [Robert Harris’s 2016 novel Conclave, on which the film is based] was written several years ago, and the script follows it quite closely.

Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen Conclave, but I wanted to discuss the ending. It’s revealed that the character Cardinal Benitez [Carlos Diehz] was born intersex, that the previous pope knew, and the conclave has unknowingly elected Benitez as the first non-male pope. What was your interpretation of the ending?

One of the biggest debates in our culture today is gender. There is a higher percentage of people than you may think who are born with genitals that are neither male nor female. I spoke to a doctor who said this happens quite often and they generally perform surgery based on functionality. They do tests to determine whether you have ovaries, and based on whatever external physical attributes you have, they can do an operation right away so that your sex is male or female. But Cardinal Benitez didn’t know and lived his entire life in doubt. At the end, when he says the pope offered to pay for the operation to remove his uterus, but he declined because God made them this way? There are layers to our humanity, and that’s the power of this film. It’s very spiritual in that way.

Have you consciously tried to explore themes related to gender and sexuality in your work? I really enjoyed the Green Porno series that you made for the Sundance Channel a few years ago.

I’ve always asked questions but never quite to the degree that Conclave does. When it comes to issues of gender and sexuality, people are sometimes scared to say the wrong thing or ask questions that may challenge preconceived notions others may have about the world around them. That’s partially why I loved making Green Porno. I made it because I was amused at all of this sexuality that exists in nature. It was an intellectual exercise where I could ask questions and learn things I’d never thought about before.

Do you have a personal favorite episode?

I really love the one about dogs and the one about dolphins. I also have a fascination with the one about a spider that gets eaten by her babies and the one about a hamster that eats her babies. Isn’t it fascinating that the scope of the maternal instinct can range from the hamster to the spider?

You got your MA in animal behavior from Hunter College in 2019. Do you think you would’ve worked with animals if you hadn’t been an actor or model?

Yes, but I do run a 30-acre farm, so in many ways I’ve managed to fuse all these passions.

How did you end up running a farm in Long Island?

About 12 years ago, a neighbor was developing it but got discouraged. The price of farmland in Long Island has gone way up, and farmers cannot afford it anymore, so now it’s all turning into resorts. She said, “Why don’t you buy it? You’re a tree hugger!” So I bought the land, and with the help of the Peconic Land Trust, a trust in Long Island whose mission is to support farmers, we changed the zoning to residential farming and into the sprawling oasis that it is today.

I feel like every New Yorker—myself included—has the same dream of leaving the city behind for farm life without fully realizing what that lifestyle entails.

Everybody says, “You chose such a quiet life”— not at all! I was lucky to meet a woman named Patty Gentry, who was a chef who wanted to become a grower. She has an operation called Early Girl Farm within the Mama Farm property where she grows her vegetables. I curated the collection of animals and make sure they eat every day. There’s also vaccinations, fences coming down, weathering storms. Patty does her own thing, but I’ve hired two people to help me look after the animals and a third person to manage the bed and breakfast.

So it’s not all hikes and fresh produce?

There’s plenty of that as well. When I’m there we’re doing everything from gardening to cooking lessons to knitting. I manage the bees since everybody’s afraid of how small and nasty they are—I’m covered up like an Ebola doctor, so it feels like armor. But it’s a lot of work and constant problems. I still have a small apartment in New York that I visit just to take a breather sometimes.

Do you miss living in the city at all?

Not really. I’m close enough that I can hop on a train if I ever feel the draw. But once you move out of the city, you sorta lose touch with what’s going on. I don’t know what exhibits or shows are happening anymore.

Do you plan on seeing the Death Becomes Her musical coming to Broadway?

I’m actually visiting Boston tomorrow to record the announcement they play beforehand, asking audiences to turn their phones off. They asked me to do it as my character. I’ve heard the show is quite good.

I read a lot of positive reviews when it played in Chicago earlier this year.

I won’t be able to attend the opening since I’ll already be in Europe, touring my one-woman show. But as soon as I’m back for Christmas, that’s one I want to see.

Was Death Becomes Her your first time working on something of that scale, in terms of sets and special effects?

I had done a few studio films before, but Death Becomes Her was on a whole other level. We all thought we were doing something that was gonna be successful because Robert Zemeckis had done all these wonderful films, like Forrest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Everybody was expecting Death Becomes Her to be another big hit, and I remember Robert saying he felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. When it came out, I sensed a bit of disappointment about the way it was received.

And yet now it’s developed such a strong cult following.

Every Halloween, I always see people dressed up as my Blue Velvet character. But suddenly, in the last few years, I’ve seen more Death Becomes Her costumes. It really seems like younger generations have embraced that film.

I watched an interview you did in 1989 to promote Cousins, and the journalist asks in a slightly appalled tone whether you’re sorry that you made Blue Velvet.

I got fired by my agents because of that film. I did Blue Velvet because I ran into David Lynch at a restaurant. I had just done a film with Helen Mirren [1985’s White Nights], and he wanted her to play Dorothy Vallens, but Helen didn’t wanna do it. The next day, he sent me the script, and I liked it, but I asked if we could rehearse because I wanted to understand this unusual character. I saw her as a battered woman but also something of a predator herself because of the way she engages with Kyle MacLachlan’s character. David, Kyle, and I talked through the script and rehearsed the whole night, and David really liked my interpretation, so he hired me.

And it never felt like you were making anything particularly controversial?

Not at all. We were a tiny independent film, so the press wasn’t paying much attention until The New York Times gave it a very positive review, which really put a spotlight on the film since reviews had much more influence at the time. I remember someone from the New York Post writing that Ingrid Bergman should come out of her grave to give her daughter a citizen’s arrest—which honestly made me laugh. It was also still relatively early in my acting career, so my agent wasn’t paying much attention until after the film came out. He just knew I was making a film with David Lynch about a mystery in a small town.

What was his reasoning for firing you?

He said: “We do not represent porno actors.”

Did you feel like the film had a negative impact on your career?

I didn’t have an agent for quite a long time. Tom Luddy was a producer who founded the Telluride Film Festival, and he championed Blue Velvet at a time when it was being heavily criticized. Tom was producing a film with Norman Mailer called Tough Guys Don’t Dance and offered me a leading role. This was at a time when I couldn’t get an agent and felt sorta ousted from Hollywood. Little by little, I managed to crawl my way back to a career.

There were obviously controversial films before and after Blue Velvet, but why do you think the film got under people’s skin?

People seemed upset at the suggestion that these horrific things could be happening right under your nose in suburbia. The nuns from my school were still alive at the time and wrote to me saying how devastated they were: “How could we have raised this girl who would choose to make such a sinful film?” Bear in mind they hadn’t even seen it! I wrote back saying that making a film wasn’t a sin and that I wanted to tell this woman’s story. They wrote back saying they had a mass where all the nuns prayed for me, so I just said, “Thank you for the blessings.”

You’ve worked with everyone from auteurs like Peter Weir and Denis Villeneuve to first-time filmmakers like Julio Torres. What do you look for in a collaborator now?

I just look for talent that excites me. Julio is an incredible new talent, and the way his mind works is so abstract. I like how it makes me look at the world around me differently. I still have a fire in my belly to be challenged. I had to read the ending of Conclave two or three times to fully understand it. But I’m also not sure how many more movies I have left in me.

Do you have any interest in retiring from acting? I’m questioning more and more these days if I should stop working as an actress—or at least only do a few projects now and then so I can really concentrate on my farm. I’d have to figure out how to make it all work financially because I am getting up there in age. I’m happiest working on the farm with the sun shining on my face, so I want to spend more time doing that.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.