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Even Philip Seymour Hoffman recognized how “hard” Mike Nichols was on Marcia Gay Harden during the famed “The Seagull” Broadway production in 2001.
More than 20 years later, Harden recalled during Sony Music Entertainment’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast, hosted by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, how director Nichols treated her like the “guinea pig” during the star-studded play. Years later, Nichols apologized to Harden for how he treated her — but only after Hoffman’s urging.
“I had won an Oscar for ‘Pollock’ and I got an offer, not even an audition, to play [character] Masha in ‘The Seagull’ in Central Park,” Harden said. “The cast of names was bonkers: It was Chris[topher] Walken, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stephen Spinella, Larry Pine, Deborah Monk, John Goodman. So of course I’m going to do it.”
Harden continued that she hoped Nichols would find her to be “the new Meryl Streep,” a frequent Nichols collaborator.
“I had in my vain little mind that Mike [Nichols] would see me and realize I was the new Meryl Streep, you know,” Harden said, “but he needed to now make ‘Sophie’s Choice’ too but with me. I just had in mind that he would love me and that he would find someone similar in spirit and passion that he had for Meryl.”
She added, “By the way, I didn’t know that anyone is similar to Meryl. I think she’s singularly one of the most inventive….she’s a goddess. But I was thinking he might think I’m goddess, too, and that I’m on another tier, maybe.”
Instead, Harden says she was the “one person who gets picked on, and when the show isn’t going to be successful, it’s going to be that person’s fault.”
Harden said, “There’s no way that person can ever be successful. No. Anyway, we’re doing it, and it’s that cast of all those people. And actually, Meryl, rightfully so, was the reigning queen of that particular play. So it very quickly became clear that no matter what I did as Masha, it was the wrong thing to do.”
Harden cited the different treatment she received compared to Streep.
“I remember even in tech rehearsal, I was like, [in the first] three minutes into the play, ‘I’m sorry, can I go back and take this again?’ Mike says ‘no.’ Cut to Meryl, the end of Act Two or something, and she’s like, ‘Can I go back to the beginning?’ And he was like, ‘Yes, of course.’ Like, this is my perception of it, right?”
Harden, who shared a dressing room with Streep, asked the actress through tears why Nichols didn’t like her.
“At one point I sobbed to her and I said, ‘I don’t think Mike [Nichols] likes me. I don’t think Mike likes me.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know if he likes her or not. And it doesn’t matter,'” Harden said, with Streep adding at the time, “‘I don’t think he likes Masha. And it’s your job to stay loyal to your character.'”
Yet their co-star Hoffman had a slightly different take, Harden said. The late actor apparently told Nichols that he was “really hard” on Harden, and in 2009, Nichols apologized to the actress.
“I was doing ‘God of Carnage’ and unbeknownst to me, Mike is in the audience one night with Diane Sawyer, his wife,” Harden said. “And he bursts into tears and I hug him and he says, ‘I was really hard on you during “The Seagull,” wasn’t I?’ And I said yes. And he said, ‘Even Philip Seymour told me I was really hard on you during “The Seagull.”‘ And I said, ‘Well, you were.’ And he says, ‘Who knew? You’re one of the greatest actresses in America.'”
Harden added, “That’s why the end of the story is a little embarrassing to say, but he said it. And I think that the takeaway for me is that it was a two-way street. Mike was disappointed in what I didn’t know. And he was also playing favorites, as he does. He can be very hard on people, but he was disappointed that I didn’t instinctively come at it with what he knew. And so he punished me a little bit for it.”
Nichols died in 2014.
“The Seagull” was later adapted into 2018 feature starring Annette Bening, Saoirse Ronan, Elisabeth Moss, Brian Dennehy, and Corey Stoll.
English (US) ·