The Thomas Crown Affair star Rene Russo turned a mid-career slump into a chance to focus on her physical and mental health away from the Hollywood spotlight.
Having broken into the entertainment industry as a fashion model for Vogue and Cosmopolitan in the 1970s, Russo made her big screen debut in the 1989 sports comedy Major League. Her star ascended throughout the 1990s with leading roles in thriller In the Line of Fire and action-comedy Get Shorty, along with forming a bankable on-screen duo with Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 3 and Ransom.
A string of box office disappointments, such as The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Big Trouble, in the early 2000s took a toll on her starpower, so Russo opted for an extended break from acting to focus on her personal wellbeing. She explained in 2014 that she “started ironing at 9 years old” in her household and never stopped working from there.
“There was never any time, and then I was doing two movies back to back,” she recalled. “Look. A lot of people started at 9, and do two movies back to back. I think it’s just your constitution, and for me, there were other things that I wanted to do. At a certain point, I had to ask myself, ‘Well Rene, if you don’t do them, what? Are you just going to keep doing one movie, after another, after another?’ And honestly, there wasn’t anything that I wanted to do in terms of parts either.”
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Russo then joked that she’d grown especially tired of “getting up at 4:30 in the morning” to be on a film set.
“I don’t like it, and if I’m going to get up at 4:30 in the morning and earlier to have makeup on my face and [sit in] a cold trailer… Now I know I’m sounding like I should really not say this, like I’m totally not grateful for my job, which I am because it’s a great job for a whole lot of different reasons,” she confessed. “But unless it’s something that I feel I can share my feelings or my emotions, so that I can be a reflection for other people to go ‘Wow, I’d do that!’ or ‘Wouldn’t I?’ or ‘I can relate,’ then it’s just not fun for me.”
One key project Russo worked on during her Hollywood hiatus was designing an environmentally sustainable garden that could adapt to droughts. She partnered on the garden project with California’s Department of Water and Power.
“So usually I don’t talk about these things but I just feel like California doesn’t necessarily have a sense of place because people have just ripped everything out of the ground when East came West and brought their water-loving gardens,” she noted. “We’re in a huge drought, so I’ve got in a completely native garden that I spent a lot of time with the designer doing, and I loved it. It’s really an amazingly artistic creative thing to do, and I worked with a genius.”
Russo also devoted her energy toward her mental health for the first time, despite struggling since her childhood. During a 2015 appearance on The Queen Latifah Show, Russo said she’d finally “pushed through” through years of self doubt to begin taking medication after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“I pretty much hit a wall,” she explained to host Queen Latifah. “My mom said my whole childhood, ‘You’re stop-and-go.’ I stopped and I had to, like, [say], ‘Whoa,’ that was it for me.”
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The Yours, Mine & Ours actress remembered that she literally “hit a wall and couldn’t get out of bed” before finally deciding to make her mental health a priority.
“I thought it was depression, but if you take antidepressants it speeds you up more. I’m kind of stop-and-go, I either crash or speed,” she noted. “I haven’t shared this, but I think it’s kind of important. I have some friends who don’t want to go on medication, and they are suffering.”
Now in a much better place, Russo was ready to make a long-awaited acting comeback. Her casting as the Asgardian goddess Frigga in Marvel’s Thor in 2011 marked her first big screen role in five years. (Russo reprised the Marvel character in 2013’s Thor: The Dark World and 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.)
Russo followed up her foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by teaming up with her husband Dan Gilroy on leading roles in his hit thrillers, Nightcrawler and Velvet Buzzsaw. (Russo and Gilroy tied the knot in 1992 and welcomed daughter Rose the following year.)
She received a BAFTA Film Award nomination for Nightcrawler but lost the category to Patricia Arquette for Boyhood. Russo took another break from Hollywood during the pandemic, but a new role could be on the horizon since Gilroy recently finished a multi-year commitment to the Disney+ series Andor.
