I wish i could be like Naomi Watts

At 35, Naomi Watts might have seemed a bit long in the tooth to reasonably expect to attain the kind of stardom enjoyed by her near-lifelong best mate Nicole Kidman – and yet suddenly she seems to be on her way.

The English born, Aussie-raised actress got into acting following a childhood she describes as ‘incredibly sad’. Her father, Peter Watts – the one-time sound engineer and tour manager for Pink Floyd – died when Naomi was ten, and after a series of highly unsuitable boyfriends, her mother decided to move the family to Australia.

It was down under, at the age of fourteen, that Naomi was bitten by the acting bug, and began trying out for small parts and commercials. At one such casting call, she met Kidman, and the two have been close ever since, going on to star alongside one another in John Duigan’s 1991 film, Flirting.

When the film recieved a positive reception on its American release, Naomi moved to Los Angeles expecting offers to come flooding in. They didn’t.

"I thought people would have remembered me in Flirting considering it did so well in North America," she recalls, "but most people didn’t even remember that Nicole Kidman was in it. Even now, people don’t remember I played Jet-Girl in Tank Girl. But there are so many disappointments in this business that you just have to be resilient. What’s weird is that the disappointment keeps getting bigger as you get older. It’s like the scab keeps coming off!"
Naomi’s CV includes such duds as the disastrous 1993 adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea, and Children Of The Corn IV – The Gathering.

That all changed though, when she landed a role in Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s darksome, doppelganger-populated take on the Hollywood dream factory. Her performance as the perky starlet Betty Elms, and the cynical Diane Selwyn, won lavish praise, though it took her a while to negotiate with the famously eccentric Mr. Lynch.

"Obviously, Mulholland Drive was a non-linear story, so I asked a lot of questions, but he would just smile smugly and torture me. So basically to stop myself breaking down in floods of tears all the time, I stopped asking questions.

"Now he is, at the same time, very communicative, but you have to figure it out yourself. He doesn’t give much instruction. While he does have these ideas about how the film should play, he’s not attached to them or fixated on them, because that would leave him with no opportunity for new things to occur. Mostly, I remember him using a lot of physical or facial expressions."

The part was a fantastic opportunity for thespian showboating, and doors started to open all over town.

"It was very complex. There’s a spectrum of black and white and good and evil, and innocence and sexuality in all of us. It’s not just about the greys in between. We can experience two extreme emotions in one person. So, it was a great experience."

Since then, she has remained in the public eye thanks to girls’ nights out with Nicole, and a high profile relationship with Heath Ledger. Of course, her most recent role, in the phenomenal sleeper hit The Ring, has also helped massively.

This atmospheric remake of the Japanese horror movie Ringu casts Naomi as a journalist investigating an urban myth about a sinister videotape.

"The tape has a bunch of weird images, which don’t seem to correlate," she explains. "You don’t know what they mean, but they are weird and stunning. They trigger off all these questions like – Where did this come from? Who made it? Then, bang, the phone rings and you pick it up, and a voice tells you that you will die in seven days. And you do."

What attracted her back to the notoriously uneven horror genre? It can’t have been that she wanted to repeat the Children Of The Corn IV experience.

"No. Definitely not. The main attraction was the fact that my character Rachel was a normal person. She goes through extreme circumstances, but she’s based in reality. I liked the notion of playing an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances."

With The Ring cleaning up at the US box office, success may have come relatively late for Naomi, but she’s got no regrets.

"If I was in my early twenties," she reflects, "I wouldn’t have been ready. I probably would have been a flash-in-the-pan – and who wants that?"

The Ring is released on February 21