Catherine Keener has spent three decades stealing films from the edge of the frame

Catherine Keener

Photo: GabboT / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 26, 1959 Miami, Florida, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Get Out, Into the Wild, Incredibles 2
Awards	New York Film Critics Circle · Los Angeles Film Critics Association · Boston Society of Film Critics · Gotham (shared) · Independent Spirit (shared)

There is a scene in Get Out that many viewers can replay from memory. A woman in a cardigan sits in an armchair, drawing a teaspoon slowly around the rim of a china cup, and the young man opposite her sinks through the floor of his own mind. The woman is Missy Armitage, a psychiatrist and a mother, and she was played by Catherine Keener, an actress who had already spent a quarter of a century as the sharpest, least accommodating presence in American independent film. A studio horror hit gave her its most quoted image, decades into a career built far from the multiplex. Keener is a two-time Oscar nominee who has never carried a blockbuster, a performer directors keep calling back, and someone who seldom gives interviews because, as she once put it, overexposure “becomes a dirty business.”

Her parents, Jim and Evelyn Keener, gave her a mixed inheritance: Irish on her father’s side, Lebanese through her mother, née Jamiel. She came into the world in Miami, grew up Catholic in Hialeah, just northwest of the city, and went through Catholic schools. Acting arrived late and almost sideways. At Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, she majored in American Studies and only signed up for a theater course along the way. Her first production, in her junior year, was Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others.

Keener, born on March 26, 1959, graduated in 1983, and the first screen credits were small: a single line in About Last Night…, a regular part as Lt. Cricket Sideris in the police series Ohara, and the backwoods thriller Survival Quest, where she worked with the actor Dermot Mulroney. Television audiences caught her in the Seinfeld episode “The Letter” as Jerry’s girlfriend, a painter whose portrait of Kramer drives the plot. Her first lead came with Tom DiCillo’s Johnny Suede, opposite a then-unknown Brad Pitt, and it earned her a first Independent Spirit Award nomination. She went on to appear in each of DiCillo’s first four features, among them Living in Oblivion, his comedy about a low-budget shoot falling apart.

The partnership that defined her began with Nicole Holofcener’s debut, Walking and Talking, which brought a second Spirit nomination. Keener appeared in each of Holofcener’s first five films, through Lovely & Amazing, Friends with Money, Please Give and Enough Said, and together they built something American cinema rarely sustains: a long conversation about money, vanity, guilt and female friendship, with no villains and few apologies. In the middle of that run came Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. Her Maxine Lund, a coolly mercenary co-worker who turns a portal into an actor’s head into a business, earned her a first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and the New York Film Critics Circle prize. She worked with Jonze twice more, most visibly as the mother in Where the Wild Things Are.

One season in the mid-2000s showed how wide her range ran. She partnered Sean Penn in The Interpreter, played opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in The Ballad of Jack and Rose and became the woman Steve Carell‘s character finally dates in Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. The same year she played Harper Lee in Capote, a quiet, watchful performance beside Philip Seymour Hoffman that brought a second Oscar nomination and a BAFTA nomination; for that run of films the Los Angeles and Boston critics both named her best supporting actress. Hoffman became a recurring partner. She played his wife in Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, whose ensemble won the Gotham Award and the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award, and again in A Late Quartet.

Penn cast her again in Into the Wild, his adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book, in which she plays Jan Burres, the traveller who briefly mothers the runaway Christopher McCandless on the road. Then came the hardest role of her career. In An American Crime she played Gertrude Baniszewski, the Indiana woman who tortured and killed the teenage Sylvia Likens in her home, a part that leaves no room for audience sympathy; when the film aired on Showtime it brought her Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

The standard reading of Keener has a blind spot. Rotten Tomatoes crowned her one of the queens of 1990s American independent cinema, a compliment that quietly files her away in a single decade, and The Independent observed that most of her studio roles had barely registered. Both judgments undersell the record. Studio work is where she reached most people: the voice of Ugga in The Croods and its sequel, Sally Jackson in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the wife of Tom Hanks‘s captain in Captain Phillips, Evelyn Deavor in Incredibles 2. Get Out then turned the received idea upside down by making her warmth the threat, so that the polite, therapeutic manners Holofcener had used for comedy became the instrument of a horror film about liberal racism. The director Rebecca Miller once said Keener is “very good at playing disgruntled.” Keener’s reply was that anger is not a bad thing, because it does not sit comfortably with behaving in a ladylike way. The “indie darling” label tends to sand that edge off.

Television has kept her busy since. In Kidding, which ran for two seasons on Showtime from 2018 to 2020, she played Deirdre, the head puppet maker of a children’s show and sister of Jim Carrey‘s host; in Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavor she was Boro, a mysterious sorceress. On film she played the executive Maya Sorian opposite Ryan Reynolds in The Adam Project. In Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux she was Maryanne Stewart, the lawyer building an insanity defence for Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck until he dismisses her in the middle of the trial, in a sequel that critics and audiences largely rejected.

Her private life has stayed mostly private. She married Mulroney in 1990; their son, Clyde, was born in 1999 and became a singer, and the couple divorced in 2007. Keener has said she does not think of herself as famous, and interviewers describe someone eager to discuss her collaborators and reluctant to discuss herself.

Her next film opens in American cinemas on October 7. In Love of Your Life, directed by the cinematographer Rachel Morrison and produced by Ryan Gosling, she plays the nurturing matriarch of the big New England family that Margaret Qualley’s Boston nurse marries into, alongside Gabriel Basso, Aaron Pierre and Patrick Schwarzenegger. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and reaches Prime Video worldwide on October 14. It is a supporting part in a studio romance, which is where Catherine Keener has been doing some of her best work all along.