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Rolling Stone May 2023

ph Tom Mitchell 

 

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Dianna Agron Has Come a Long Way From ‘Glee’

Star opens up about her exciting new roles, the ‘Glee’ years, fame in the late-aughts, and playing a whole bunch of shiksas.
 

DIANNA AGRON COMES off as remarkably calm, cool, and collected. Now 37, she seems sure of herself in ways she perhaps wasn’t when she exploded onto the scene in 2009 as Quinn Fabray, the head cheerleader on Ryan Murphy’s culture-shifting musical-dramedy Glee. She isn’t interested in examining her past relationships — while balancing an Arnold Palmer at the Swan Room, an Instagram-ready lounge in what interlopers are now calling Dimes Square — but is looking forward to the many exciting things she has in store.

“With experience comes more opportunity,” she says, citing her desire to direct.  

First is Hulu’s Clock, a body-horror thriller from Alexis Jacknow that follows a young Jewish woman (Agron, who is Jewish) who is pressured by her family and friends to enroll in a program by a biotech start-up run by Dr. Elizabeth Simmons (Melora Hardin) that promises to fix women’s biological clocks. Needless to say, things get very weird very fast. Then there is Acidman, director Alex Lehmann’s drama about a woman (Agron) who tries to connect with her estranged father (Thomas Haden Church) whose mental health is deteriorating. The film’s father-daughter relationship holds similarities to Agron’s own, as her father, a former Hyatt hotels GM, began losing his faculties after falling ill with multiple sclerosis and suffering a stroke when she was a teenager. It took Agron, who also produced the film, and Lehmann eight months to put together the project, from building the script to pitching it to financiers. And then there is The Chosen One, a Netflix adaptation of Mark Millar’s graphic-novel trilogy American Jesus that she stars in alongside Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Tenoch Huerta.

 

We talked about all that and more over the course of our hour-plus-long conversation.

How has navigating the pandemic been for you as an actor?
Well, I’d come off of doing a film weeks before it started. So, that felt good. As the first month started to set in, and everyone was trying to understand what would happen, I started thinking more about what I would like to be exploring as far as material. I had asked and thought I was ready to take on some father-daughter heavier material. I had an important, really long journey with my father’s deteriorating health over the years since I was 15, and while a decade ago that wouldn’t have been something I would have wanted to deal with, I had been having so much peace around how those relationships shift and what it means to have a parent that you lose pieces of over the years. I was thinking about that a lot, and I had made it known earlier in the year to Alex Lehmann that I really enjoyed his work and knew his process involved a lot of improvisation, which I thought was really interesting. A month into the pandemic — this time, three years ago — he sent me the script for Acidman and said the film was originally a father-son piece and he started tailoring it to be a father-daughter piece. It was wild timing and a nice thing to hold on to, because it was buildable in those first months of quarantine and Alex brought me on as a producer. It kept me going.

 

You’ve been exploring more Jewish films and roles on screen in recent years, since Shiva Baby.
It’s something I’ve been very happy to fold in.

That crucifix necklace you wore on Glee has turned into a Star of David.
I grew up Jewish and had a wonderful, hilarious Jewish grandmother, Joyce, who was very encouraging of anything I wanted to do, but would always tell me, “You’re a performer. You can do it all. You’re everything.” And it was funny because when I started my career she would say, “When are you going to play a nice Jewish girl?” And I’d say, “When the industry will start seeing me as one.” Quinn was very religious in Glee and in Novitiate I played a nun. I remember talking with Emma [Seligman] about working together on Shiva Baby and she loved that Kim was this shiksa wife. There’s this line where one of the mothers says, “Well, I’ve heard her father’s Jewish,” and the other woman says, “That doesn’t count.” That was a joke that we had worked up from our first meeting.

 

My father’s Jewish and my mother’s not, so when I go into somewhere like Crown Heights I tend to get that same line.
It was such a part of my upbringing. I went to Hebrew school. I was bat mitzvah’d. It was the only thing. I didn’t celebrate anything else. I was Jewish. No Christmas. I remember my mom joking one year that we would have a Hanukkah bush and put ornaments on it, but no. So, it’s funny that Shiva Baby opened the door and allowed me to run into all these Jewish characters.

Your real-life grandmother sounds very different from your grandmother in Clock, who’s this terrifying specter of a Holocaust victim stalking you from beyond the grave. You deliver this powerful speech in the film, too, about why the Holocaust tends to occupy a larger space in the imagination than other horrible tragedies.
Oh my god, yes. We made that film exactly a year ago today. There’s a point in that speech where, as she’s explaining all of that, she points to doctors and patients. What Melora [Hardin] is putting my character through in that moment, and asking her to trust her, there’s that [Holocaust] parallel in that moment. And there was no improvisation. It was exactly like a play and we hit beats. This movie was very personal to Alexis Jacknow, there were so many heads of department that were female, and it was a fun experience having so many people believe so fully in what we were exploring. We were also shooting this right in Texas as Roe was overturned, so it was charged. It felt emotional being on set, telling this story, and thinking about people who are having their choice completely stripped away from them.

 

In Clock, women’s reproductive systems are being controlled by a biotech start-up, which sadly doesn’t seem all that dystopian.
Totally. And I think this character, and I’ve experienced this a lot in my own life, it’s so bizarre to be this person where I feel really comfortable in my own skin, in my career, in my community, and yet all of that can be diminished by one comment. It’s strange to me how often someone will place judgment on your life choices or expect that you would be moving yourself closer to choices that they see fit. It’s so wild. There’s this “normal” timeline that people think everyone should stick to. My mom had me when she was 30. I’m 37 and have no children. I also have friends my age whose parents had them when they were 40 to 44 years old, but that was not as “normal.” Somehow, weirdly, 37 years later it is still not very “normal.” And, whatever choice you’re making, I don’t understand somebody — especially a stranger — feeling that they need to wake you up out of your fever dream, as if you don’t know what choices you’re making.

 

Does that happen to you at family functions?
It doesn’t happen to me at family function, but I was so surprised that it happened to me at a work event. It was an event surrounding the Tribeca Film Festival and there were a few journalists outside. One of them said to me, “Your mom’s name is Mary. So, is it at the top of the list?” And I said, “What list?” and she said, “For children.” And I said to her some version of, “We’re here to celebrate everybody’s work. I am so not comfortable speaking about that, and I’m very surprised that you asked me that here of all places.” It was weird. And I said it kindly, but I said it because that was how I felt and I’m more comfortable saying how I feel in situations that make me uncomfortable, and there was no registering that that was perhaps inappropriate. It was just on to the next question. And that blew my mind.  

That’s super weird. What was it like growing up Jewish in the South?
I was born in Savannah, Georgia, and my father is in hotels, so we traveled a little bit growing up. I was born living in a hotel, and then from the ages of two to eight we were in San Antonio, Texas. I was Jewish, and none of the other kids were Jewish, and I chose to do ballet as my extracurricular, so I was this weird kid that was teased and not exactly let in in the same way that I was when I moved to San Francisco. When I moved there, there weren’t many Jewish kids at my immediate school, but there were in the community, and I realized it was nice to have some people who could understand you and not just judge you. From eight to almost eighteen I was living in a hotel in San Francisco.

At the airport, right?
Yes. It was a unique experience, and it’s also why I’m really comfortable in hotels. You could observe so many things, and the daily life was very unusual, observing the comings and goings at that hotel. I think that experience also wanted and aided my desire to tell stories, because I saw so many things happening. You saw people coming in from all over the world. I had strict parameters as far as how I was able to use the hotel facilities. I couldn’t order whatever I wanted or run around terrorizing people.

 

Then you move to LA and start playing all these shiksa characters. Was that odd for you?
I really moved to Los Angeles to find a musical. That was my dream. I actually had a dance agent before I had an acting agent, and I would go on these auditions and ask anyone who would listen, “Where are the musicals?” People would tell me to move to New York, but I somehow had this staunch belief that I was in the right place. It’s funny, looking back, that my most desired thing because my actual reality. It was a full musical show. We did so many dance numbers I lost track.

What is it like looking back on that Glee period?
It does feel strange because we were such young people. If I see footage of myself from that period, I see my youth and I see the heart and community and family we had with each other. It’s emotional, nostalgic, heartwarming, and career-affirming. That experience opened up so many doors, and I’m so grateful that that’s how I learned everything. I hadn’t done TV for almost a decade, but we shot this series last year for Netflix [The Chosen One], which is an adaptation of a Mark Millar graphic novel. The boy who plays my son is 13 years old, and him and his friends, who are this Goonies/Stand by Me little bunch, they are all between the ages of 13 and 16, and they hadn’t acted before. Watching them interact with each other, I was reminded of the curiosity, enthusiasm, intrigue, and discovery that we had on Glee. It allowed me to reflect a lot on it.

Are you glad Glee didn’t exist in today’s chaotic social media landscape?
We were right at the beginning of it. I remember our studio executives suggesting that we could participate in Twitter. That was such a funny, weird thing for us, because between Myspace and things like Napster, we had experienced very low-level internet developments, so by the time Twitter came around, we didn’t really take it seriously. We didn’t anticipate that it would become as prominent in people’s lives as it is now.

Well, now it’s being ruined.
[Laughs] What do you mean? It’s perfect!

What was it like being a young female star on a hot show during that era?
I think it was a sliding scale of appropriate to terribly inappropriate, and especially if you’re playing a character who people find to be attractive, or you are a young person who people find to be fit in a box that they would like to put you in, which is “young and sexy.” That was the hardest thing for me to reconcile with. I was a pretty nerdy kid and not much has changed, so I didn’t ever really feel comfortable dolling up or expressing my sexuality in that way, because I didn’t even fully understand how I felt about my own sexuality. I really came of age on that show. I was 22 when it started. There were things that happened where I had to learn how to use my voice to advocate for myself, and I wish people would have had more of an awareness to support me or ask my permission.   

 

This was the Maxim and lad-mag era, where so many young female stars were being pressured into being shot in bikinis and stuff.
The very first photo shoot I had, which I love the photos from, actually, and it was a serious magazine, I showed up and there was a rack full of bikinis. I said, “I wasn’t told that this was the direction the shoot was going in and I’m not really comfortable. What else is there?” And then she pulled up some really lovely pieces. It’s weird to me that that was my first experience and I’d found my voice, and then years later, we had a photo shoot with GQ, and it was with Terry Richardson, and there were no other clothes, our reps were not there, and we were just told, “This is what you have to do for your show.” I remember feeling strange after about the whole thing.

Was Terry being a creep on that shoot?
He was not. It was a woman on set that played a role in the photo shoot, but he was kind. I remember when we shot the cover of Rolling Stone. That was a funny day. It is so strange to think of all those moments and the full spectrum of experiences you’ve had over 16 or 17 years of doing this. But I do feel that this is just the beginning. I feel so comfortable in myself, and in the work, and I’m able to access so many things that I wasn’t able to access in years prior. I think that the roles that I’m being presented are getting more and more fun — not to take anything away from the past jobs I’ve had. I’ve been waiting to play characters my own age, and that happened a few years ago.

 

How did you feel about the end of your tenure on Glee? There was much written at the time about how you were barred from the Cory Monteith tribute episode.
Not true. I think there are so many false pieces of information out there. That’s the weirdest thing that you have to learn in this industry — you don’t comment on things that are untrue, because that gives them more space. Maybe at the end of my career I’ll write a book and go into detail on everything that was very true and very untrue.

There’s been a lot of exploitation of the history of Glee, like the recent trashy docuseries The Price of Glee.
Right. I’m sure, which is really sad and unfortunate. At the end of the day, you can’t control what other people do. I’ll leave it for when I write my book at the age of 89. I picture this in Italy. Lunchtime consists of really delicious pastas, dinner consists of really delicious pastas, and I’ll sleep in a little. From 10:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. I write. Then I lunch. Then I take a sea dip. Then, from the hours of 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., I edit what I wrote. And then I do it again.

 

 

And you’re a New Yorker now.
This is my place. I’ve lived in New York for eight years now. I used to split time between New York and London.

I studied abroad in London my junior year of college. The indie music scene was pretty fun back then. It was when the Arctic Monkeys were first blowing up.
I think the only fights that I ever got in with my mother during my 13th or 14th year was that I always wanted to go to concerts on my own. That was the most contentious thing. There would be moments where I would be in my room saying, “You’re ruining my life!” It is funny to think back on, but there was a time where I really thought, “If I don’t see this show, my life might be ruined.” And you had no filming devices back then, so it wasn’t about showing people you had gone. I needed to feel the music within every inch of my body. I started lying to my family and was always sleeping at my friend’s house but then going to shows.

Who were you seeing back then?
Oh my god, it varied. Sometimes it would be Warped Tour, so whoever was playing that year: AFI, Blink 182, Sum 41, Gwen Stefani, Weezer. I saw Arcade Fire at the Bowery Ballroom last year, and it was incredible to see them in a small venue because I had only seen them in big ones. It was so special. Give me music that I love in a venue and the ability to be free with movement and dance, and that’s my happiest place. I want to be dancing eighty percent of my time, though that’s not what I actually achieve.

You have inspired music as well, since you’re in the liner notes as one of the inspirations for Taylor Swift’s song “22.”
Me? Oh, if only! That’s more because of a friendship than being the inspiration for the song. But I would not be the person to ask about that. I cannot claim that!

How do you feel about the way that friendship was covered in the media? You two were shipped.
Shipped?

You two were made out by the media and some fans to be in a relationship.
That is so interesting. I… I mean, there have been many stories about my dating life that are so wildly untrue. That’s funny.

 

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Bustle Magazine May 2023

Ph Evelyn Freja

 

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Dianna Agron Rejects Your Timeline

The star of the new horror movie Clock on surviving Glee mania, setting boundaries, and loving your 30s.

May 9, 2023
 

Dianna Agron is running late — she’s stuck on the subway. I have no problem believing this because I am on the exact same train a few cars away, as we learn when she sends me a heads-up text. My phone slowly receives a selfie of Agron waving through a grainy train window, face curtained by long light-brown hair, along with another message about how tickled she is that we’re sharing a classic New York experience. And it’s one we continue when we finally make it to The Odeon, the iconic Tribeca bistro. “It's been a staple since the 1980s, which is what I love about this place,” she says in her lilting voice as we mull over the menu. “This is a place that was happening when I was born and didn't even know that it would be waiting for me when I moved to New York City.” We get two dirty martinis and a plate of fries before gleefully cheering to being in our 30s. “I love this time, though,” she adds.

Agron has been thinking a lot about her 30s, and not just because we’re meeting up two weeks before her 37th birthday. Her new movie, Clock, out now on Hulu, is a sci-fi horror film that explores the immense societal pressures women, in particular those without children, face in that decade of their lives. But the film’s messages about making your own choices also resonate within the arc of her career. Agron spent six seasons on the pop culture juggernaut that was Glee — and enduring the intense public scrutiny that came with it — before more recently finding acclaim with a string of indie movies like Shiva Baby and Novitiate. With Clock, Agron pushed herself again. There are big action scenes (hanging from cliffs, elbow-deep gore), as well as dark emotional depths (involving painful family secrets coming to life). “Collected experience really does add up,” she says. “And I think that the life I've lived the last 10 years in some ways has been more magnificent and more challenging than my more formative years.”

 

Agron never thought she’d try her hand at horror, but the Clock script hit too close to home to resist. She plays Ella, a 30-something who doesn’t want kids but eventually gives into the pressure of prying family and friends and enrolls in an experimental clinical trial, under the leadership of Dr. Simmons (Melora Hardin), that promises to help women who don’t experience having a biological clock. “The moment I turned 30,” Agron says, “the amount of questions that I felt were far too personal — and from truly everyone — just intensified year by year.”

Even for an actor who came up in the Perez Hilton era of celebrity blogging and is used to skirting prying questions, Agron still finds herself surprised sometimes. Just last year, she was on a red carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival promoting the sci-fi drama Acidman when a journalist asked her out of the blue if her mother’s name, Mary, would be “top of the list” for her. “I truly had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked for clarification and she said, ‘The top of your baby list,’” Agron says. “I said, with all of the kindness, ‘You have no idea what my personal journey is. And I'm quite surprised that you asked me that at my workplace when I'm here to discuss a film that I'm in.’” The message didn’t land. “She had no remorse. She just bopped along to the next question.”

 

Clock only took on more meaning throughout production. Agron was in Texas shooting the last day of principal photography when the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked. “It did not feel good, that's for sure,” she says. “But then felt in some ways good that we were making [a movie that speaks] to some of the perils of being a woman and making choices that are more aligned with your own sense of self, as opposed to making choices for other people.” She dips a fry into one of the many condiments we’ve ordered. “All it takes is a film or a piece of journalism [for people] to open their eyes to different experiences that they could never imagine for themselves and have no personal touch points for. As a woman and one who very much loves women and loves the immense and enormous abilities that we have to carry so much, I wish that we had to carry less.”

When writer-director Alexis Jacknow was looking to cast Ella, she knew what she wanted: “It was very important to me that that character just already have a natural, grounded nature, a gravitas to her.” And she knew right away after meeting her that Agron could deliver. “There was absolutely nothing she wouldn’t do,” Jacknow says. “She pushed me, and there was just no hesitation on her part. She showed up every single day, 110%, and gave us everything.”

That is not an exaggeration. During one scene, Ella cracks open eggs into a frying pan and begins to eat them raw with a spoon. Jacknow didn’t want anyone to flaunt food safety guidelines, but Agron thought the only way to sell the scene was to actually do it. “Beef tartare, a whiskey sour,” Agron says, listing all the indulgences with raw ingredients she already enjoys. (There are reasons those are safer than raw eggs, but just go with it.) Jacknow proposed a compromise: Agron could put the raw eggs in her mouth as long as she spat them instead of swallowing. Agron agreed — or at least pretended to. “I winked at our [director of photography] and motioned at him like, ‘Don’t cut,’” she says, laughing. “I go to pick up the egg, I swallow it and go to take another bite. And I just hear, ‘Dianna, what the f*ck?!’”

 

Agron hasn’t always felt such autonomy in her career. When she was in her early twenties, she booked a role in a “big studio film” that, though ultimately a positive experience, involved an eye-opening screen test. “It was like, ‘We don’t like her hair like that, we need her to be more girly. We don’t like those clothes,’” she recalls. “I kept getting moved off set, changed, put back on stage, taken off again. I didn’t feel that I had any say in the matter, even if I had suggested something nicely. I was just a product at that point.”

Glee did not exactly help things. Agron says she was the last person cast for the show and describes getting the job as nothing short of fate. She grew up watching musicals with her mother in hotels on account of her father’s job as a manager at Hyatt. “Look, I moved to Los Angeles and I set out to find a musical. They were my absolute bread and butter. I told anybody that would listen to me, ‘I really want to do a musical,’” she says. “And [agents] were like, ‘No, try to be on Broadway.’ I just had this staunch faith that I was meant to be in Los Angeles and I would find a musical. And then it happened.”

But while she credits the show with changing her life, the show’s explosive popularity tested her boundaries. “There was a moment in time where there was not only a lack of acknowledgement in respect to personal space, there have been times where I've been put in a headlock and kissed on a plane. There have been times where mothers were grabbing you by the arm to meet and take a photo with their child,” Agron says. “There were so many personal attacks in a way that are just truly not what you do to a human. That feels specific to that time and that intensity of the feelings that people were feeling watching the show.”

 

So she moved to New York in 2016, eager to escape Los Angeles and its “predatory nature of people with lenses down there that just doesn’t exist in the same way in other places.” For a few years, she split her time between London — from 2016 to 2020, Agron was married to Winston Marshall of British folk-rock group Mumford & Sons — but now calls New York “my only home.” “Following my personal life is really not going to yield anything that interesting,” Agron says of public attention. And it’s true, the few times I tactfully (I hope) bring up topics that might lead Agron to open up about other aspects of her personal life, she gently deflects them. It’s clear she’s figured out a way to maintain her privacy while still being incredibly personal in the context of her work.

In New York, she’s able to follow her muse more freely. She’s reconnected with music through a string of residencies at the famed Café Carlyle, where she’s performed jazz standards and ‘60s covers. She served as a producer on Acidman and would like to do more behind-the-scenes work. And she’s relishing the chance to be a “waving the Jewish flag” kind of actor, choosing projects like Shiva Baby and As They Made Us that let her honor and explore her heritage. “I went to Jewish weekend school and Wednesday school for my entire upbringing up until my Bat Mitzvah and spent a lot of time with Holocaust survivors,” she says. “So it was a weird experience to then have many people say [in Hollywood], ‘You don’t look Jewish.’ It is weird to have somebody deny you your own personal experience.”

Next, she’ll make her return to television with The Chosen One, a multilingual adaptation of Mark Millar’s American Jesus comic book that follows a 12-year-old boy who gains the biblical powers of Jesus after a freak accident. She’s bonded with the younger actors on the show who have asked her for career advice — a full-circle moment for the now bonafide industry veteran. They’ve even watched Glee and marveled to Agron about how young she looks and seems. Her response? “I am!” she says, laughing.

By this point, our martini glasses have long been empty. Neither of us want to brave the train again, so Agron walks me up the street and, like a true New Yorker, gives me directions with a McNally Jackson tote slung over her shoulder. She gives me a hug, then turns to head deeper into Tribeca, forging a path all of her own.

 

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W Magazine May 2023

Ph Meghan Marin

 

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Dianna Agron Knows Exactly What She Likes

After more than a decade in the spotlight, the former Glee actress has a slew of exciting new roles—and a whole new take on her personal style.

Photographs by Meghan Marin
05.09.23
 
 

Ryan Murphy’s campy, high school musical dramedy Glee permanently altered the face of pop culture when it first aired on Fox in 2009. As Quinn Fabray, the blonde head cheerleader with a husky contralto singing voice, Dianna Agron turned a character that could have been a one-dimensional mean girl into a sympathetic, layered human being—and left a lasting impression on a generation of television viewers.

At 37, Agron is stepping into the spotlight again—not that she ever left. She’s had a successful string of acting roles in recent years, starting with 2020’s cult favorite, Shiva Baby, which sparked a wave of creativity for Agron and simultaneously introduced her to a whole new audience. Thanks to Glee clips on TikTok and the series’ current streaming status on Hulu, viewers are either discovering her or falling in love with her all over again.

But the actress’s current CV extends far beyond the realm of nostalgia. In Hulu’s new psychological thriller Clock, directed by Alexis Jacknow, Agron plays a Jewish woman pressured by everyone around her to kickstart her nonexistent biological clock (Agron is Jewish herself, and having been in the public eye for her entire adult life, the actress understands the strain). There’s also Acidman, in which Agron plays a woman trying to reconnect with her estranged father (Thomas Haden Church) as his mental health declines. Agron, who was a producer on the project, was able to tap into her past for the film—as a teenager, she watched her own father’s health deteriorate after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and suffered a stroke. This summer, The Chosen One (El Elegido), a Netflix adaptation of the graphic-novel trilogy American Jesus, will debut, with Agron opposite Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Tenoch Huerta. Between shooting projects and enjoying an intimate singing residency at Café Carlyle in New York City, which she calls home, Agron sat down with W to discuss her personal sense of style and the impact of Glee’s legacy.

How are you choosing roles these days?

Shiva Baby was just before the pandemic. The first projects I made after that were Acidman, immediately followed by As They Made Us. The grounded family drama was not an arena I had entered in that way; the jump from that place to what I made last year, between Alexis’s film Clock and Eduardo’s show El Elegido, I couldn’t have anticipated those moves. With Clock, I thought, If I’m going to try something that sits in a psychological thriller/horror genre, why not have that be related to women’s issues and fertility—things I had already experienced by way of people’s ideas about how and when you should be having children? It’s something I really could understand.

 

What about those themes really struck you?

We were filming in Austin, Texas right when the opinion paper had been leaked. Then when Alexis was filming the cold open a few months later, it was when Roe had been overturned. It was very sad to be on set to receive that information. In some ways, I couldn’t have imagined we’d be here. Then I remember a decade ago, women a few decades older than myself had said, always be watchful. This is always going to be something that’s contested. That’s something we were feeling when we were making this film.

Shiva Baby introduced you to a younger audience, who have also been rediscovering Glee. What’s that been like?

With Shiva Baby, I had a strong sense that if people were to come across it and watch it, they would feel tethered to the film. That proved to be very true. It truly is one of the most watched things I’ve been in, and especially because it’s an indie film, it’s not a given that you're going to have as many eyeballs on a project.

Because Glee is now on Netflix, it has these cycles. For example, the young people that were working on El Elegido, all of them about 13 to 15 years old, didn’t know me prior to filming. They started watching Glee, and Bobby, who plays my son, was like, wait a second! You sing, you dance, you act, you were this character and you were pregnant. Because I look so different now than I did then, he couldn’t quite believe it.

We’re in reboot-mania. Would you ever participate in any Glee-related projects?

You never know what’s going to present itself. In the entirety of my career, I’ve always stayed open. I never, ever thought I would return to TV and do a series that was predominantly in Spanish—you never know what’s around the corner.

Who’s your ultimate style icon?

Katharine Hepburn for sure, Diane Keaton for sure. And my friend Jane Wenner is a huge style inspiration for me. Miuccia Prada—she’s incredible.

Biggest fashion regret?

There are plenty of photos I look at from the first decade of my career where I think, wow, what an interesting hair color. What an interesting assemblage of pieces. But it’s also endearing. I mean, I walked out of the door with confidence.

What’s your daily uniform?

Oftentimes, I feel most comfortable in a suit. While I always admired women who wore a lot of suiting—like Katharine Hepburn and Diane Keaton—it never was something that I incorporated into my wardrobe until the last couple of years. But it’s an easy go-to that I know will make me feel like myself. While there are exceptions to every stylistic choice, I would rather you see me as I am in my presence more than notice an article of clothing I’m wearing.

You’ve got Prada loafers on right now; do you tend to favor a flat shoe?

I definitely like a flat shoe, because I love to dance. After so many years of wearing heels, I would never want to be inhibited by the shoe I’m wearing.

 

Do you remember your early experiences at fashion shows?

The first time I went to a fashion show in Paris was Marc Jacobs’s last show for Louis Vuitton. It was the show where a train appeared, and all the women and the porters came off of the train. It was so magnificent, otherworldly—I could hardly believe what I was seeing, or the fact that I had been flown there to participate. It was too much for my brain to handle.

Back in 2015, you directed a video for Tory Burch. Are you still interested in working with fashion houses in that capacity, as a creator?

Absolutely. I definitely am moving toward directing in a long-form way, but short form is so fun and a great way to tell stories, especially as it relates to clothes or music. People still have a big appetite for digesting small pieces in that way.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
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Thanks for these @Sunshiine.  :)  

 

So glad to see that Dianna's out there more lately with new projects and with more events to go to in order to promote those projects.  She's too talented to be absent from the screen as long as she seems to have been.  

 

Absolutely love her hairstyle here as well.  

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