An actress who rose to fame with “House” and “Once Upon a Time”, and a director for the past ten years — most recently of “The Five-Star Weekend” on Peacock — Jennifer Morrison opens up in a long, unusually candid video interview: about friendship, motherhood, the complex women she plays, and one idea that might change the way you work — receiving criticism the way an athlete receives a coach’s correction.
“Holding Space” for the People You Love
A Chicago native — “an open book, but a private person” — Morrison opens the conversation with friendship, the very heart of “The Five-Star Weekend”, which she has just directed from Elin Hilderbrand’s novel: a grieving woman gathers her closest friend from each phase of her life, from high school to mom life. During the shoot, several members of the team went through losses of their own. At a loss herself, the director called her best friend, who handed her back her own portrait: “Just do what you always do — you hold space. If what they need is to laugh, you’ll make them laugh; if what they need is to cry, you’ll hold them while they cry.” Ever since, her chief concern has been not adding to the other person’s burden: a message that says “please don’t respond to this — I just want you to know I’m thinking of you.”
No Woman Is All One Thing
Her interviewer notices it: Morrison is remarkably good at conveying inner conflict without over-emoting, playing women who are strong without ever being flat. Her answer is one of the interview’s high points: “We’re never all one thing. I don’t think any woman is all one thing — no matter what category you want to put yourself into, or someone else wants to put you into. I am a very different person at home when I’m a mom, compared to when I’m running a set, compared to when I’m acting on a show. Those are three very different versions of me, but they’re all authentic.” She calls out the double standard that weighs on women — asked to split themselves endlessly, then suspected, if they vary, of not knowing who they are: “We all rise to the occasions we’re asked to rise to, and all those parts of ourselves are little pieces of a whole.” That conviction shapes her acting: looking for a character’s layers rather than her surface.
Criticism, Like a Coach’s Correction
Then comes the idea that gives the video its title. On the set of “Yellowjackets”, which she also directs, Morrison marvels at a cast she describes as “emotional athletes”: a director’s note is met there with a voracious hunger, never taken as a judgement. “If someone were playing professional football, they’re not going to take a criticism as ‘oh my god, I’m a bad person, I’m terrible.’ They’re going to go: ‘I can run that a tenth of a second faster — I’ll try it.’” The coach, she reminds us, couldn’t do what the athlete does: the correction doesn’t come from a place of judgement but from a single question — how do I make you your absolute best? “If you receive the note the way an athlete receives a correction, it’s invigorating. And everybody’s got to feel like they can try: actors need space to fail, and directors need space to fail in their notes too. Sometimes magic happens, sometimes a disaster happens — and you course-correct.”
Ten Years Behind the Camera
That philosophy grew out of an actor’s frustration. For many years, she recalls, despite all her research and her passion for her characters, she felt people were getting “maybe 10 to 20 per cent” of what she had to offer. Directing became her way of giving more. Her production company carries a manifesto of a name: Apartment 3C, after the flat she shared at university with three friends from strikingly different backgrounds — already a village of women. Behind the camera she has kept her performer’s methods, like her old habit of tearing pages out of magazines without censoring herself, letting a character’s colour palette and texture emerge from pure instinct.
Serendipity and Bottomless Curiosity
Chance played its part too: she very nearly skipped the audition for “House”. Convinced at 24 that no one would cast her as a 32-year-old immunologist, drenched by a Los Angeles downpour, without a minute to pull herself together, she ran straight into director Bryan Singer in the lobby, and dared to ask for his notes before playing the scene rather than after. The part of Dr Allison Cameron was hers. Every project since has fed a curiosity she calls bottomless: the doctors’ memoirs devoured for “House”, the real spinal surgeries observed while preparing “Dr. Death”, the whaling history of Nantucket discovered for “Five-Star Weekend”. “That’s one of the reasons I love this industry: you never run out of things to be curious about.”