It is almost 30 years since Marisa Tomei, near the start of her career, won an Oscar for her role as Mona Lisa Vito, Joe Pesci’s abrasive, quick-witted young fiancée in the comedy My Cousin Vinny (1992).
“I’ve felt differently about it at different times in my life… The further I get away from it, the more pleasurable it is. It was pleasurable at the time as well, but then I was ill-prepared for the attention afterwards,” she says of her breakthrough role. “But in the actual moment, and the doors it opened, it was wonderful.”
We speak during the Venice Film Festival. The last time she visited, she was driven in a minivan to the city by an unlikely chauffeur, George Clooney, from his villa beside Lake Como, for the premiere of his political thriller, The Ides of March (2011).
On another of her visits, to make the romcom Only You (1994), it started snowing over the canals. This time, she isn’t in town at all: I am sitting in an underground bunker in a hotel on the Lido, while she is talking via Zoom from New York.
A co-founder of The Naked Angels theatre company, Tomei works regularly on stage and TV. Her range is huge. While a new generation has got to know her as Peter Parker’s aunt in the Spider-Man films, over the years, she has done horror films (an instalment of the Purge franchise), comedies (such as Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island) and plenty of heavyweight independent dramas.
She has played strippers, divorcees, silent movie stars, doctors and cheating wives. Yet there remains a nagging frustration when she contemplates the state of her career today.
A few years ago, she made what she considers now to have been a grievous error: she agreed to play a mother on screen. “I really regret starting down this road,” she said last year.
She feels perceptions of her changed and the leading roles began to slip away. She isn’t married herself, doesn’t have children and doesn’t understand why she is so in demand to play mothers.
I put it to her that there are plenty of rewarding mother roles – Medea or Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.
“You can name the good ones. I’m talking about ‘the wife’, ‘the mum’. The real danger is when someone tells you you’re going to be the heart of the film. That means you’re going to be underpaid and not thanked. I feel like it translates the same way politically: it’s about the caretakers and the care economy,” she says.
Her distrust of maternal roles in no way means she regrets playing Aunt May in the Spider-Man movies. After the latest film, Spider-
Man: No Way Home, she hopes to work again on other projects with its director, Jon Watts. “I love Jon so much and to see Tom [Holland, who plays Peter Parker] and Zendaya [Peter’s classmate MJ] grow as artists is very exciting.”
Tomei relishes the “camaraderie” on the Spider-Man sets. “You do feel part of a family, which is very hard to find in Hollywood.” When she first took on the role, she and Watts talked extensively about… spiders.
“And the power of spider medicine, and how the spider in native American culture is the female, as she weaves the web of life. She cares about the community.”
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The Spider-Man movies are a long way from some of Tomei’s grittier work. I remind her of one of my favourite of her films, Sidney Lumet’s dark family crime drama, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), in which two brothers (Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman) rob their own parents’ jewellery store.
Tomei’s character is married to one brother but having an affair with the other. She, too, cherishes the film.
“I had always wanted to work with Mr Lumet. He had asked for me personally. Phil Hoffman and I, and Ethan Hawke, we all sort of came up at the same time in New York. We all had our own theatre companies. We were always influencing each other. It was particularly special to work with people you know so well as friends.”
The film begins with a notoriously graphic sex scene in which the huge, heavily sweating Hoffman is shown on top of Tomei. “Trust is the biggest thing for an actor to take risks,” she says.
“That sex scene was a super-weird day. I was really glad it was with Mr Lumet. It just felt so awkward. It was lucky we [Hoffman and I] knew each other.”
It helped, too, that Lumet was one of the rare directors in that period who was as interested in the female characters as in their male counterparts. “Often, it’s really an afterthought,” she says of how other film-makers often behaved.
Tomei has long fought against sexism within the movie industry. “There are laws being changed now. Then there is the consciousness that has been raised… I cannot tell you what it has meant. I never thought I would see something like this in my life – never!” she says. “I thought we would just continue to endure the big aggressions and the micro-aggressions.”
As a child, she used to read Ms. magazine on her mother’s subscription and came close to playing its co-founder, feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem on screen.
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“I met her at a party. She and I and George Clooney went to HBO to pitch it,” Tomei says of a drama series in which she hoped to star as Steinem. That was in 2015.
“They were interested but that was before it was in the zeitgeist. Now, we have that wonderful series [Miss America] with Cate Blanchett [in which Rose Byrne played Steinem]. Maybe I’ll get to play her later, in middle age.”
In Venice, the director Jane Campion described #MeToo as being like “the Berlin wall coming down” for women’s rights. Tomei used to think that, at best, small changes would be made in her lifetime. That was why she was so keen to make the Steinem series.
“But now we’re talking about Gloria. That wasn’t happening. The courage to stand up for oneself – you can feel society is open to it.”
As for her own career, there is one surefire way to tell the roles she values most. Early in her career, she played silent movie star Mabel Normand in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin (1992). “I loved that film,” she sighs. “Actually, my cat was named Mabel Normand. Robert Duvall told me: ‘Always name your pets after your favourite characters.’”
Spider-Man: No Way Home is in cinemas now. Marisa Tomei was at the Venice Film Festival as part of a Mastercard Conversation Series