Laura Dern's stardom is defined not by an ability to do a few things extremely well but by the staggering variety of full-bodied characters she inhabits while retaining her essence. BilgeEbiri writes
Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture We talk often of longevity in actors, but it’s almost always the result of hardheadedness — Tom Cruise or Clint Eastwood finding new ways to do Tom Cruise or Clint Eastwood things, even as the times change. Occasionally, it’s owed to a long list of capital-A accomplishments: Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis come to mind. But then there are those rare actors who change our very idea of stardom.
Just a few months after Smooth Talk’s theatrical release in 1986, Dern appeared in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as Sandy Williams, the next-door neighbor who, alongside Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont, gets pulled into uncovering a seemingly ordinary town’s vast, unspeakable underbelly. In Lynch’s vision, performers are called on not for their way around subtlety but for their ability to be big without ever going camp.
In some ways, Lynch still “gets” Dern better than just about anyone else. Four years after Blue Velvet, he pretty much confirmed her range by casting her as one-half of the snarling, lusty lovers at the center of his surreal hell-ride romance Wild at Heart.
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