E-mail a friendAnna Paquin
airdate April 15, 2009
Since garnering instant fame by winning an Oscar at age 11 for her performance in The Piano, Anna Paquin has remained in the limelight with roles in numerous projects. She also has an exec producer film credit (Blue Slate) and won new fans—and a Golden Globe—for the lead in HBO's True Blood. Born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, Paquin attended Columbia University in New York, where she began working in the theater. In addition to her series, she stars in the TV biopic, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler.
Oscar winner explains why her new project's focus on children is so compelling. (3:11)
Full interview. (12:15)
Anna Paquin
Tavis: Pleased to welcome Anna Paquin to this program. The Oscar-winning actress has starred in so many notable projects and took home a Golden Globe just this year, in fact, for her role in the TV series "True Blood." This Sunday night, though, you can catch her in the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of "Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler." The movie airs at 9:00 p.m. on CBS. Here now, a scene from "Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler."
[Clip]
Tavis: I saw this, Anna, and it was at once for me both embarrassing and inspiring. And I say embarrassing because I'm always amazed - and not that I profess to know everything; clearly, I don't - but I'm always amazed at the powerful stories of people around the globe that we know nothing about.
Anna Paquin: Nothing about at all.
Tavis: Not a freaking clue about the contributions to humanity that these people make until somebody like you and Hallmark and CBS brings it to life. So I'll give you the honors to tell me who Irena Sendler was.
Paquin: Well, Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker who lived in Warsaw during World War II and facilitated the rescue of 2,500 children out of the ghetto and re-homed them safely into other families, with new identities, and worked with the Polish underground.
Tavis: This is to take nothing away from Steven Spielberg, who I love, and the wonderful project, "Schindler's List," but the numbers are real. She rescues and saves more people than we have celebrated in the movie, "Schindler's List," just in terms of sheer numbers. I want people to properly contextualize the numbers of people that she was able to bring to say that's pretty - that's big.
Paquin: It is, it is. It's a very huge and incredibly impressive and sort of intimidating thing to be therefore sort of stepping into that person's shoes and trying to sort of do that person justice.
Tavis: So how, to your point about being intimidated by that, how does one go about doing that?
Paquin: Well, the only way I know how, which was researching as much as I could, reading everything I could find about her. There was a biography written about her. Unfortunately it was never published in English, and the translation was a little weird. But it was still absolutely fascinating and really, really useful.
I watched documentaries, I read eyewitness accounts and memoirs of other people who were in Warsaw at that time, because there really is nothing like firsthand experience to sort of inform what it was like to be during that time, even if it wasn't all her firsthand experience. And I found that really sort of helpful, and then jumped in and tried to do my best.
Tavis: And how's your Polish now?
Paquin: I can pronounce a few names and a few places. (Laughter) I sort of had this fantastic sort of hope that I would learn some Polish, except we shot in Latvia, our crew were Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian and Canadian, and there was some Polish, but it was like the most multilingual set I've ever been on, and I could barely tell the difference between the sort of languages by the end of it, but just. So my Polish, still nonexistent, unfortunately.
Tavis: I want to go back to your word intimidating, and just in terms of making comparisons - again, this is not to cast aspersion on anybody - but she rescues more people than Schindler in "Schindler's List," just in terms of giving you sheer numbers, and she was, as you will hear in just a moment more about her, but she was nominated for the Nobel Prize and in the year that she was nominated she lost to one Al Gore, taking nothing, again, away from Al Gore.
But just to show you, just the comparisons about stuff like this, these powerful stories that we know nothing of, and how that kind of plays itself out or doesn't in some ways. That said, to your word intimidating, what did you find - I'm not an actor, but again, when I just started to dig into who she was, what do you find intimidating about playing this character?
Paquin: Well, she had such an incredibly profound and amazing impact on so many people's lives, and the thought that I could never really know what that was like, to be there, and to just try to bring her to the screen in a way that if she were still alive she wouldn't be mad about, or something.
She was a very tough lady. She was a strong, stubborn, tough, tough woman, and she was a bit older than I am. And I've never really played anyone as much of an adult as that, and sort of finding that steeliness that she seemed to have, from all accounts, I just wanted it to be as real as possible.
Tavis: What did you make of her focus specifically on children?
Paquin: Well, first of all, it's easy to understand how that would sort of tug at you in a sort of different emotional place, because not only is it none of their fault but these kids are too young to even understand, really, why they're being segregated and discriminated against, and then eventually obviously murdered.
And also because it's easier to re-home a child. They can be blended in with a new family and obviously in the film I talk about having to teach them to speak Polish as opposed to Yiddish, and having to sort of fake a (unintelligible) into Christianity, which she didn't intend as sort of getting rid of their cultural and ethnic background, but it was the only way for them to survive and to remain alive. But it was doable, whereas with an adult it's a lot harder.
Tavis: I don't want to give the story away, but there are two things that I do want to raise that I find fascinating, and again, I'll let you tell the story. The jar.
Paquin: Every child that she rescued, she wrote - she had little strips of paper and she wrote their name and their new name and location on the back, and she put them in a jar and she buried them under a tree outside her house. So that when she was eventually captured, there was still a record of all the children and where they were, and that was how they kept track of them.
Tavis: The plan, of course, was for her not to get captured - she wasn't planning for that - and had the -
Paquin: No, but it was a plan to have a record.
Tavis: Exactly, when the war ended they'd have a record.
Paquin: A record of where the children had ended up, to be returned to anything remaining of their families.
Tavis: To your point about her being captured, and again, since you went there, I'm going to follow you there - I didn't want to give too much away. But she does get caught, though.
Paquin: Mm-hmm.
Tavis: And the treatment.
Paquin: She was tortured in prison and she was supposed to be executed. And I'm not going to say exactly how or why that didn't happen, but it's - as much as it's kind of sort of hinted at and sort of shown in an optically graphic way in the film, what she endured in prison was absolutely horrendous, and that was pretty much, from what I've read, normal for what went on in those prisons.
Some of the research that I did was a book called "Words to Outlive Us" that was eyewitness accounts from Warsaw, and some of the sort of images that were created through the words of these people - diary entries and letters - was just absolutely mind-blowing.
Because you think you know how horrifying an event was, but not until you're really hearing it through what they saw happening to their friends, to their family, and it's horrifying.
Tavis: She lives long enough, though, to hear from some of these kids. That's the redeeming part of the story, I think.
Paquin: Yeah, she lived to be 98.
Tavis: And so some of those kids, many of them who she had saved, she had a chance to be -
Paquin: Yeah. Well, I met one of the -
Tavis: Oh, you did?
Paquin: One of the - well, now women that she saved as a child -
Tavis: And what'd you hear?
Paquin: - at our premiere the other night, and -
Tavis: Wow. So tell me about that, I want to hear about this.
Paquin: It's really overwhelming that someone's sitting there and telling you the only reason I'm still alive is because of what that woman did for me. And that's kind of - it's chilling. And she's sitting there, and that's all because of what Irena Sendler did.
Tavis: I want to get your take on this. A quick preface - I want to circle back to where I started our conversation, so you see something like this or you read something about somebody's story like this, you're embarrassed if you're trying to learn, as I am; you're embarrassed that you never heard of the story, but you're inspired by the story.
And I want to come back now - now that we've dealt with my embarrassment about not knowing - let me come back to the inspiring part. Sometimes we meet people who have such courage and such conviction and such commitment that we get intimidated to believe that we could never appropriate the kind of courage they displayed.
That said, what did you personally take away? What do you think the viewer is going to take away from being inspired by this person? Nobody's asked you to rescue people and save them, but just trying to find a way to be courageous in the world that you occupy, the world you live in.
Paquin: Well, she didn't take no for an answer, ever. She didn't back - if someone said it was impossible, she said, "Well, okay, but how would I do it? If it weren't impossible, how would I do it?" And that sort of determination, if it's something you really, really believe you can do, even if it's one person. And it might work, it might not work. It could have spectacularly failed, what she tried to do.
But it could be that thing that makes a massive difference, you never know. It's worth sticking your neck out if you really believe in it, and I really like that.
Tavis: How do you - how should I ask this? How do you contextualize this role in the body of work you've done? How does this fit in? You've done a lot of good work; you've got a lot of choices. Why this role? How do you see this fitting into what is going to become a huge body of work over your lifetime?
Paquin: Well, at this point I don't really have a grand plan or a sort of overview of it. (Laughter) I'm still sort of doing what I've always done, which is trying to work with people I find inspiring, trying to tell stories I find interesting or meaningful, and that seems to have done pretty well by me. It's all about the stories you're telling and who you're working with, and sometimes you end up with material that's incredibly compelling and important, and really amazing people, like in this film.
And I just feel really lucky that I get to be part of those stories, but I don't really feel like I have the overview of the career as a body of work.
Tavis: We were teasing before we came on the air, just talking privately about how you contextualize and whether or not you've been able to do that yet, being nine and doing a film that wins an Academy Award at 11. Now that you've had some years to look back on that, what do you make of that moment? How do you contextualize that?
Paquin: Well, it still doesn't make much more sense than it did when I was nine.
Tavis: (Laughs) So in other words, you ain't learned nothing in 20 years.
Paquin: Well, it doesn't (laughter) - I still don't know - people still say, "How did you get -" I was, like, "I really have no idea." There were so many - I think it's like anyone's life. There's so many moments that if you'd made a slightly different decision or if you hadn't gone to that audition to that day or whatever, that just your life could have taken a completely different path.
I happened to be blessed with a career that I got given very, very young, and that I've worked hard to keep, and that I love more than anything. And I don't know, I still feel very lucky. (Laughs)
Tavis: I'll take that. "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler" on CBS, it's a Hallmark project. We're glad to have you on.
Paquin: Thank you for having me.
Tavis: And all the best on the project.
Paquin: Thank you.
Back to April 15, 2009