S ometimes an epiphany arrives in the most unexpected package. For Rosalind Eleazar, it was a pair of shades and some pumps.
The British actor had a few weeks before she was set to start filming Misty Green, Chris Rock‘s drama about show business and the sensitive, often self-destructive artists it chews up and spits out. So she flew to Los Angeles early and embedded herself there, popping into local haunts and walking the streets of Hollywood. Eleazar plays the title character, an actor who, once upon a time, had been on a hit TV show and won Emmys. When we meet her, however, Misty is deep in a professional lull and a personal downward spiral. Eleazar had spent limited time in L.A. before, doing promotional duties for projects. Now she wanted to take some time to really soak in the culture.
“Acting is 3-D anthropology,” Eleazar says, pouring herself a cup of peppermint tea. It’s a late afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, a few days after Misty had its American premiere at the New York Film Festival, and she’s between press gigs in a chic button-up shirt and jeans. “There were lots of little bits here and there that, just by being in L.A. and absorbing everything around me, I was able to find for her. And then one day, I was in an Equinox gym — because I was trying to do as much as she would do in her daily life — and this woman walked in for a gym class wearing high heels and sunglasses. It’s like, ‘Brilliant. Yes. There she is.’
“Listen, no judgement,” she adds, laughing. (Eleazar is the type who laughs uproariously and often.) “You don’t judge as an actor. But it was this incredible moment of, ‘Yeah, you do you. You wanna come to the gym in sunglasses and heels? You go!’ And that’s Misty.”
If you’re even a casual consumer of British television and movies, you’ve definitely seen Eleazar before — she was a standout in Armando Iannucci’s take on Dickens’ The Personal History of David Copperfield, the Hulu U.K. import Harlots, the hallucinogenic arthouse sleeper Rose of Nevada. Fans of the hit spy series Slow Horses will instantly recognize her as Louisa Guy, one of the MI5 agents assigned to the agency’s house for misfits.
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Yet Misty Green, which opened in L.A. and New York this past weekend and goes wide Oct. 16, doesn’t just gift Eleazar with a bigger spotlight than usual. This often caustic character study gives her a real showcase to stretch out and go to some truly dark places. Misty is grappling with losing the apartment she’s been living in, an industry that’s shunned her, a longtime hook-up (Adam Driver) who doubles as her dealer, a brother (Daniel Kaluuya) with mental health issues, and a legacy of volatility fueled by drug and alcohol abuse. Even when a filmmaker (played by Rock himself) who once fired her offers her a second chance, there’s no guarantee that a potential comeback means she’s capable of genuinely coming back. Misty is talented. She’s also a disaster.
“I got to see a lot of different Mistys,” Rock said during a postscreening discussion after one of the film’s NYFF showings, noting that he auditioned close to 100 actors for the role. “Rosalind turned out to be my favorite Misty. This was the Misty I wanted to hang out with. This is the Misty I want to spend three months making a movie with. She was the best actress, she was the smartest actress, there was the most going on behind her eyes. She’s not just saying the lines; you can feel the gravitas.”
Mention the audition process to Eleazar, and she’ll tell you a worst-case-scenario anecdote that ended up leading to another of her epiphanies about Misty. “Right, so, I did OK during the first read, and I got a callback,” she says. “I also got some notes back from Chris, some fair notes about the character, about how Misty leads with her looks. So I decided to really zhuzh myself up, you know? Got my makeup done, got my hair done.”
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She also booked a studio space rather than simply doing a self-tape at home, for a more professional setting. But everything that could go wrong — from a heavy metal band practicing next door to lagging wifi causing awkward delays — did go wrong. “The irony of it,” she adds, “is that they had me auditioning with a scene involving a bad audition within the film!” Eleazar wasn’t going to take any chances, so after that ordeal, she flew to Los Angeles of her own accord and asked to read with Rock in person. She booked the role shortly after that.
But seeing herself zhuzhed up after that chaotic reading, Eleazar says, helped her understand a key thing about Misty. “I’d thought the notion of ‘leading with her looks’ felt superficial at first,” she says. “Then I probed a little deeper, and went: Oh! It’s not just about being desired, it’s about a desire to be recognized. It’s about validation from others. Misty has been acting since she was nine years old. She has no support system. She doesn’t have the luxury of being a victim. This is what she needs to do to survive. It was another moment where I went, ‘Yeah, I get her.'”
Eleazar is quick to note that she grew up with a wonderful support system in the form of her single mother, who worked for a shipping company. Her father, a Ghanian politician, was not much of a presence during her formative years. Most of the time, Rosalind lived in South London. During the summers, however, she would accompany her mom to “Pakistan, Ghana, Tunisia… all these different places where she was working. I loved it. She had friends who were literally from all over the globe, and I was exposed to all of these different types of life early on. I think that’s where my love of acting came from, honestly.”
Despite being an incredibly shy kid, Eleazar says she immediately took to performing: “I felt more comfortable onstage than being around a lot of people in a group situation.” After doing a lot of acting in school, Eleazar might have gone straight to drama school, she says. But she ended up moving to Ghana in her early twenties and reconnecting with her dad; he passed away in 2010. “There was this detour, and after my father died… I wanted to meet that side of my family, because I’d never met them,” she says. “I was really getting to know that side of my life in my father’s absence. That was something important for Roz.”
Eleazar fell in the love with country and might have stayed there permanently had a theater-director friend of hers not called. She asked Eleazar if she still had any plans to pursue acting, something the two of them had discussed numerous times over the years. Oh, that ship has sailed, Rosalind replied. “She knew reverse psychology works very well on me, though,” Eleazar says. “‘Oh, OK, well, don’t try out for drama school and just live your life in Ghana, bye!’ I thought, well, I’ll show her! I auditioned for LAMDA [London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art], and got in. I’ve been lucky ever since.”
Eleazar had been getting steady work for close to a decade when casting agent Nina Gold caught her performance in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in London’s West End. Gold thought of her for a show she was working on, an adaptation of Mick Herron’s books about a group of intelligence agents considered unfit for regular duty. The series, Slow Horses, became an international sensation — its sixth season just dropped on Apple TV last month, and a seventh is on the way — and Eleazar suddenly found herself being recognized in the streets. “Yeah, there’s a lot of ‘Hey! Louisa!'” she says, taking on the excited, wide-eyed look of a fan unexpectedly running into an actor from their favorite TV program. “It’s a little weird, to be honest, when someone starts going” — Eleazar pointedly jabs her finger in the air — “‘It’s. A. Famous person!’ It’s much nicer when someone goes, ‘I like your work.’ That feels rewarding.”
And while the Oscar buzz her performance started generating after the fall festivals will come as no surprise to filmgoers, Eleazar admits she’s not sure about the extra attention that’s starting to bring her. “I’d be lying if I said the exposure doesn’t scare me a bit,” she confesses. Still, she’s ecstatic that Misty Green is getting the attention she feels it deserves, and has been grateful that people have embraced her version of an Angeleno grappling with personal demons while caught in the machinery of Hollywood, gym sunglasses and all.
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“I have so much compassion for difficult people,” Eleazar says. “They’re such a misunderstood tribe of people. There was this quote that I found, and I thought it just summed Misty up: ‘The children that need the most love in the world ask for it in the most unloving ways.’ Someone who people think is abrasive and is screaming ‘Love me,’ but punching people at the same time. My heart melts for them. And Misty, you know…”
Eleazar chokes up for a second, then composes herself and takes another sip of tea. “God, I feel so lame,” she says, laughing yet again. “I just get so emotional about her, you know? Misty is a mess. But I love her so much.”
Production Credits
Styling by WAYMAN and MICAH. Hair styling LACY REDWAY. Makeup by VINCENT OQUENDO.