Vera Farmiga, who won an Oscar nomination for her role opposite George Clooney in “Up in the Air” now takes to television to flesh out the previously skeletal character of Norman Bates’ mother in the “Psycho” prequel “Bates Motel,” starting tonight on A&E.
It was sort of a quest, she told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour.
“I got into this wanting to defend who that woman was,” Farmiga says. “And to me she was just such a beautiful portrait of valiant maternity to me. And so that was therein I saw the challenge.”
She was also, she adds, “just a real head turner.”
The script she was sent reads like “a beautiful love letter between a mother and her son, and that’s that’s how I perceive the character. That’s how that’s how I approach it.”
But then she referenced art history.
“There’s an Edvard Munch painting of the Madonna. It’s really warped and it kind of exudes the sacred and the profane and it’s just psychologically gripping, and that’s what I was so drawn to with Norma,” she said. (The image is at left).
“She’s a playground for an actress,” Farmiga says of Norma. “It’s, like, when they offer you Hedda Gabler, you don’t say no. And that’s what it was for me.”
The character, “riddled with contradiction” is also “as strong and tall as an oak and as fragile as a butterfly and everything in between that I admire in female characters that I come across, which is resilience and passion and intellect and, at the same time, she’s an absolute train wreck and a magnet.”
Farmiga, it turns out, is kind of a nutty interview subject. But, like Norma Bates, fascinating in her way.
In inventing a character that didn’t really live in the original she sees Norma as “not even necessarily Hitchcockian.
“She’s a cool blonde that, at the onset, appears kind of very kind of lovely and but as soon as as soon as danger she encounters danger or acts in a really kind of animalistic,” she says. “For me she was more kind of Ibsen and Chekhov proportions, you know; she really was. To me it was like, I can probably equate her more to those kinds of heroines than Hitchcock. Or I didn’t necessarily think of Norma Bates and what that would mean to an audience. We have a lot of bounce in this springboard to be inventive, because we know nothing about her.”
The bounce begins tonight.