‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ Sally Field On Octopuses & Anger

Until recently, an octopus was not the most obvious choice to co-star with Sally Field.

Looking at her career thus far, one might immediately think of her alongside Julia Roberts and Shirley MacLaine in Steel Magnolias, or those Oscar-winning turns opposite Beau Bridges in Norma Rae and with John Malkovich, Danny Glover and Ed Harris in Places in the Heart. But lately, the buzz surrounding Field is all about her Emmy-nominated role sharing the screen with a cephalopod in the Netflix film .

Adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures stars Field as Tova Sullivan, a 70-year-old widow meticulously dedicated to her cleaning job at the Sowell Bay aquarium. Under cover of night, she chats to the aquarium’s occupants, including a recalcitrant octopus named Marcellus (voiced by Alfred Molina). Then, when Cameron, a down-on-his-luck musician played by Lewis Pullman, lands a job at the aquarium, he and Tova come together to share a mystery that changes both of their lives.

A lot of what’s in the film between Cameron and Tova, between Lewis and me, is improvised. It’s just us just talking to each other.

Sally Field

When I meet Field on Zoom, inevitably we chat about the Oscar-winning 2020 Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher, in which a scientist documented his daily dives and observations with one of the highly-intelligent sea creatures. It turns out Field was well-versed on the subject before she’d laid eyes on Remarkably Bright Creatures. “I loved [My Octopus Teacher],” she says. “I thought it was wonderful. And certainly, an homage to the importance and brilliance of sea creatures. All of them, sharks and all of them, they need to be protected and looked after, and we need them. We need this form of life on Earth, and it’s all being challenged all over the place. I had also read before that a book, for whatever reason, a long time before that, a nonfiction book called The Soul of an Octopus.”

Coincidentally, Field’s son Peter Craig, in search of a producing project, had got hold of the galleys of Van Pelt’s then-unpublished book. A novelist himself and a screenwriter known for co-writing The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, The Town, The Batman and Top Gun: Maverick, for which he was Oscar-nominated, Craig brought the galleys to Field. She was sold.

Field says she instantly knew Pullman had to play Cameron. “Second 1, the minute he walked in the room. I mean, he’s tall and very available, very kind of awkwardly available. Here I am. And I had read with some other actors, but over Zoom because they were in other places.” She was able to meet with Pullman in person and says, “whether I’d been on a Zoom or face-to-face, it would’ve been Lewis. It just instantly was Lewis.”

It’s always been hard to find roles that I’ve wanted to do, roles for women, and certainly now roles for older women. It’s incredibly difficult.

Sally Field

Marcellus was entirely CG-generated for the film and Field is matter of fact about the task involved in portraying a complex relationship with, well, thin air. “I’ve been a professional actor for 62 years, and even before that, I was on stage in high school, in middle school. I have been acting and trying to figure out this craft of acting my entire life. So, imagination is a huge part of what acting is. Acting in the way I was taught is a form of self-hypnosis.”

Between Field and Pullman emerged a kind of ongoing improvisation. In an earlier interview, Pullman had told me that Field set the bar for how immersive that imagined relationship would be. Feeling as though her performance almost manifested Marcellus for him he described the process with Field as inventive and spontaneous. “We jumped right into the scene where Marcellus, the octopus, is on the loose in the aquarium,” he recalled, “and we can’t find him, and we were like in a game of like imaginary chicken. She was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s going out the door!’ And then I was like, ‘It is going out the door, and down the hallway,’ and the camera operator followed us out there.”

Says Field, “We began to improvise and play with it and just play with each other. And a lot of what’s in the film between Cameron and Tova, between Lewis and me, is improvised. It’s just us just talking to each other.”

I tell Field I’ve been listening to her audio narration of her memoir In Pieces in which she describes a home life much influenced by her mother, the actress Margaret Field and her grandmother, Joy Morlan. Did her grandmother, who comes across as stoic and pragmatic in many ways, influence her portrayal of the similarly-minded Tova?

She shakes her head a little and says, “All actors, they are the lives that they have lived. They are the people that raised them. They are the experiences they’ve had. And the task is to find a way to weave the real existence of the actor with the existence of this fictional character, to weave them together so that some of my experiences are her experiences, and to make them all somehow blend together. So, I don’t know how much of my grandmother is there, but I know that a lot of me is still resonating with Joy, my grandmother, and my mother in a huge way. But I can’t say I was ever thinking about them or visualizing them. I mean, I didn’t use that as one of my tools.”

Field’s mother Margaret was plucked from relative normalcy by a talent scout, to sign an acting contract with Paramount Pictures, and Field muses on how that trajectory impacted her own dreams. “Her passion, her education and her passion for a craft was instilled in me. It was part of our language with each other. From the time I got on a stage when I was 13 in the seventh grade, it became a place for us to have a secret dialogue that was just about acting. It was just about this monologue, this improvisation, whatever task I was supposed to be doing to deliver to class. So certainly, her life affected me a lot. I had somehow felt since my young career was taking off, that somehow the ball had been passed to me, and I was somehow going to carry it onto the goalpost or wherever you take that ball, I was supposed to take it.”

At the age of 13 Field took to the stage in junior high, most notably performing scenes from Romeo and Juliet. Then, at 18, she landed her first screen role as the lead in Gidget, a TV series about a quintessential California surfer girl. Two years later, she signed on to the show The Flying Nun— a role she’d felt reluctant to take, since she was looking for a more fulfilling artistic challenge. Fortunately, around that time, she got involved with Lee Strasberg’s The Actor’s Studio, and found herself among the likes of Ellen Burstyn, Ron Rifkin, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Richard Dreyfuss.

She recalls Dern as being “incredibly supportive.” “I was doing The Flying Nun at the time. I was not exactly everyone’s pick as far as being an actor was concerned,” she says. “Many times, Bruce Dern was a moderator, and you’d sit and watch the scene, then you oversee the conversations afterward and he was very supportive. I met him years ago, but I ran into him again and thanked him for his attention. It was attention that he gave during those conversations, attention to detail and focus. And it was hugely important to me.”

Ultimately, Nicholson put in a word for her with casting director Dianne Crittenden and director Bob Rafelson, and Field landed a first film role in Stay Hungry, starring Jeff Bridges.

Anger and energy is fuel, but it takes a lot of time and effort to understand it, and to have a conversation with it, and to not let it own you, but to understand it’s incredibly important as fuel.

Sally Field

Now, this Emmy nomination for Remarkably Bright Creatures marks her fourth — she won for her last three — along with an Oscar nomination for Lincoln, to go with her two wins, two Golden Globe Awards, a Tony nomination for The Glass Menagerie, and she received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2023.

This is not to suggest that it all just fell into her lap after that first film break.

“It has always been very hard for me,” she says. “Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Well, you haven’t done anything since four years ago when I did 80 for Brady with my girlfriends [Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno and Sally Kirkland].’ And I go, ‘Well, four years ago, and now, it’s always been hard to find roles that I’ve wanted to do, roles for women, and certainly now roles for older women.’ It’s incredibly difficult.”

Interestingly, she says that something that’s driven her is anger.

“I guess that because as a child, I was so little, I was always the runt, the tiny one,” she says. “And I have abuse in my family. And I think what happened is I just got f*king pissed off, and my anger still bubbles inside me. And it took me a long time to be able to easily let it out. But when I would get pushed too far, some part of me would just rise up and take care of me. And I had no say as to what it did, this part of me. I just wouldn’t be dominated. I won’t be conquered… Something that came from my childhood, probably because I had a mother who was supportive, but too weak to take care of herself. And so, I think I was the one that was just going to do it. I was just going to take care of everybody and get out of my way. But it took a long time to not hide that part. That part of me frightened me and I didn’t let it out easily, until it would just come roaring out whether I wanted it to or not.”

As with her Remarkably Bright Creatures character Tova, whose spiky perfectionism is driven by pain, or even for Marcellus himself, whose frustration pushes him to persevere, Field has found her anger to be a tool of sorts.

“I say that easy is overrated, but anger is underrated,” she says. “Anger has to be understood and appreciated and owned and used. And anger that’s squashed and you don’t really understand where it comes from, then it comes out all weird places and can hurt people and do terrible, destructive things. But anger and energy is fuel, but it takes a lot of time and effort to understand it, and to have a conversation with it, and to not let it own you, but to understand it’s incredibly important as fuel. Good, positive, productive fuel. So, it doesn’t eat you up and it also doesn’t eat your neighbor up.”

For now, while she considers what to do next, she says been enjoying watching the success of fellow Emmy nominee Matthew Rhys who played her on-screen son in the 2006 ABC series Brothers & Sisters for five seasons. “I’ve stayed friends with him wherever he is all over the globe. And yes, I’ve watched everything he’s done, everything. I wrote to him after I saw the first three episodes of Widow’s Bay. I mean, he’s just dazzlingly good in it. And the show is so wonderful. It’s my very favorite.”

When I see Rhys a few days later, I relay this story to him.

“Ah, still the matriarch,” he says. “She’s gold. Just iconic.”