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Leslie Mann is back in Los Angeles after escaping the UK heatwave. ‘With no AC or ice!’ she heckles. ‘No ice! What are you going to do? You guys are going to have to get air conditioning, right?’
Not all comic actors are funny in real life, but Mann – who’s been a scene-stealer in comedies including Knocked Up, This Is 40, Funny People, The Other Woman and Blockers – fills most sentences with amused laughter and is reassuringly self-deprecating.
She has returned to California primarily for her cats. ‘There’s no reason to be back in LA, just my cats, and they hate travelling. Now that my kids are older I spend a lot of time talking to my cats, we’re close, we’re tight. It’s hard to be away from them.’
Along with the three cats, Mann, 54, lives with her husband, writer-producer-director Judd Apatow. Their two daughters, Maude, 28, and Iris, 23, are both successful actors, having cut their teeth as young children in their parents’ movies.
Mann and Apatow’s 29-year marriage is a happy anomaly in Hollywood. ‘I don’t believe people when they say that any part of this is easy,’ she says. ‘I think you’re faced with learning lesson after lesson. It’s rewarding if you can get through. We’ll see if we make it to 30, that’d be kind of lame if we didn’t. I’ve learned everything from this relationship, we’ve grown up together and taught each other everything.’
Robe, £45, The White Company; bra, £95, Torlowei; sunglasses, £234, Jimmy Choo; bracelets, £6,000 to £9,000 each, necklaces, from £17,380 each, ring, £4,950, all Fope
She’s long played comedic roles to sharp, realistic effect with healthy doses of the unexpected (like when she threw up on Steve Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin). For a swathe of her career Mann’s lived out a fictional midlife crisis on-screen, becoming the poster woman for tackling being a grown-up with deadpan humour. In her latest movie, Spa Weekend, her character joins three girlfriends (Anna Faris, Isla Fisher and Michelle Buteau) on a riotous weekend opt-out of their draining lives. Think Bridesmaids goes to The White Lotus but no one dies.
‘It’s nice, first of all, to have a movie for women,’ says Mann. ‘I guess you can bring your husbands and your kids too, but it’s a fun movie for women, to show the importance of spending time together and taking time out for each other. I love that.’
The movie is directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the duo behind Bad Moms and The Hangover. ‘I was supposed to work with them a long time ago,’ says Mann. ‘I had to back out of the movie and I always regret doing that. They came to me with this and I thought, “I don’t want to make that mistake again.”‘ They filmed on the Gold Coast in Australia and for the most part the cast ‘did daytime hangs. I used to be able to go to work – not that this is a good thing – eat candy, drink coffee all day and smoke cigarettes and I was totally fine and felt great, and now if I don’t eat perfectly and sleep really well, I’m exhausted and a nightmare,’ she says, singing from an all too familiar hymn book.
The film touches on the socially conditioned tropes of Millennial and Gen X women, namely people pleasing and failing to make time for themselves. Mann thinks it’s ‘training from previous generations. I don’t think my girls are like that as much as I was like that, and I’m not as much like that as my mother was. It’s being worked out of us, which is a good thing.’ As you’d expect, it happily skewers wellness culture. There’s goat yoga, mud baths, Isla Fisher trolling guided meditation. As a California native, how invested is she in the Goop life?
Dress, £900, Sportmax; shoes, £725, Christian Louboutin
‘YOU GET SUCKED INTO THE WELLNESS VORTEX. YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’RE NEVER DOING ENOUGH’
‘I do guided meditations and I’ve been doing that for probably 12 years. The second I get to LA, I am doing the latest thing. You go to the dentist, then your dentist is telling you about this amazing face laser she had, the next thing you know you have an appointment with that person, and then that person tells you about this amazing hair colourist, and then you have an appointment with that person, and then the next person tells you about this amazing food diet and then you’re doing that. You get sucked in the wellness vortex. Then when I leave, I don’t think about that stuff at all. It’s weird, you feel like you’re never doing enough. It is fun, then it gets exhausting, then you want to go be somewhere outside of Los Angeles…’
‘IF I DON’T EAT AND SLEEP REALLY WELL I’M EXHAUSTED AND A NIGHTMARE’
Leslie Mann
Apatow has often credited Mann with inspiring him to write better roles for women. She reflects, ‘I think scripts for older women are better written than for younger women, for some reason. I mean, I haven’t been reading young women’s parts lately to see how they’re doing, but I hear from my daughters…The best thing to do is to write your own stuff, if you can.’
She grew up in Newport Beach with a riveting, if bleak, three-month English sojourn when she was 14. ‘My mom was going through a divorce and she took me out of school and brought me to Rye, East Sussex.’ The house they stayed in ‘was so miserable. It had coin-operated electricity. It was for sure haunted. I still have nightmares about that house.’ So much so that on her recent trip to the UK she decided to go back. ‘I stood there on the street, looking at this house, and just remembered that person who was 14 years old, living in that house, and how different I feel, how much I’ve grown, how I’m a lot happier… But who’s happy at 14?’ she muses.
Right: T-Shirt, £50, Cowboys of Habit; shorts, £127, Onitsuka Tiger; shoes, £330, Petar Petrov; ring, Leslie’s own
Left: Tank, £54, Wolford; jeans, £100, Levi’s; vintage sweatshirt, price on request, Ebay archive; bracelet, £8,840, Fope; necklaces, price on request, Roxanne First; (on chairs) shirt, £95, With Nothing Underneath; sunglasses, £234, Jimmy Choo; jumper, price on request, archive Stella McCartney
She and Apatow moved into their current home after their daughters had flown the nest. ‘That was devastating,’ she recalls. ‘I remember walking through our house, looking into their rooms and at all the photos throughout the years and being so sad we had to sell our house because I couldn’t be there any more. Now we’re in this weird house that has no warmth, but it’s soothing somehow, this cold modern house.’
She has found each parenting shift difficult, but ‘this new stage is really fun, they’re the coolest women I know. If I could go back and give my younger self advice, it would be to trust that it keeps getting better, and not to be sad about what’s going away, but be excited about what’s [to come].’ Mann speaks constantly to her daughters. ‘I try to keep us together as much as possible, that’s my one goal in life.’
She wasn’t sure that they would follow her into the business. ‘We were open to whatever,’ she says. ‘But, being a kid growing up around us and our friends, it is a fun world to be in so I don’t blame them for wanting to stay in it. It is good fun.’
Neatly, she stars in her daughter Maude’s directorial debut, Poetic License, which premiered to acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. ‘I was a little worried because I didn’t know what she would be like as a director,’ she says of the project. ‘She turned out to be the greatest person to work with, I felt so safe. It’s not just a mother-daughter thing, she was so smart and capable.’
Mann plays a woman having (another) midlife crisis, this time meeting two young men in a poetry class who both fall for her. ‘I’m just getting it all out through these movies,’ she quips. ‘[Midlife] is a rough time for sure. But I’m feeling good today! Fingers crossed… I don’t want to jinx it.’