‘The Hills of California’ star Laura Donnelly on having to revamp her character in 10 days: ‘I had a minor panic attack’

“I will admit, on the first day of the read-through of the new Act 3, I had a minor panic attack,” recounts Laura Donnelly of bringing the play The Hills of California to New York. Donnelly earned great acclaim, and an Olivier Award nomination, for starring in the London production. But days before the Broadway transfer, her husband, Jez Butterworth, also the playwright, completely reconceived the final act of his epic family drama.

Donnelly was nominated for a Tony Award for Lead Actress in a Play for her impressive dual roles in The Hills of California. In a recent Gold Derby interview, she discusses the “terrifying” process of reconceiving one of those characters in just 10 days.

Gold Derby: You play two different characters across two time periods. There's Veronica, who's trying to turn her daughters into a singing group. Then you portray the adult version of the eldest daughter, Joan. How did you create a throughline between them?

Laura Donnelly: Possibly the first idea that Jez had in writing this play was that there would be a mother and a daughter played by the same person, because you would see the consequences of the mother's actions. Having watched young Joan in the first two acts, I think the audience carries that part of the experience through in their own heads and hearts in a way that I don't have to tell that story. I have to tell the story of how different they are. In an ideal world, I wanted to be able to walk on in Act 3 and people wouldn't know that it was the same actor. And it turns out that worked. There were a lot of people that never knew, maybe still to this day don't know, that I played both. I just tried to make them as different as possible and that was a really fun exercise in getting to figure out how they would be different physically, vocally, just absolutely everything about them. A lot of the time when you're creating one character, you personally will seep in to them. That's just inevitable. But if you're playing two different people that you want to make really distinct from one another, then you have to push both of them as far away from yourself as possible.

When I recommended the show to people, I had to be careful in my description of Veronica. When people hear the term “stage mom,” they conjure up Mama Rose in Gypsy and that’s not her. So, what motivates Veronica to push her daughters to perform?

This is a woman who has grown up through two wars, has had to fight tooth and nail to be able to feed her family, to be able to run a business independently. This was in an era when women couldn't have a credit card, couldn't get a mortgage, couldn't have these things by themselves. You had to be married and have a man to help you do everything and men have let her down. So she has to do everything by herself, and she wants these girls to grow up and not have to have the restrictions and the life that she has had. She just wants more for them. She wants them to be safe, she wants them to be able to be independent. I think it is motivated through pure love rather than narcissism on her part. I don't think there's any part of Veronica that thinks that she will be a star if they become stars. I imagine that for Veronica, if those girls do go off to California and become big stars, she's still in Blackpool running that guest house, just quietly proud of those girls.

Adult Joan really takes over Act Three. I heard that this part of the play was almost completely rewritten after London. How did those changes affect your performance?

It was hugely different. I have to say, it's the part of this whole process that I am most proud of. We had done nearly 160 shows in London, where the old Joan was deep in my bones. The joy of getting to do stage acting as opposed to screen acting is that it gets so far under your skin and you become so linked with that character that you're playing their every thought. You know what they would do in any circumstance. And then with 10 days before we came out to tech it in New York, we suddenly had to rehearse a completely different Act 3. It was a totally new Joan. She had a completely different attitude, she needed a different physicality, she needed different everything. It felt like I was trying to tattoo something on my skin at the same time as removing the old tattoo. The way Jez rewrote it, he took sections of dialogue and still used those verbatim, but shifted where they were in the script and shifted their meaning entirely. We had become so used to those lines coming out in a certain way with a very particular meaning, and then all of a sudden you're trying to see this line completely anew with a different thought that comes before it. I've never had 10 days rehearsal to start previews on Broadway and I was terrified. It made the previews really interesting and scary, and we were finding it the whole way through. We genuinely were not ready until opening night, but it's all the more satisfying because now I know that I can do something that I'm absolutely terrified to do.

This version of Joan feels like she’s lived a life in the music world that her mother was naive to. Was that a conscious choice of developing this rocker chick persona?

Veronica is so much more straight up and presented, and she is not only a mother who has to look respectable in this society for the sake of her girls, but she also runs this business. Joan had to be the opposite of that. That's somebody who's spent the last 20 years getting drunk, being on tour, probably taking a lot of drugs. I was really aware of that with the vocal quality as well. I wanted her to sound like she's been singing at the top of her lungs and smoking a lot for the last 20 years. I wanted a kind of jangly sense about Joan this time, where she was trying to be cool and collected on the top, but her physicality would give her away in places. I had watched some Janice Joplin interviews, especially on The Dick Cavett Show, where everything's just kind of moving all the time, she's always fizzing. I wanted that for Joan, but also to put that layer on the top where she was trying to come across very calm. It had to look like it was leaking out of her.

I still feel haunted by the scene when Joan encounters her younger self on the staircase. What was it like being inside that moment? You could hear a pin drop in the theater.

Those moments are always so magical because you really do feel the audience not breathing with you. And you know that when that moment is over, everything has shifted. Not just physically, but the air in the room has shifted and you can feel that from the audience. And Joan having this epiphany that she's just experienced, that was a moment that didn't exist in the London version at all. And now I can't believe it didn't exist because it really does feel like the entire play hinges on that particular moment. And the aftermath … it just feels so powerful. I could always feel that the audience was listening to and feeling every word that came out after that. It's unique to theater that as an actor, that feeling of the next thing you say is going to land really hard, and when it does, you feel the ripple of that come back at you and it affects you emotionally as well. So you and the audience are just feeding off each other the whole time. It's an incredible thing to experience.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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